The recording played for the fourth time.
Meric told himself it was standard protocol. Session review ensured client safety, documented behavioral patterns, and refined Cadence adjustments for future work. He'd watched every session recording for fifteen years—218 clients, 1,847 individual sessions archived in encrypted storage. The review was not voyeurism. It was clinical responsibility.
Except he'd already compiled the data he needed.
He sat alone in the Institute's Security Review Room, a windowless space two doors down from his office. The monitor glowed pale blue in the darkness, casting shadows across the soundproofing panels that lined the walls. Outside, beyond layers of glass and steel, the Norwegian winter pressed against the Institute—black water, black sky, the temperature hovering just above freezing. Inside, the air was precisely controlled at 20 degrees Celsius. Meric barely noticed the cold anymore.
On screen, Aethelreda Kaelen gasped.
Session Two, timestamp 20:47:03. She was naked, positioned exactly where he'd directed her—standing before him, vulnerable, exposed. No restraints this time. No blindfold. Just his commands and her willingness to obey them. Her hands were at her sides, fingers trembling slightly. He'd told her to watch, and she had. Her pale gray eyes—almost the exact shade of his own, he'd noticed, though hers carried more warmth—had tracked every movement of his hands on her body.
Meric's finger hovered over the pause button.
This moment. This specific frame at 20:47:03. Her face as she'd asked for permission.
"Please," she'd whispered on the recording, her voice breaking slightly. "Please let me come."
He pressed pause.
The clinical analysis had been straightforward: Client demonstrated significant progress in Surrender Articulation. Verbal request indicated reduced shame response, increased capacity for vulnerability expression. The delay between arousal plateau and permission request measured 47 seconds—optimal duration for psychological breakthrough without triggering avoidance behaviors.
But that wasn't why he'd watched it four times.
He'd watched it because of her face.
The way her eyes had darkened, not with lust alone, but with something more complex—Maybe realization. The flush that had spread across her chest and throat wasn't merely physiological arousal. It was the visible manifestation of a woman discovering that power and surrender weren't opposites. That begging could be an act of self-possession.
He'd seen that breakthrough before. Many times. It was Session Two's intended outcome.
What he hadn't seen before was his own response.
His hand on the recording—the one that had cupped her face after she'd climaxed—had trembled. Just slightly. A micro-movement lasting perhaps half a second before he'd regained control. But it had happened. His clinical detachment had slipped for exactly the duration of her emotional breakthrough, and the surveillance system had captured it with ruthless clarity.
Meric closed the file.
The timestamp burned behind his eyelids: Day 6, 20:47:03. Forty-seven seconds that had compromised fifteen years of perfect adherence to Clause 7.3.
He'd been in Aethelreda's position once.
The memory surfaced without invitation, triggered by the darkness of the review room and the lingering image of her face. Ten years ago, before he'd earned his Praxis Certification, before he'd inherited the Institute from his father's estate. He'd been twenty-eight, grief-raw from losing his father just months earlier, and desperate to understand the methodology his father had died protecting.
His mentor—a woman named Karine Solberg who'd trained with his father in the methodology's early development—had insisted that true Praxists must experience The Edge from the inside before they could guide anyone else to it.
"You can't administer this work cleanly unless you've surrendered yourself," she'd told him. "Otherwise, you're just performing dominance. And performance isn't transformation."
He'd submitted to her for six months. Restraints. Commands. The systematic excavation of every defense mechanism he'd spent his adolescence constructing. She'd been clinical, precise, utterly controlled—exactly as he was now with his clients. But he remembered what it had felt like to kneel before her, to wait for permission, to discover that the moment of surrender was the moment he'd felt most powerfully himself.
And he remembered the terror when he'd realized he was falling in love with her.
She'd terminated his training immediately. Not as punishment, but as protection—for both of them. "This is why Clause 7.3 exists, Meric. Because once you cross it, you can't administer the work cleanly. Your desire to protect me would interfere with my need to be challenged. Your fear of losing me would compromise the psychological excavation. Love destroys Praxis."
He'd understood intellectually. But the ache had lasted years.
Now, sitting in the darkness with Aethelreda's face frozen on the paused monitor, Meric acknowledged what he'd been avoiding since the moment she'd walked into his office on Day 1 and asked her first incisive question.
He was compromising himself.
Again.
But this time, he was the Praxist. This time, he held the responsibility.
Meric left the review room at 23:47, navigating the empty corridors of the Observation Wing by memory. The Institute felt different at night—the floor-to-ceiling windows reflected his image back at him, doubling his presence in the glass. Beyond the reflection, the fjord was invisible, swallowed by December's darkness.
His suite was at the wing's eastern end, farthest from the client accommodations. He'd designed the separation deliberately: physical distance reinforced psychological boundaries.
The boundaries were failing.
He entered his suite without turning on the lights, crossing to the desk by muscle memory alone. The room was minimalist by necessity—gray walls, black furniture, nothing decorative. The only personal item was the locked box he kept on the corner of his desk, small and steel, containing the belongings his father had carried the day he'd died. Meric hadn't opened it in twelve years.
Next to it sat his journal.
He'd started keeping it three days ago—the morning after Session One. Clinical notes belonged in Aethelreda's official Client Dossier, typed and encrypted. But the journal was different. Private. Handwritten observations he couldn't justify including in her file because they revealed more about his internal state than her psychological progress.
Meric switched on the desk lamp, pulled the journal toward him, and opened to the latest entry:
Day 6. Session Two complete. Client achieved verbalized permission request with minimal resistance. Orgasmic response indicated full psychological engagement. Integration Period extended to 72 hours to allow processing.
Professional. Appropriate. Completely useless.
He turned to a blank page and wrote what he'd actually been thinking:
She doesn't just surrender. She alchemizes it. Turns vulnerability into power in real-time. I've guided 218 clients through this work. I've seen every variation of psychological response—resistance, deflection, intellectualization, dissociation. But Aethelreda experiences surrender as metamorphosis. She enters The Edge and emerges transformed, not broken.
I've never seen that before.
And I can't stop watching her face.
His hand paused above the page. The admission stared back at him, undeniable in his own precise handwriting.
He was documenting his compromise. Creating evidence of his boundary violation. If anyone ever read this—Vigdis, an external auditor, a legal inquiry following a Clause 7.3 complaint—this journal would destroy his defense.
He wrote anyway:
Session Three is scheduled for Day 10. Theme: Reflection. I've designed it as the first intercourse with mirror self-observation. The psychological goal is confronting her body image distortions, forcing her to see herself as powerful rather than merely functional.
But I designed it to protect myself.
If I push her harder, create more psychological distance, maintain more extreme clinical control—perhaps I can prove to myself that I'm still in command of this work. That my response to her is professional curiosity, not emotional attachment.
I'm lying.