The Internal Rule Nobody Was Supposed to See

Diego came out of don Marcos’s office wearing that look people get when they’ve just heard something they shouldn’t have heard. He walked fast, staring at the floor, as if the hallway would swallow him if he moved quickly enough.

Carmen saw him coming from her desk and stood up before he reached the door. She’d spent twelve years in that company and had learned to read her coworkers’ faces better than her own quarterly reports.

—Wait —she said, blocking his way with one arm.

—What do you want?

—What you’re hiding. —It wasn’t a question.

Diego tried to steer the conversation toward unimportant things: that month’s budget, Thursday’s meeting, the coffee that had gone cold on his desk. Carmen didn’t bite. She stared at him, with the patience of someone who knows silence always wins, until he looked down.

—He activated the regulation —Diego whispered, leaning toward her.

The accidental brush of his lips against Carmen’s ear lasted an instant. She registered it and dismissed it in the same second. Her mind had room for only two words.

The regulation.

***

That same afternoon, in the small meeting room on the second floor, don Marcos summoned the two of them. He had lowered the blinds and placed an extra chair in front of the table. On the table, a black cloth bag.

Fourteen folded slips of paper. One for each employee at the company, including the three people present.

Only one was missing.

—Valeria is not taking part in the draw —don Marcos clarified without preamble—. It was her mistake, so she cannot also be the one carrying it out. Carmen, please.

Carmen reached into the bag without thinking too much about it. She drew out a name written in neat block letters and read it silently before handing it to Diego.

—What a nightmare for Tomás —he muttered—. His week’s already a mess.

—He’ll manage. Carmen, send him the email with the full protocol. Diego, stay and help me with the room. The sooner we set this up, the sooner we’re done with it.

***

Tomás received the email at six thirty in the evening.

He was finishing up a report when the notification appeared on the screen. Subject line: “Urgent — Highest Priority.” Sender: don Marcos. His colleague Elena, sitting on the other side of the glass partition, looked up when he muttered something under his breath.

—Is something wrong? —she asked.

—No. It’s from don Marcos, I’ll look at it at home.

Elena went back to her screen. Tomás saved the laptop, said he was leaving, and walked out without any further explanation. Elena shook her head and smiled to herself, swallowing whatever question she might have asked.

At home, stretched out on the sofa with the printed document on his chest, he took almost an hour to read it all the way through. It was long. Meticulous. Every step numbered, every possible variation accounted for. There was a section titled “Unforeseen Situations” that covered everything from a last-minute refusal to involuntary physical reactions. The language was administrative and cold, like a first-aid manual.

He thought about Valeria.

She was the newest person on the team. Seven months, maybe eight. She’d arrived with good references, a better attitude, and in a short time had won over the whole department. The error —a data point entered incorrectly into the system that had left an important client on the verge of breaking the contract— wasn’t malicious. It was inexperience. The kind of mistake anybody makes when they’re still learning the seams of the job.

But consequences don’t ask about intentions.

Tomás turned off the light at twelve thirty, still having not fallen asleep. He took himself in hand under the pajama pants without even thinking about it; he’d been hard for two hours, and he came with the image of Valeria bent over the horse before he’d even reached ten strokes, biting her lip in rage for having given in so easily.

***

The second-floor room had the blinds down and smelled of wood and something harder to identify. They had removed the meeting table and replaced it with a straight-backed chair and a low wooden contraption upholstered in padding, with four leather straps along the sides. Tomás had seen it described in the manual, but seeing it in person was different.

At seven o’clock sharp, Valeria came in.

She was serious. Pale, maybe, but with her chin lifted and her eyes steady. She wore her usual gray sweater and had her hair tied back in a low ponytail. She looked at the horse without lingering on it for more than a second and then looked at Tomás.

Tomás read the form aloud. Date, time, full name. The camera connected to the laptop streamed in real time, end-to-end encrypted, to the compliance department server. The records would remain available for fifteen days to handle complaints or reviews by authorized personnel, and then they would be permanently destroyed.

—Valeria Sánchez Ortega, of legal age, present by her own decision and in full possession of her faculties. Any objection?

No one spoke.

—Do you want to use the bathroom before we begin?

Valeria nodded. Carmen pointed toward the adjoining bathroom door. Diego and Carmen exchanged a look for an instant and then looked away, as if the ceiling had suddenly become extremely interesting.

***

Nerea had been standing in the hallway for almost twenty minutes without moving.

She had come out of the technical room with a network cable in her hand and passed by that room with no particular intention. The door never quite closed properly; it had been like that for months, and nobody had called the technician because the problem was too small to make any priority list. A strip of warm light leaked through the keyhole slit.

