Delta Gamma Enchanted: Ella Enchanted Parody

A sexy parody of Ella Enchanted featuring sorority gals!

This is a work of fan fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All fictional characters engage in sexual acts and are aged eighteen and over.

The Morning After

---

The first thing Isabelle Johnston heard when she woke up was Whitney Larchick's voice cutting through the thin wall between their rooms like a serrated knife.

"Somebody come tell me what this smell is."

It wasn't a request exactly. It landed in the air of the Delta Gamma house the way Whitney's words always did — weighted, expecting compliance, shaped by twenty-two years of getting exactly what she wanted. Isabelle rolled over in her bed, pulling her silk pillowcase tighter against her cheek and squinting at the pale San Diego light pressing through the curtains. Her head felt strange. Not hungover-strange, not even tired-strange. It was a tightness behind her sternum, something wound up like a spring, dormant but coiled, like a key had been turned in a lock somewhere deep in her chest while she slept.

She lay still for a moment, running her tongue over her teeth, cataloguing the sensation. It wasn't unpleasant. Just... present. New.

She would have kept lying there — she had no morning class on Thursdays, and the bed in her room on the second floor of the KDS house was a queen with a purple velvet headboard she'd bought herself and shipped from home — but then Whitney's voice came again.

"Isabelle. Come here."

And Isabelle's body moved before her brain issued the instruction.

She sat up. Swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her feet found her slippers on autopilot, and she was halfway to the door before she stopped herself, blinking hard.

*What—*

She hadn't decided to get up. She'd been thinking about going back to sleep. She'd been actively *planning* on going back to sleep, and her body had just — gone. Like someone had flipped a switch on her spine.

Isabelle stood in the middle of her room in her oversized Oklahoma State sleep shirt and pink sleep shorts, hand resting on the doorframe, deeply unsettled.

"Isabelle, seriously, come here," Whitney called again, and this time Isabelle felt it — a small electric pulse right at the center of her chest, a little *zing* like touching a metal doorknob in winter, and her feet moved again, carrying her out the door and down the hall toward Whitney's room before she could think twice.

Whitney Larchick was sitting cross-legged on her bed in a white silk robe, dark hair loose around her shoulders, holding a sheet mask in one hand and frowning at her vanity mirror. She was twenty-two, VP of Delta Gamma's finances, and she had the particular kind of beauty that made people nervous — sharp jaw, grey-green eyes, the posture of someone who had been told she was intimidating and had decided to lean into it. She looked up when Isabelle appeared in the doorway and pointed at her skincare shelf.

"Do you smell that? It's like something chemical. Like burning rubber but also floral? I think one of my serums expired."

Isabelle opened her mouth to say *I was actually about to go back to sleep, Whitney* — and instead walked across the room and started sniffing along the shelf of glass bottles.

"Okay," she said slowly, picking up the vitamin C serum and uncapping it. "This one's turned. It's oxidized, it smells like hot pennies and orange peel."

Whitney wrinkled her nose. "Throw it away."

Isabelle threw it away. She dropped it straight into Whitney's rose-gold wastebasket without even consciously deciding to, and then stood there with her hand still half-extended toward the trash can, staring at it.

She turned around very slowly.

"Whitney."

"Mm?"

"Tell me to do something else."

Whitney looked up from her phone with the particular expression she reserved for when pledges asked confusing questions. One manicured brow rose. "What?"

"Just — tell me to do something. Anything." Isabelle's voice was very controlled. "Like a command. Just say it."

Whitney stared at her for a long moment, then clearly decided this was too early for existential weirdness. "Pick up my robe from the floor."

Isabelle's hand was already reaching for it. She grabbed the silky hem off the bathroom tiles before she'd even processed the instruction, and then she stood up holding it, and the *zing* in her chest faded to nothing, satisfied, like a breath released.

"Oh my God," Isabelle said.

"What—"

"Oh my God, Whitney."

---

By nine-fifteen, all eight of them were in the main living room.

