Château de Valéran – Book One
Chapter One: In Pursuit of the Light
Before
Over the last two years, while Alana de Vargas was out there landing one big role after another, walking every red carpet looking impossibly beautiful, winning Academy Awards and Golden Globes, like a true global superstar, people on the dark web were busy generating her.
AI was taking over, just like Sarah Connor had warned it would in The Terminator. The line that had everyone laughing back then didn’t feel quite so funny anymore in 2027. The machines were not coming – they were already here, and among many other things, what they had decided to do with all that power was to generate Alana de Vargas in a bikini, in lingerie, on her knees, tied up, used, degraded, passed around. All the female celebrities were facing the same situation. Alana was amongst the most deep-faked; she alone had four thousand three hundred and twelve deepfake videos online and counting.
The difference between real and fake had become almost impossible to tell. Things no one said out loud but which everyone imagined secretly. Some of those videos and pictures ended up on her mother’s phone, some were sent to her friends and family.
Back in her Los Angeles apartment, Alana had made a decision.
It was going to happen over ten days. Ten different scenarios – all live-streamed, with no recordings, no archives, and no second takes. Just the real thing, done by the real person.
Day 1 would be lingerie, bikinis and nudes. The deepfake catalogue had four thousand three hundred and twelve videos in that category alone. Starting Day 1, the world was going to see the real thing.
09:30 – The Ring
Tate, who was her close friend, confidante and director, had been at the château for a week before Alana’s arrival. During those seven days she had had plenty of time to check the positioning of the cameras, test and measure the light in every room, map the grounds and brief the crew. She had also, on the third day, driven forty minutes to a jeweller in Avignon and come back with a tiny item in a very small bag which she put in the nightstand drawer without mentioning it.
On the morning of Day 1, she took it out. It was a fine gold ring – small, seamless, the diameter of a shirt button. She held it up in the morning light, happy with what she saw.
Alana came in from the bathroom in a short white robe – ending at mid-thigh, with nothing underneath, large gold hoops already on, her delicate anklet already tight around her left ankle – a double thread of fine gold with three tiny bells spaced along it, chiming softly as she moved. She saw what Tate was holding and stopped in the doorway.
‘What is that?’
‘Come sit down.’
‘Tate…’
‘Bed. Robe open.’
She looked at Tate standing there in the ridiculous faded blue Daisy Dukes that stopped at the very top of her thighs, white tank top loose at one shoulder, barefoot, and especially those completely calm grey-blue eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the robe open, spreading her legs. Because it was Tate, and she always knew best.
What Tate was looking at was what she had been thinking about for a week: Alana de Vargas, the long sculpted inner thighs open in the morning light, fair skin even fairer at the inner thigh where the skin was softest, the delicate pink of her folds visible beneath the hood, everything flushed slightly warmer than the rest of her in the morning light – and at the centre of all of it the vertical barbell of her hood piercing, fine platinum, the lower ball sitting just above her clit, the hood pulled slightly taut over it, the platinum bright against the pink skin surrounding it. Everything looked clean, intimate and completely immaculate.
Tate looked at it like someone who had been planning this for a long time.
She knelt and crouched between Alana’s open thighs and worked carefully – unscrewing the lower ball of the barbell, threading the fine gold loop onto the post, then screwing the ball back on. A small gold circle now hung from the barbell just above her clit, swaying gently with every breath, warm against her skin.
When she was done, she sat back on her heels and looked at her work with quiet satisfaction.
Alana felt the new weight of it – light and warm just sitting there, swaying with every breath she took in a way that was going to be impossible to ignore. Something pleasant and warm started low in her belly; she refused to acknowledge it at that early hour, with the day barely starting.
‘What’s that for?’ she asked.
Tate stood up and looked at Alana for a moment – at the ring, at the whole picture of her sitting on the edge of the bed with the robe open and her legs apart and the new gold loop catching the morning light.
‘Later,’ she said, and walked out.