Nerea was the most invisible person on the floor. She managed the servers, repaired equipment when it failed, spoke only as much as strictly necessary. She wore shapeless clothes. She spent half her mornings with uncombed hair. Her coworkers greeted her out of habit when they crossed paths with her in the kitchen, but they didn’t really see her. She was part of the furniture, like the printers or the fire extinguishers.

She told herself she’d take a quick look. Just to know what was going on.

What she saw through that slit stole her breath.

Tomás was sitting in the straight-backed chair, the manual open on his knee and a focused expression on his face. Valeria was over his lap, face down, her pants at her ankles and her underwear at the same level. Tomás’s voice was low and steady as he explained the steps of the process, as if he were reading a safety procedure. The open hand landed on Valeria’s ass with a dry, clean sound.

Nerea pressed her back to the hallway wall.

This isn’t happening.

But it was happening. And she kept looking.

The hand fell four more times. Five. Seven. Valeria’s skin was beginning to color, a vivid red spreading from one cheek to the other, and Nerea could see from the slit the perfect line of ass opened by the position, and lower still Valeria’s cunt completely exposed between her pressed thighs. And what Nerea saw, and what twisted something inside her, was that that cunt was shining. The inner lips swollen, clear wetness slowly sliding down the inside of her right thigh. Valeria was wet. Soaked. Each slap made her wetter.

Her head was down and her fists were clenched against Tomás’s thighs, but she wasn’t making a sound. She was only breathing carefully, as if controlling sound was the last frontier she still had to defend. And Tomás, Tomás had a brutal erection under his pants that pressed straight against Valeria’s stomach with each slap, a bulge she had to be feeling with every inch of her skin, and he couldn’t hide it even if he wanted to. Every time the hand came down, Tomás’s cock jumped, and Valeria’s belly tightened against it.

Nerea slid her hand beneath the elastic of her pants without consciously deciding to. Her fingers found her own soaked cunt, wetter than it had been in months, in years. She rubbed her clit with two fingers and had to bite the inside of her cheek not to moan in the empty hallway. She began to stroke herself in slow circles, pressing her forehead against the wooden door, her eyes locked on the rectangle of light.

Tomás’s hand fell again, and again, and again. On the twelfth slap, Valeria opened her thighs barely an inch, involuntarily, and Nerea saw with complete clarity how a thread of moisture fell from her cunt and stained Tomás’s pants at the knee. Tomás saw it too. His hand hovered in the air for a second before coming down again, harder, as if punishing that betrayal of the body. Valeria let out a low moan, barely audible, and it wasn’t one of pain.

Nerea shoved two fingers inside herself without stopping rubbing her clit with the heel of her palm. She was so wet her fingers went in without resistance, to the knuckles, and she had to close her eyes for a second not to come then and there.

***

When Valeria sat up and covered herself, Carmen was already unfastening the leather straps from the wooden horse. Diego brought over a thin, flexible rod, a little over a meter long, which had been propped against the wall in a corner.

—We’ll proceed with the second phase —Tomás said—. Valeria, whenever you’re ready.

He said it like someone reading the safety regulations before an evacuation. Without emotional inflection. But Nerea, from the hallway, saw how Tomás’s gaze followed Valeria as she approached the horse, and she also saw how Valeria, as she passed close to him, deliberately brushed her hip against the bulge in his pants. A minimal touch, a calculated accident, and Tomás closed his eyes for an instant as if someone had stuck him with a pin. There was something in that tracking of eyes the manual didn’t account for.

Valeria took off her pants herself, and then her underwear, before anyone had even asked. The protocol would require it later, but she got ahead of it. She stood naked from the waist down in front of the three of them, her gray sweater barely covering her to the navel, and her cunt, swollen and shiny and with the hair trimmed close, was on full display. Carmen swallowed. Diego turned a quarter of the way toward the wall, and from the hallway Nerea could clearly see that Diego’s bulge was showing in his pants too.

Valeria bent herself over the horse. Carmen secured her wrists with the leather straps. Diego, her ankles. The horse tilted Valeria’s body forward, leaving her in a position that admitted no ambiguity about what was about to happen. Her ass lifted, her legs spread by the ankle strap, her cunt and asshole fully exposed under the room’s warm light. From the slit, Nerea saw a thread of Valeria’s wetness hang down to the floor, one drop after another.

—Fifteen —Tomás announced.

Following the protocol, he checked the area that was going to receive the punishment again. It was necessary to monitor the skin’s condition between strikes. He ran two fingers over her right cheek, slowly, almost tenderly, checking the temperature and color. Tomás’s fingers slid a centimeter toward the center and brushed, without meaning to, the edge of Valeria’s soaked cunt. She let out a low moan, a real moan this time, long and deep, and Nerea in the hallway shoved the fingers of her other hand into her mouth so she wouldn’t answer with one of her own.