It was not a comfortable gathering. The KDS house main floor had been decorated last fall in what their chapter president Arianna had called "elevated coastal maximalism," which meant cream linen sofas, rattan side tables, trailing pothos from every shelf, and a gallery wall of formal portraits going back to 1987. The girls were scattered across the furniture in various states of morning disarray, and the energy in the room was somewhere between a group therapy session and the early stages of a very controlled panic.

Arianna Matthews was standing. She almost always stood in group settings — she was five-foot-nine in bare feet, with the kind of athletic blonde beauty that read as almost aggressive in person, pageant-polished by years of competing, and she processed things better on her feet. She'd been runner-up at Miss Ultimate USA six months ago and had the bearing of someone who had been photographed in a crown enough times to make standing feel like a natural state. She was in matching workout set — ivory biker shorts and a cropped quarter zip — and she was staring at her own hands.

"Tell me to do something," she said to no one in particular.

Kallyn Paige, sunk into the corner of the sectional with her knees pulled up and a crease-mark still on her cheek from sleep, said flatly: "Clap."

Arianna clapped. Once, sharp and involuntary, like a reflex.

"Okay," Kallyn said. She had a flat affect even at the best of times — she was a junior biochemistry double-major from Phoenix, always the most unreadable person in any room, with short dark red hair cut in a blunt bob that she'd had for two years and a stud piercing in her nose and the permanent expression of someone two steps ahead of the conversation. "Okay, so it's all of us."

"What does that mean?" Katie Kerley was next to her, a blonde from Charlotte whose eyelash extensions were still somehow perfect despite sleep, pulling her cardigan tighter around herself. "What does it *mean* that it's all of us?"

"It means," Kallyn said, "that the old woman wasn't joking."

The silence that followed this was very full.

The old woman. None of them had been thinking about the old woman — or rather, all of them had been deliberately *not* thinking about the old woman, which was a different thing. The old woman who'd been sitting on the steps of the little blue house on Calle Bella Court when they'd arrived last night. The one they'd startled. The one Isabelle had been, in hindsight, probably not very kind to. The one who had looked at all eight of them with those very dark, very still eyes and said — what had she said exactly? Something in a language that wasn't English, and then in English: *By morning you will know what it is to serve.*

They had laughed. They had laughed quite a lot, actually. Arianna had gotten it on her story.

Briley Ann Waters, who was sitting sideways in the armchair nearest the window with her legs draped over one arm, pushed a piece of strawberry-blonde hair out of her face and said: "This isn't real. We're — there's no such thing as a curse. We all just, I don't know, didn't sleep well, we're suggestible, the adrenaline from last night is—"

"Briley Ann," Cassie Cleckler said from the loveseat across from her. Cassie was the youngest, a sophomore, with dark hair that curled slightly at the ends and the kind of wide brown eyes that made her look perpetually in the middle of figuring something out. She'd been chewing on her thumbnail since she came downstairs. "Go stand on one leg."

Briley Ann stood on one leg. She scrambled to keep her balance and clutched the arm of the chair and stood there, one leg crooked up behind her like a flamingo, looking mortified.

"Okay," Briley Ann said, in a very small voice. "Okay. I hear you."

"Put your leg down," Cassie said, and Briley Ann's foot landed on the floor.

Chloe Frederick, sitting cross-legged on the floor between the coffee table and the couch with her laptop open, because she had a coding assignment due at noon and was trying very hard to remain functional in a crisis, looked up from her screen. She was small and sharp-featured, dark blonde hair half in a bun, and she had a habit of processing things through typing — she'd already opened a doc and was taking notes. "Okay so the mechanism seems to be verbal commands. Direct address or implied address, like 'someone come here' is enough. And there's a physical sensation, right? Like—"

"A zing," Isabelle said.

"Right. A zing. And then compliance, whether or not you intend it."

"You're literally taking notes right now," Arianna said.

"I cope through documentation," Chloe said, and went back to typing.

Whitney, who had been sitting with her arms folded since they'd all convened, said: "Can we resist it?"

This question hung in the air.

Kallyn said: "I've been trying. When Cassie told Briley Ann to stand on one leg, I tried not to and I still — I felt it pulling. Like gravity. Like trying to hold your breath. You can delay it maybe half a second but you can't stop it."