Alana sat on the edge of the bed shifting her weight and felt the ring move with her – the smallest sensation, warm and new and completely unexplained. She was, by any standard, an extraordinary-looking woman at five feet ten: fair skin, 34C, 24, 35. Her breasts were full and real, with the thick platinum rings through her nipples – the left one larger than the right, deliberate, chosen that way, rougher at the entry point from three years of wear, the right one smaller and smoother and more recent, 4.2 centimetres of fair skin between them. The thick rough gold of her septum ring above them and a tiny diamond stud in her left nostril. The gold tongue barbell slightly left of centre, a platinum curved barbell through her navel and the anklet on her left foot – double thread gold, with three tiny bells. And now, hanging from the platinum barbell of her hood piercing, the fine gold loop which Tate had just added, whose purpose she didn’t know yet.
She closed the robe and went to find the pink bikini.
10:00 – The Crew
René was in the corridor with his camera when she came out. Twenty-six, tall and lean and good-looking – dark hair, quick eyes, the confidence of someone who knew the area. He was local, Provençal, had grown up forty minutes from this château, and Tate had found him through a contact in Marseille, offering him the opening he’d been waiting for. He was her assistant now, and he had learned that Tate’s approval was worth working for. The added bonus being that he secretly found Tate extremely hot.
When Alana came out of the master bedroom in the hot pink micro bikini – a thin waistband and a front panel barely covering the new gold ring and nothing on either side, a strip between her perfect round cheeks that disappeared completely – his eyes went to her and then to his camera monitor.
She felt the half-second gaze before he looked away. She was used to being looked at, but this was different – she was standing in a corridor in what was technically her only clothing, and René was trying very hard to be professional about it, which somehow made it worse.
‘Bonjour,’ Alana said.
‘Bonjour,’ he said to the monitor.
Suzette was at the end of the corridor. She was a few inches shorter than Alana and Tate, and the red-soled heels compensated for that. Blonde, sharp features, beautiful in a way that no one had to mention it to her. She was in a fitted white shirt tucked into wide-leg trousers, clipboard in one hand. She looked at Alana in the pink micro bikini with thorough professional focused attention – not the way René had looked.
‘Bonjour,’ she said. ‘On y va?’
Tate appeared with her tablet, assessing Alana from head to toe – the tiny pink bikini, the gold ring clearly visible through the thin fabric pressing against her, the anklet bells on her left ankle.
‘The library first,’ Tate said. ‘Professor Girard is the estate’s light consultant. He needs to see you in there before we go live.’
‘In this,’ Alana said. It wasn’t a question.
Tate was already walking. ‘In this.’
The Library
Professor Girard was at the central reading table when the four of them came in. Late sixties, tall and broad, white hair kept short, strong jaw, the hands of a man who had spent his life handling delicate things. Dark jacket, reading glasses on, two leather-bound notebooks open in front of him. He knew this château better than anyone alive.
He looked up when the group came in, seeing Tate with her tablet, René with his camera, Suzette with her clipboard. Then he looked at Alana in the hot pink micro bikini – the front panel barely covering the new gold ring, the anklet with its three bells on her left ankle – and his reading glasses slid down his nose. He pushed them back up and wrote something in his notebook.
Alana blushed immediately. She was almost naked in a library in front of a man she had never met, and he was already taking notes about her.
Tate opened the shot log she’d been building all week. The library was first – the tall window at this hour was the best light in the château, she’d confirmed that every morning for five days. Professor Girard had the photometer and eleven years of research that was about to become very useful.
‘On the table,’ Tate said to Alana. ‘The reading table. Standing.’
‘Standing on a…?’
‘It’s a solid piece,’ Professor Girard said, without looking up. ‘Eighteenth century. It’ll hold.’
Alana climbed on the reading table. The anklet bells chimed as she found her footing on the old oak.
‘René,’ Tate said quietly, not looking up from the tablet. ‘Wide first. Full frame. I want the window in shot.’ René adjusted without a word. ’10:17,’ Tate said to herself, and noted it.
Ting.
‘Bien,’ Suzette said. ‘Now – pull the bottom down to your knees. Stop there and hold.’
‘Pull it…?’
‘To your knees,’ Suzette said. ‘And hold. Don’t step out of it.’
Alana looked at Tate.
Tate was checking the tablet.
‘Tate,’ she said.
‘Go ahead,’ Tate said, without looking up.
Alana looked at her for a moment longer – at the grey-blue eyes that weren’t going to give her anything right now – and then she reached for the waistband and pulled the indecently small pink bottom down slowly until it sat across both knees and the front panel bunched between them. She stopped there and held.