The rod whistled through the air before the first blow. Valeria tightened her whole body at once, like an electric shock running through every muscle simultaneously. The sound was different from the hand: sharper, more precise. And with each blow, Valeria’s cunt visibly clenched, expelling more wetness, and a perfect red line drew itself across her skin.

Nerea pressed her lips together not to make a sound. Her pants were already pulled down to her knees; she didn’t remember having done it, three fingers inside her cunt and her thumb pressed against her clit, fucking her hand to the exact rhythm of Tomás’s blows.

The strikes fell at regular intervals. Not fast, not slow. Tomás checked between each one, following procedure, and each check lasted a second longer than strictly necessary, and his fingers brushed a little deeper each time. Four. Five. Six. Valeria held out until the eighth in absolute silence. On the ninth, a brief, contained sound escaped her, which could have been anything but sounded more like pleasure than pain. On the tenth, she clenched her fists against the horse’s padding hard enough to whiten her knuckles, and at the same time lifted her ass a little higher, offering it, and everyone in the room saw it.

Carmen had moved to one side, and Nerea could see from the hallway how Carmen had pressed her right thigh against the left and was rubbing them discreetly against each other. Diego had both hands in front of his pants, holding the bulge, his face red. Nobody was pretending anymore.

On the thirteenth strike, Valeria came.

She came tied to the horse, with the rod in the air and fifteen red marks crossing her ass in parallel lines, and she couldn’t hide it even if she wanted to. Her cunt clamped down in visible waves, wetness coming out in short spurts down her thighs, and she let out a long, rough moan that finally broke the last frontier she’d been defending. Tomás lowered the rod, took a deep breath, adjusted the bulge in his pants without even trying to hide it anymore, and gave the two missing blows, gentler, almost caresses on the punished skin.

Nerea came in the hallway, pressing her forehead against the door, with three fingers all the way inside her cunt and her other hand over her mouth. She came so hard her knees gave out and she slowly sank down to a crouch, back against the wall, keeping her fingers in, stretching the orgasm while she heard Valeria finish moaning inside the room.

Fifteen.

***

When Tomás read the closing line of the form, the room fell silent. Carmen carefully untied Valeria, her fingers trembling as she unfastened the wrist straps. Diego disconnected the camera from the laptop and closed the lid. There was a long, heavy moment in which nobody spoke while Valeria straightened up slowly, her cunt still shining and the wetness running down the inside of her thigh, with no hurry to cover herself.

—Do you need anything? —Carmen asked softly, and her voice came out broken.

Valeria looked at her. Then she looked at Tomás, who was still marked by a bulge in his pants and breathing hard. She looked at Diego, who didn’t know where to put his eyes.

—Yes —Valeria said, very calmly—. I need him to finish what he started.

And she nodded toward Tomás with her chin.

The camera was already off. The form was already closed. Whatever happened next would not be recorded on any server. Carmen and Diego looked at each other for a second, a full second, and without saying a word Carmen stepped back and leaned against the wall, thighs clenched and eyes shining. Diego sat in the corner chair, undid his pants just enough, and pulled his hard cock out over his briefs without even lowering his clothes all the way.

Nerea, in the hallway, brought her wet fingers to her mouth and slid the other hand back between her legs.

Tomás approached Valeria slowly. He placed an open hand on her reddened ass and Valeria jolted, pressing even closer against his body. He went for her mouth. They kissed with their tongues out, without closing their eyes, biting each other’s lips with delayed hunger. Valeria pulled down his zipper with both hands, took out his hard, veined cock, weighed it for a second in her palm as if measuring it, and dropped to her knees without taking her eyes off his.

—Fuck, what a cock you’ve got —she murmured hoarsely, and took it halfway into her mouth.

Tomás threw his head back. Valeria sucked him slowly at first, using her tongue to lick the whole length from his balls to the glans, pausing at the tip to suck off the drop of precum already beading there. Then she started going at it for real, with both hands, with her throat, swallowing him until she gagged and pulling him out covered in saliva only to take him back in a second later. The sound of her head bumping against Tomás’s hips filled the whole room. Diego was jerking off in the chair with his hard cock shining and not hiding a damn thing. Carmen had hiked her skirt up to her waist and had two fingers moving fast over her cunt on top of her soaked panties.

—Come here —Tomás said, his voice breaking as he pulled her hair upward—. The horse. Again.

Valeria obeyed without saying anything. She bent over the horse again, this time without straps, this time offering her reddened ass and her soaked, open cunt, and spread her legs as far as she could. Tomás got behind her. He ran two fingers through her cunt, from bottom to top, gathering the wetness, and brought them to his mouth. He licked them slowly, looking Carmen in the eyes while he did it.