"Half a second," Whitney repeated.

"Maybe."

"Great," Whitney said. "Super useful half second."

"I'm just telling you what I found."

"Does it wear off?" Arianna asked. "Did anyone wake up this morning and feel normal first, and then it came on? Or was it just—"

"Just there," Isabelle said. "I woke up and it was already there. I didn't notice it until Whitney told me to come to her room."

Whitney didn't look flattered.

"I woke up at like six to pee," Cassie said, "and my roommate — well, my roommate at home, in my dreams, I was dreaming — anyway she told me to do something in the dream and I woke up because I felt it even in a dream and I thought I was having a heart thing."

"Okay so it's been on since at least six," Chloe said, typing.

Katie said: "Can we just — is there a way to *undo* it? Like did anyone Google the old lady? Does she have a Yelp? Is there a number we can call?"

The look that crossed the room was not kind.

"A number we can call," Kallyn repeated.

"I'm just asking—"

"A number for the curse witch's business line—"

"Okay I hear how it sounds—"

---

The morning dissolved into afternoon the way San Diego mornings always did — the marine layer burning off around eleven, the sky going from pearl-grey to that particular ruthless blue that made everything look like a postcard, the campus filling up with the particular Thursday energy of people who had one foot already in the weekend. Life at UCSD continued with complete indifference to the internal catastrophe happening inside the walls of the KDS house on Via Sorento.

By noon they had established a few things.

The curse responded to direct commands, implied commands, and — Chloe had discovered this by accident when she'd been reading aloud from her thermodynamics textbook and had reached a sentence that included the phrase "expand outward" and had physically stood up from her desk chair and spread her arms — potentially to any imperative phrasing directed at a person in the room, even without intent. She'd immediately sat back down and added three new bullet points to her document.

They could not tell anyone. This had been Arianna's decision, made in the flat decisive tone she used when she wasn't asking for input. "Nobody talks about this outside this house," she'd said, standing in the living room with her arms folded and her jaw set. "If this gets out we are done. We are finished. The sorority is finished. We will be the girls who got cursed for TPing an old woman's house and it will be on our Wikipedia pages forever."

"We don't have Wikipedia pages," Briley Ann had said.

"I do," Arianna said, and nobody had argued with that, because she did.

So they had dispersed to their Thursday obligations — classes, study groups, the library, Chloe's lab section — with the understanding that they would reconvene before the Pi Kappa Phi party that night, which was already on the calendar, already half the reason the whole prank night had happened in the first place, a tradition of sorts, the Pi Kaps' first party of the quarter and KDS always showed up and it was always a whole thing, and canceling was not something Arianna Matthews did.

The rule they'd established was simple: no one gives a command to a cursed girl in public. No one speaks in imperatives around them. You steer conversations, you deflect, you use questions instead of instructions.

It was a good rule.

It lasted until approximately one forty-five PM.

---

Isabelle had a discussion section for her Communications and Media Studies class at one PM in the Humanities building, a low-slung seventies building with narrow windows and a brutal air conditioning system that always ran about fifteen degrees too cold. She sat in the second row like she always did — close enough to look engaged, far enough back to check her phone — in her tan wide-leg pants and a white ribbed tank, her long dark blonde hair pulled half up, and she spent the first forty minutes of discussion completely normally. Answering questions, taking notes, sending a text to Whitney that said *still functional, no incidents* and getting back a thumbs up.

She was gathering her things at the end of class, the room filtering out around her, half-listening to her classmate Dev wrap up a conversation with the TA about the Chomsky reading, when it happened.

Her professor — Dr. Reyes, a compact forty-something with wire-rimmed glasses and the harried energy of someone who had forty papers to grade — was erasing the whiteboard at the front and called over his shoulder without turning around, addressing the room generally: "Before everyone leaves, write your attendance on the sheet by the door."

Everyone moved toward the attendance sheet.

Isabelle moved toward the attendance sheet.