The effect was immediate. The waistband across her knees pulled her legs together – not tightly, but with the insistent, gentle restraint of fabric that was designed to stay where it was put. She could not step apart, nor could she move freely. The pink triangle of fabric between her knees swayed slightly with her now heavier than earlier breathing.
And above it – everything. The full fair length of her from hip to knee, the soft inner thighs in the morning light, the gold ring and the platinum barbell above it fully exposed. The thin pink front panel between her knees let the light through, diffusing it against the skin of her inner thighs – somehow more exposed than naked would have been.
She was, standing on that table with the pink bottom around her knees, an extraordinary thing to look at. She knew it just as everyone else in the library did and she wished she didn’t.
Professor Girard was already reaching for his photometer.
He stood at the table’s edge, level with her knees, looking at the gathered pink fabric and everything around it with the genuine interest of a researcher discovering something new worth studying. He didn’t use the photometer immediately, just observing.
‘The light at this hour,’ he said, moving the photometer along the line where fabric ended and skin began, ‘makes fine materials look almost luminous.’ He looked at his readings. ‘Remarkable. I need several minutes here.’
‘Several minutes…’ Alana said to the window.
‘The light values change as I move,’ he said. ‘I need the full range.’
He took the gathered pink panel between two fingers and rolled it slowly, twisting the fabric into a thin cord against her skin. He held it there for a moment, studying the effect, then released it and watched it fall back into its original shape.
‘Got it,’ Tate said, from behind the tablet. ‘René – close on the knee position. And the ring above.’ René moved in. Tate made a note: 10:24 – knee restraint, fabric diffusion, gold ring direct. Day 4.
‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘It holds its properties even when compressed.’
He straightened slightly, moving the photometer upward from the fabric toward the gold ring above it.
‘The contrast between the diffused light below and the direct light up here,’ he said. ‘I need to measure it. Several minutes.’
Alana stood on the reading table with the tiny pink thong bunched around her knees, morning light on her bare skin, breathing carefully. She had agreed to ten days of live streaming in front of half a million people and somehow this – in a century-old library, a professor with a photometer, her ridiculous underwear around her knees – felt completely insane.
The anklet bells chimed softly as she tried her best to stay immobile.
Ting.
He crouched to the anklet, measured the bells in the light for long seconds, then straightened.
‘Tiptoes,’ he said. ‘Up on your toes. I need to see how the bells move. The light is perfect at this time’
‘Log that,’ Tate said to René. ‘Tiptoe position, anklet in motion, this window, this hour.’ She checked the time on the tablet. ’10:31.’
A library assistant came through the side door with a trolley of books, looked at what was going on, and left considerably faster than she’d arrived.
Suzette stepped forward before Professor Girard had even fully straightened.
‘Remove the thong,’ she said. ‘Step out and hold it between your teeth. Don’t let it touch anything.’
Alana did not step out. She stood on the table exactly as she was – hands on her hips, legs held together by the waistband across her knees, the pink triangle stretched between them, chin up – and looked at Suzette.
It was, objectively, a contradictory image – the posture was pure Alana de Vargas with her hands on her hips, chin up, the full authority of someone who had commanded every room she’d ever walked into. And below her waist, a tiny pink thong stretched between her knees on a reading table in a library in Provence. The authority she was trying to assert made the situation more ridiculous and devastatingly sexy.
‘My teeth,’ she said.
‘The fabric cannot touch any surface during the transition,’ Suzette said. ‘The mouth is the only hands-free option.’
‘You want me to put my fucking thong in my mouth! While standing on a table in a library?’
‘C’est ça,’ Suzette said.
‘No,’ Alana said.
Suzette shifted her clipboard to her other hand and put one hand on her hip. She said nothing and just waited.
The pink waistband stayed stretched across Alana’s knees, her hands staying on her hips. The morning light came through the window and Professor Girard continued taking notes.
Finally, face burning, Alana stepped out of it and put it between her teeth.
The thin pink fabric hung from her mouth, swaying with her breathing – the waistband on one side, the front panel on the other, barely anything, but still there.
‘Hands behind the head,’ Suzette said pleasantly. ‘Both. Now.’
‘Why the…?’
‘The raised arms remove the shadow from the chest,’ Suzette said. ‘Professor Girard needs the piercings in direct light without the arm shadow. Both hands.’