—She’s fucking gorgeous —Tomás said—. She’s made to be fucked like this.

And he drove his cock into her in one thrust, all the way to the hilt.

Valeria screamed. A real scream this time, long, uncontrolled, and that scream almost made Nerea scream too in the hallway. Tomás didn’t give her time to adjust. He started fucking her with hard, dry thrusts, pulling almost all the way out only to slam back in to the hilt, and with each blow the reddened skin of Valeria’s ass hit Tomás’s hips with a wet, brutal sound.

—Yes —Valeria panted—. Like that. Harder. Harder, fuck.

Tomás grabbed her by the hair, threw her head back, and drove into her faster. With the other hand he landed a sharp slap on her left cheek, right over the rod marks, and Valeria shuddered all over and came a second time, squeezing his cock with her cunt in waves.

Diego came in the chair, almost silently, his face buried in his shoulder and his fingers smeared with semen. Carmen came two seconds later, biting her hand so she wouldn’t scream, sliding down the wall until she was sitting on the floor with her panties around her ankles.

Tomás pulled his cock out of Valeria’s wet, shining cunt. He spat once, onto her asshole, and slid the head in there slowly, pressing.

—Put it all in —Valeria whispered—. I’m clean. Put it all in my ass.

Tomás pushed. His cock went in only a little at first, with resistance, and Valeria clenched her teeth and shoved her hips back to swallow it herself. Tomás drove himself all the way into her reddened ass, and started fucking her from behind with both hands on her hips, pulling her toward him with every thrust.

—Fuck, you’re tight —Tomás growled—. I’m gonna come inside.

—Come —she panted—. Come inside, all of it, I want to feel it.

Tomás hammered into her five, six more times, very hard, very deep, and came with a deep moan that rose from his chest. Valeria felt the hot spurts inside her and came with him, moaning low with her face pressed against the horse’s padding, while Tomás kept moving slowly, emptying himself completely, and a drop of semen began to leak from the rim of her ass and fall slowly over the wetness of her own cunt.

Nerea came a second time in the hallway. This time she couldn’t hold back the moan. It came out from between her fingers, muffled, and she stayed there, curled up against the wall, breathing in fits, with soaked panties and sticky fingers, while she heard the four people inside the room breathing slowly and coming toward the door.

She got up as best she could. Pulled her pants back up. Ran down the hallway with trembling legs and slipped into the technical room two seconds before the room door opened.

And Valeria left after a while. Without looking back, without reproaches, without the expression of someone seeking compassion. She just left.

***

Five days later, in the break room, Tomás and Carmen were talking in low voices with their coffee cups in their hands. It was midmorning and the rest of the floor was at their desks.

—What do you think about all this? —she asked.

Tomás took a while to answer. He looked at the coffee, then at the window.

—The consent part is fine on paper. I get it. But I wonder how much real leeway someone has when they’ve been in a new role for eight months and need the salary. I don’t know whether she wanted to be there or whether she simply didn’t see another way out. That difference matters, even if the form says it doesn’t. What I do know is I wouldn’t have held out like that. She didn’t lose her composure even once. I would’ve lost it long before. I mean the pain.

—Yeah —Carmen said, and lowered her eyes to her cup, and both of them knew neither of them was talking only about pain.

Nerea passed by the break room door without stopping. She carried an empty cup in her hand as an excuse in case anyone looked at her.

Nobody looked at her.

They never looked at her.

But Nerea had been there. She had seen Tomás with the rod in his hand and the look of someone following a procedure and something else at the same time. She had seen Carmen and Diego laughing under their breath in the hallway before everything began. She had seen the marks on Valeria’s skin when Tomás uncovered them to check the damage according to protocol. She had seen Tomás fucking her in the cunt and the ass on the horse, and Diego jerking off in the chair, and Carmen coming against the wall with her panties at her ankles.

And while she watched them, she had finished alone, silent, with her back against the cold hallway wall and the network cable thrown on the floor. Twice. With three fingers inside and her eyes fixed on the keyhole slit.

The process was supposed to be secret. Someone had forgotten to call the technician to fix that door.

Nerea had the compliance department number saved on her phone for years, as a matter of protocol, in case it was ever needed. An anonymous call would be enough to trigger an inspection. And then Carmen and Diego, who had been present as witnesses and not only as witnesses, would have to choose how to explain certain things.

She thought about it while turning on the computer.

She thought about it while checking the previous night’s logs.

She thought about it once more before logging out and turning the screen off at seven in the evening.

She still hadn’t dialed the number.

But she had it. And she knew exactly what she had seen.