And then Dr. Reyes said, still not looking up from erasing, apparently talking to no one, running through his own mental checklist out loud: "Take your seats for a second, I need to make an announcement before you go."

The remaining six or seven students drifted back to their seats.

Isabelle sat down.

Dr. Reyes turned around, looked at the handful of people still there, and said: "Oh — actually, never mind, I'll send an email. You can go."

Isabelle stood up.

It was fine. It was totally fine. She gathered her things again, slung her tote over her shoulder, and was almost at the door when the TA, a grad student named Marcus with the slightly glazed look of someone who had been in academia too long, called out absently while flipping through papers: "Hey, whoever's still here — can someone grab that marker cap off the floor over there?"

Isabelle was the only one still there. She put down her bag. She picked up the marker cap. She handed it to Marcus, who said "thanks" without looking up.

She walked out into the hallway sunshine and leaned against the warm concrete wall outside and closed her eyes and breathed.

*Okay,* she thought. *Okay, that was fine. That was manageable.*

Her phone buzzed. A text from Katie: *urgent come to the bookstore NOW*

She was walking toward the bookstore before she registered that *come now* was a command.

She pulled up short in the middle of the walkway, caught herself, and then stood there and reasoned through it: Katie was also cursed, Katie couldn't command her, the curse seemed to be one-directional, one cursed girl couldn't compel another — they'd tested this in the living room that morning, Kallyn had told Chloe to sit down and Chloe had just looked at her. So the pull she'd felt from Katie's text was what, exactly? Just habit? Just normal social obligation?

She kept walking toward the bookstore, but slower, and she told herself it was her own decision, and it mostly was.

---

The UCSD bookstore was busy in the early afternoon, undergraduates drifting through the sweatshirt section and the overpriced snack aisle, and Katie was standing near the back by the school supplies, holding a hand basket and looking extremely stressed in a way that didn't read as unusual for Katie but that Isabelle, who knew her, recognized as a different grade of stressed than normal.

"What happened?" Isabelle said.

"Nothing happened," Katie said. "Nothing *bad* happened. I just — okay so I was in here picking up a notebook and the guy at the register — he's like, I think he's a freshman, he's very young, he's working the register — and he was like 'can I help you find anything?' and I said no and then when I was checking out he said—" she paused and looked around and lowered her voice — "he said 'have a great day and come back soon.'"

Isabelle stared at her. "Did you—"

"I left the store," Katie said. "I walked out and then I walked back in and I bought a notebook I didn't need and came back in and I've just been standing here because I don't know if *come back soon* means — like does that mean I have to keep coming back? Is it going to pull me back here? Like on a loop?"

Isabelle pressed her lips together. She wanted very much to laugh but Katie's eyes were doing a thing that suggested laughter was not the right call. "I think — I think it's contextual. Like it's a figure of speech, not a command. You came back and you're fine."

"I'm not fine, Isabelle, I'm cursed."

"You know what I mean."

Katie put a pack of highlighters in her basket that she clearly didn't need either and said: "How is this our life right now."

Isabelle was about to answer when her phone lit up with a text from Briley Ann in the group chat: *minor incident in bio lab report back later all ok*, followed immediately by three emojis from Cassie — a lightning bolt, a grimacing face, and a running figure — which was apparently how Cassie was communicating about the curse via text to avoid accidentally writing any commands.

"The party's still on?" Katie asked.

"The party is absolutely still on," Isabelle said, because Arianna had said so, and also because Isabelle Johnston from Stillwater, Oklahoma was not the kind of girl who missed parties on account of supernatural hexes. "We'll manage. We just — we have to be careful."

---

The Pi Kappa Phi house was three blocks off campus on a street that the university had been trying to reclaim for residential zoning for six years and failing, because the fraternities on it paid their rent on time and threw parties that kept the local economy in red Solo cups and Uber surge pricing. The house itself was a wide two-story Spanish colonial that had been lived in hard — the front yard had been concreted over at some point in the nineties, string lights ran between the eaves, and the bass from inside was audible from half a block away, a low physical thump that you felt in your sternum before you heard it.