Professor Girard nodded. ‘The raised arms remove the shadow from the chest. I need both configurations for the data.’
Alana said something through the thong which nobody could make a word out of.
René had found something very interesting to look at on his monitor. Tate was checking the tablet with the focused attention of someone who had definitely heard everything and made up her mind that she had more important things to attend to.
‘Les mains, allez!’ Suzette said.
She put her hands behind her head.
Standing on the reading table bare from the waist down, the pink thong between her teeth, hands behind her head, the morning light on all of it. The full specific real version of a woman four thousand generators had approximated and gotten wrong.
Cheeks scarlet, she had plenty to say and said all of it through the pink thong with complete conviction.
Suzette tilted her head. ‘Pardon?’
Alana repeated louder this time.
Suzette listened carefully, leaning in slightly as though genuinely trying. Then she straightened up.
‘Non, toujours rien,’ she said, with a small apologetic shrug. ‘Désolée.’
René made a sound behind his camera. Tate did not look up from her tablet, but she was smiling.
‘Fascinant,’ Professor Girard said, studying the nipple rings from below. ‘The left one is heavier – you can see it in the light. The weight difference creates a different angle. The distance between them – 4.2 centimetres.’ He made notes.
‘On your hands and knees now,’ Suzette said. ‘Stay on the table. Face the window.’
Alana went to her hands and knees on the reading table. Face toward the window, ass toward the room. The nipple rings pressed forward against the thin pink top with gravity, their weight visible through the material. The gold ring and platinum barbell were fully exposed to the room behind her.
Ting.
‘Head down,’ Suzette said. ‘Lower. Forehead touching the surface.’
She lowered her head, pushed her ass further up, hips rising, everything opening further into the library.
‘Legs apart,’ Suzette said. ‘As far as you can.’
She moved her knees apart. Hips raised, head down, knees apart, exposing the gold ring and platinum barbell to the direct light.
Professor Girard, in his relentless pursuit of research, moved swiftly to the back of the table.
‘René – posterior angle. Stay wide, I want the window and the room in the same frame.’ Tate moved to the side, checking the composition on her tablet screen. ‘Good. Hold that.’
‘The platinum barbell from behind,’ he said, moving the photometer slowly. ‘Completely different from the front. The underside of the ring catches the light at this angle in a way I’ve never measured before.’ He made three rapid notes.
‘Better late than never!’ came out as a warm muffled sound through the pink thong that could have been anything. But Alana had addressed it to the table surface anyway.
‘He’s thorough, babe,’ Tate said, checking the tablet.
Professor Girard moved from behind her to crouch at the level of her left ankle – the anklet now at knee height since she was on all fours. He examined the three bells in the full light from this angle.
‘The Marrakech piece,’ he said, touching one bell gently. It rang once. ‘The light from behind hits the underside of the bells differently.’ He wrote. ‘Shift your weight to the left – I need the ankle fully weighted.’
Ting.
She shifted. The bells chimed their small chord. He measured for thirty seconds.
‘Now on your back,’ Suzette said. ‘Legs open. Stay on the table.’
Something came out of Alana that was clearly ‘Absolutely not’ but arrived as a muffled sound that nobody could fully make out.
‘Lying down gives a completely different light angle on the…’
The argument that followed was longer and more elaborate, sounding like a full legal argument about dignity and self-respect, but it was completely inaudible.
Suzette looked at Tate.
Tate looked up from the tablet for the first time in several minutes. She looked at Alana – at the full picture of her on all fours on the reading table, the pink thong bulging slightly between her lips, Professor Girard behind her with his photometer – and she said, quietly and without any drama at all:
Alana.’
Just that. One word. Fifteen years of knowing exactly what it meant.
Alana lay down on her back and opened her legs.
She stared at the library ceiling. The morning light fell on her from above – on the nipple rings pointing upward through the thin pink top, on the gold ring fully open to the room, on the smooth fair inner thighs and everything between them. And none of all that stayed hidden from the four people in the room.
Professor Girard moved to the end of the table in silence and crouched until his face was level with the gold ring. Close, with the photometer angled upward, his reading glasses slightly fogged, looking at it with unhidden interest.
René had not moved from behind his camera and his expression remained professional.