There was already a crowd on the front porch when the eight of them turned the corner, clusters of people with drinks, someone's golden retriever sitting very patiently near the steps, and from inside the warm spill of music and light and noise that meant the party was already at full tide.

Arianna didn't slow down. She walked up the front path like she was arriving at something she'd been invited to specifically, which she basically had been — the Pi Kap social chair, a broad-shouldered senior named Drew, had texted her yesterday: *KDS better come through tonight* — and the group folded in behind her in the natural way they always did, Isabelle at her shoulder, the others trailing in pairs, Whitney with Kallyn, Briley Ann with Cassie, Katie with Chloe.

"Remember," Isabelle said, low, close to Arianna's ear as they reached the steps. "We stick together. No splitting up. No one gets isolated."

"I know," Arianna said.

"And you personally cannot tell anyone to do anything tonight—"

"I *know*, Isabelle."

"—because you have the hosting instincts of a golden retriever and you're going to try to direct people—"

"Isabelle." Arianna stopped at the top of the porch steps and turned to look at her, and her expression was the one she'd learned to keep perfectly neutral from years of pageant interviews, the face that showed nothing while meaning everything. "I have this. We have this. We're fine."

She turned back around and walked through the front door.

---

Inside the Pi Kap house, the party was the specific flavor of organized chaos that Thursday night Greek parties achieved when they'd been planned well — not a rager, not a kickback, something in between, loud enough to feel alive, managed enough that people were having actual conversations rather than just surviving each other. The main room was open plan, the furniture pushed to the walls, a bar setup in the kitchen visible through the pass-through, two guys managing it with the focused efficiency of people who had done this many times. String lights again, because it was California and string lights were apparently load-bearing, warm amber light that made everyone look better than they probably deserved to.

The music was loud but not deafening. This was important. This was the difference between a night that stayed manageable and one that didn't, and Isabelle noted it with relief as they pushed through the front room — if she couldn't hear what people were saying to her, the curse became genuinely dangerous, she'd been thinking about this all evening. Loud-but-conversational meant she could track the language around her. She could listen for imperatives. She could stay in control.

Drew materialized from somewhere near the kitchen almost immediately, the way fraternity social chairs did at their own parties — always a little watchful, always glad to see the people they'd been hoping would show, the social equivalent of a border collie. He was tall, dark-haired, wearing a blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up, with an easy grin that he aimed at Arianna like she was the sun.

"You actually came," he said.

"Did you think I wouldn't?" Arianna said.

"I think you always have a backup plan." He reached past her to grab a drink from a nearby tray and held it out. "Welcome. Get in here."

The whole group filtered through. Someone handed Cassie a drink before she'd even finished walking through the door, which was the Pi Kap hosting philosophy in miniature. The energy in the room noticed them — or noticed Arianna, which was effectively the same thing — in the particular way that a room notices when something worth noticing has arrived, conversations dimming slightly, a few heads turning, the general recalibration of a social atmosphere.

Isabelle took a drink from the kitchen bar — vodka soda, she needed to stay clear — and found a position near the wall with a sightline to most of the room, which was a habit she'd developed not from paranoia but from the same low-grade social intelligence that had gotten her voted most likely to know where everyone in the party was at any given time by her high school friends. She could see Arianna already in conversation with Drew and a group near the center of the room, could see Whitney and Kallyn establishing a position near the window, could see Briley Ann and Cassie accepting drinks, could see Chloe doing a slow scan of the room that was absolutely her cataloguing exit strategies.

Katie appeared at her elbow. "This is fine," Katie said, with the specific brightness of someone trying to convince themselves. "This is fine, right? This is fine."

"This is fine," Isabelle confirmed.

"There are so many people here."

"There are a lot of people here," Isabelle agreed. "Just — you know the drill. Questions, not commands. Redirect. And if something happens, just—"

"Comply fast and move on."

"Comply fast and move on."

Katie took a long sip of her drink and looked out at the room. "You know what would be so much easier is if the curse just — like, made us really good at dancing or something. Something fun. Why couldn't she have given us that."

"I'll pass that feedback along to the curse witch."

"Please do." Katie touched her arm. "Okay. I'm going to find Briley Ann. Text me."

She disappeared into the crowd.

---

The Pi Kap brothers were not, as a collective organism, unaware that the KDS girls were there. This was not arrogance on anyone's part; it was just true, the same way it was true that the room temperature had risen slightly with the influx of warm bodies, a simple fact of the environment. The Pi Kaps were a mid-sized chapter — forty active brothers, roughly half of them here tonight — and they existed in the standard Greek row ecosystem of parallel orbit with KDS, social proximity without formal affiliation, the two houses attending each other's parties and nominally looking out for each other and managing a complex web of history and ongoing entanglement that was never fully mapped and never fully resolved.

The brothers who were most aware of the KDS arrival were, from left to right across the main room:

Drew Calloway, social chair, who was already talking to Arianna and doing it with the focused attention of someone who had been thinking about this conversation for a week.

Marcus Webb, junior from Sacramento, who had been watching the door for an hour and had specifically been watching it for Briley Ann Waters, who he had met three times and thought about with an frequency that was slightly embarrassing by his own admission.

Jake Sutherland, senior, who had his arm around another girl already but whose eyes tracked the new arrivals in the way of someone who was gathering information for later.

And then there was Connor Hale.

Connor Hale was not watching the door when the KDS girls arrived because Connor Hale was in the kitchen arguing about the whiskey selection with his roommate and fellow brother Theo Park, which was where Connor spent significant portions of any party — adjacent to it, engaged in a separate and equally animated conversation, coming out when he felt like it. He was a senior, economics.

Connor leaned against the wall next to Isabelle and let the conversation breathe for a moment, and then he said, casually, watching her face: "Do something for me."

It wasn't loaded. It was light, almost throwaway, the tone of someone about to ask you to hold their drink. But Isabelle felt the zing detonate in her chest like a struck bell, immediate and total, and her body angled toward him before she could stop it, her weight shifting forward, her chin lifting, the full involuntary attention of someone awaiting instruction.

Connor noticed. His eyes sharpened.

"What was that?" he said, quieter now.

"Nothing," Isabelle said, and her voice was too controlled and he was too perceptive and they both knew it.

He looked at her for a long moment with that empirical stillness, the way he'd looked at Kallyn on the chair, the way you look at a thing when you're building a model of it in your head. Then he said, slowly, testing it: "Turn around."

The zing. Her body turned. She was facing the wall before she caught herself, one full rotation, and she stopped with her back to him for two full seconds of profound mortification before she turned back around of her own will, her jaw tight, her cheeks warm.

Connor's expression had gone very still in the way of someone who has just discovered something extraordinary and is deciding what to do with it.

"Interesting," he said softly.

"Don't," Isabelle said.

"How long has this been—"

"I said don't."

But he was already turning toward the room, toward where Theo was standing twenty feet away, catching his eye with a slight lift of his chin, and something passed between them — the shorthand of people who have lived together for two years — and Theo looked at the group of KDS girls spread across the room and looked back at Connor and his eyes widened incrementally and he smiled the slow smile of someone whose evening has just gotten significantly more interesting.

---

It moved through the Pi Kap brothers the way information always moved through fraternities, which was: fast, sideways, and with increasing embellishment. Connor told Theo. Theo told Marcus, who immediately looked at Briley Ann across the room with an expression that had shifted several degrees warmer. Marcus told Drew, who was still standing with Arianna, and Drew turned to look at her with new and total attention, the particular focus of someone who has just been handed a key.

Drew said, to Arianna, conversationally: "Hey — come upstairs with me for a second. I want to show you something."

The zing hit Arianna like a current and she was moving before she'd decided anything, falling into step beside Drew as he turned toward the stairs, and she got three steps up before she realized what was happening and grabbed the bannister and said, under her breath, sharp: "Drew."

He stopped on the step above her and looked down at her and the understanding was all over his face now — warm and interested and not quite innocent. "Yeah?"