Suzette was writing on her clipboard with a small, satisfied smirk.
Tate stood back from the table, tablet under her arm, and watched. Her grey-blue eyes moved from the gold ring to Alana’s face on the table and back again, and she kept mum.
She was watching René – the angle he’d chosen, the way he’d moved instinctively to catch the light on the gold ring from below. She’d known he was good. She hadn’t known he was this good. She picked up the tablet and noted: 10:44 – on her back, legs open, anklet raised. Day 7.
‘The rings point upward,’ Professor Girard said, moving the photometer slowly from the gold ring to the nipple rings. ‘The light falls differently from above.’ He looked at his readings. ‘Exactly as predicted.’
He moved the photometer to her anklet.
‘Raise the left ankle, please.’
She raised it. The three bells chimed.
Ting.
‘The Marrakech piece,’ he said, moving to her raised ankle. ‘The bells hang differently in this position. I need thirty seconds and then you can get down.’
Something came through the thong that had the exact cadence and resignation of ‘of course you do’ – but nobody in the room could make out a single word of it.
He measured while René filmed, and Suzette made notes. Tate kept working on her tablet. The librarian’s assistant came back to try the book delivery a second time and left again faster than the first.
Ting.
‘Merci,’ Professor Girard said. He straightened.
Alana climbed off the table. She had barely found her footing on the stone floor when Professor Girard stopped mid-step, took his reading glasses off, put them back on, and looked at her mouth.
‘There is something else,’ he said. ‘Behind the thong. A gold piece. In your mouth.’
A pause.
‘The tongue barbell,’ Suzette said, from her clipboard.
‘A lingual piercing,’ Professor Girard said, with the focused interest of a man encountering new data. ‘Remove the thong. Show me.’
Alana took the pink thong from between her teeth and held it in her hand. She opened her mouth slightly and showed the tongue barbell – gold, slightly left of centre, three years old.
Professor Girard studied it with his photometer from approximately twenty centimetres away.
‘Extraordinary,’ he said. ‘The light catches the metal inside the mouth in a way I’ve never measured.’ He straightened. ‘I’ll need a separate session for this.’
‘A separate session,’ Alana said.
‘For the paper,’ he confirmed.
Tate looked up from the tablet. ‘Add it to the schedule,’ she said to Suzette. ‘Oral metalwork. Separate session, Professor Girard and Alana. Light conditions TBC.’
Suzette noted it without comment. Professor Girard looked pleased.
‘Thong goes back,’ Suzette said. ‘All of it. The whole thing. You’ve been too chatty.’
‘Too…?’ Alana started.
‘Tout,’ Suzette said.
‘It’s a micro thong, Suzette, it’s not a…’
‘Tout.’
Alana looked at it, then at Tate. Tate was looking at her tablet.
She opened her mouth and took the whole thing in – the waistband, the panel, all of it – her cheeks slightly fuller than before, the pink fabric bulging slightly between her lips, now silenced.
Suzette stood back and looked at Alana – standing there in just the pink bikini top, hands at her sides, mouth full of thong – with quiet satisfaction.
‘Les mains derrière la tête,’ she said.
Alana put her hands behind her head.
Tate and Professor Girard went back to the tablet while Suzette cross-referenced her clipboard. René checked his footage, nobody addressing Alana directly. She stood there, hands behind her head, mouth full of pink thong, fair skin warm in the morning light, the tiny pink top barely there – extraordinary to look at and completely ignored while they worked around her like she wasn’t there.
Finally, Suzette looked up from her clipboard.
‘Tu peux y aller,’ she said pleasantly. ‘You may go. We have technical things to go through.’
Something came out of Alana through the thong that had the shape and fury of a complete sentence, but nobody caught a word of it.
‘Thong stays in until you reach your room. Hands stay where they are. C’est plus hygiénique.‘
Alana looked at Tate, face crimson now.
Tate was looking at the tablet.
Alana walked out of the library in the pink bikini top, bare below the waist, hands still clasped behind her skull, the pink thong bulging between her lips, the anklet bells marking every step on the old stone floor of the corridor.
The librarian’s assistant, trying her luck for the third time, stepped aside to let her pass.
Neither of them said anything. Not that Alana would have been audible, anyway.
The live stream started at noon.
END
Coming up – Chapter Two: The Real Thing