She looked up at him. Drew Calloway, who she'd been managing for a semester, who she'd kept at arm's length with the practiced fluency of someone who'd been in Arianna Matthews' personal orbit long enough to know that letting people too close had a cost. She looked at him and saw that the balance of what she'd been managing had just shifted.

"You know," she said.

"I figured something out," he agreed.

"It's not—" she started.

"Come upstairs, Arianna," he said.

The zing rolled through her from sternum to fingertips. Her hand released the bannister.

She walked upstairs with him, and the noise of the party fell behind her like a tide going out, and at the top of the stairs Drew opened a door and she walked through it and he closed it behind them and she stood in the middle of a room that was someone's bedroom, clean enough, blue lamp on the desk, and turned to face him, and her whole body was flushed and too warm and pulled taut like a bow.

"This isn't fair," she said.

"No," he agreed easily, leaning back against the closed door and looking at her with that easy smile. "Take your shoes off."

The zing. Her heels hit the floor. She stood three inches shorter and somehow more exposed for it.

"Now tell me," he said, "how long has this been going on?"

---

Downstairs, the room had reorganized around a new gravity without anyone acknowledging it openly, the way party rooms do when the social calculus has shifted and everyone is operating on the new information. The Pi Kap brothers had spread through the space with a different intentionality than before, not aggressive, not predatory, just — focused, the focused interest of a group of twenty-something men who have discovered that the most attractive women in the room are in a state of extraordinary suggestibility and have decided to explore this thoroughly.

Marcus Webb materialized next to Briley Ann with two fresh drinks and handed her one, which wasn't a command and didn't trigger anything, just was a nice thing to do, and she took it and said thank you and he smiled and said: "Dance with me."

Briley Ann felt the zing and moved toward him and he put his hand on her waist and pulled her into the space between the other bodies moving, and the music was deep and low and her back was against his chest and his mouth was near her ear and he said: "You're so fucking pretty." Not a command. Just a fact, delivered warm. She felt the zing the same and whether that was the curse or something else she couldn't entirely separate in the low amber light.

Katie Kerley had been talking to a brother named Nate, tall and sandy-haired and possessing of an enormous amount of energy, who had been working up to something for twenty minutes and finally landed on it, saying directly: "Katie. Kiss me."

The zing. She kissed him. Right there in the main room, one hand coming up against his chest, his hand finding her jaw, and the kiss was deeper than a first kiss at a party between strangers had any right to be, and when it broke Katie stood there with her lip gloss ruined and her heart going and Nate said softly, testing: "Again."

The zing. She kissed him again.

Cassie, watching this from across the room with wide eyes, felt a hand at the small of her back and turned to find a dark-haired Pi Kap she'd seen around but didn't know well, a junior named Riley who had a calm, deliberate way about him, and he looked at her and said simply: "Come here."

Cassie stepped toward him. The zing was almost pleasant from the right angle, like a drop into warm water.

---

Chloe was the first one to fully understand that the situation had progressed past the point of management. She'd been watching the room with the focused horror of someone watching a controlled experiment dissolve into chaos, all of her careful parameter mapping from the afternoon suddenly inadequate against twenty guys who knew and an environment where commands were landing every thirty seconds from every direction. She noted Arianna disappearing upstairs. She noted Briley Ann dissolving into the dance floor with Marcus. She noted Katie's very public kissing and Cassie being pulled toward the back hallway.

She started toward Whitney, who was the most composed person here and who she needed for a strategy summit immediately.

A Pi Kap she didn't know stepped into her path and said: "Stop."

She stopped. The zing was so fast she didn't even have the half-second window anymore.

He smiled. He was cute, unfortunately — dark blonde, square jaw, the easy confidence of someone who had been good-looking his whole life. "I've been watching you take notes on everything all night," he said. "What are you writing?"

"Observations," she said.

"About what?"

She wasn't commanded to answer and she pressed her lips together.

He tilted his head. "Tell me."

The zing. "About the curse," she said, and then closed her eyes briefly in resignation.

"The curse," he repeated, delighted. "Tell me everything."

And Chloe Frederick, who had been trying all night to maintain documentation and composure and scientific distance, stood in the middle of a Pi Kap party and told him everything. Every parameter, every observation, the range, the resistance window, the way abstract commands felt different from specific ones. He listened with his full attention and when she finished he said: "So if I told you to put your phone away right now you'd have to do it?"

She put her phone in her clutch.

"And if I told you to come with me—" He held out his hand.

The zing hit before he'd finished the sentence.

She took his hand.

---

Whitney had made it longer than any of them through the combination of her personality — people didn't naturally issue commands to Whitney Larchick, they made suggestions, they deferred, the social field around her bent toward asking rather than telling — and through Kallyn's proximity, the two of them having maintained their position near the window for most of the evening like a two-person fortress.

It was Kallyn who broke first, which was ironic given that she'd been the most analytical about this all day.

Theo Park had been circling their position for ten minutes with the patient intentionality of someone who had done his research, and he came in close to Kallyn and said: "I want to try something. Just stand still for a second."

Kallyn stood still. The zing rolled through her and her body locked into place, very upright, arms at her sides, and she looked at Theo with those flat, controlled eyes while being completely unable to move her feet, and Theo looked back at her with a fascination that was genuine and not unkind.

"Interesting," he said, which was exactly what Connor had said, and Kallyn noted with distant irritation that these two apparently had the same response to discovering cursed women.

"If you're going to do something," Kallyn said, her voice perfectly level, "do it. If you're going to stand there enjoying yourself, you can release me."

He blinked. "Does that work? You can tell me to release you?"

"I don't know. Try it."

"You can move," he said, and she could. "So you can negotiate."

"Within the structure, yes." She looked at him with the expression she used in seminars when someone said something she'd already thought past. "The curse is the frame. Inside the frame there's still—" she searched for the right word "—conversation."

Theo looked at her like she was the most interesting thing in the room. "Come with me," he said.

The zing. She went.

Which left Whitney alone, and Whitney scanned the room in the ten-second window of Kallyn's departure and took rapid inventory: Arianna upstairs, gone. Isabelle — where was Isabelle, she'd been against the wall with some guy — gone. Katie, Cassie, Chloe, Briley Ann, all absorbed into the party's body in various states of progress. Whitney was the last one standing in open ground.

Connor appeared at her elbow.

"You're the VP," he said.

She turned to look at him. He was with Isabelle, who appeared at his other side wearing an expression of combined embarrassment and something that wasn't quite unhappiness, her dark blue dress slightly rearranged, her cheeks flushed. "Hi," Isabelle said, with the specific smallness of someone who has just been thoroughly managed.

"What did you do," Whitney said.

"Several things," Isabelle said.

"She's very good at following directions," Connor said, in a tone of genuine appreciation that made Whitney's jaw tighten.

"Don't," Whitney said, to him.

"Don't what?" he said, and smiled, and he was good-looking in that irritating approachable way, and Whitney assessed him with six months of executive function and two years of managing a sorority's finances and determined that he was the kind of person who was smarter than he looked, which was the most dangerous kind.

"What do you want," she said, which was direct and practical.

"Right now? I want you to take a breath and stop looking like you're about to file a motion," he said. And then, lower: "Whitney. Relax."

The zing moved through her like warm water poured down her spine, and her shoulders dropped two inches and her jaw unclenched and she stood there in her emerald green dress being involuntarily, deeply relaxed, and she absolutely hated it and also — the warmth of it, the specific physical ease — it felt good in a way she was not prepared for.

"You're an asshole," she said, in a completely relaxed voice.

"Probably," he agreed. "Isabelle, go back and get us drinks."

Isabelle turned on her heel and walked toward the bar before her mind could catch up to her body, the zing still humming pleasantly in her chest, her hips moving with that particular involuntary sway that came from being directed rather than choosing. Connor watched her go, his eyes tracking the line of her back in the dark blue dress, and then he turned back to Whitney with the focused attention of someone who had finished his preliminary observations and was ready to begin the experiment in earnest.

"You're going to tell me everything," he said softly, stepping closer, close enough that she could smell his cologne—something clean, cedar and something warmer underneath. "How many of you. How it works. What the limits are."

Whitney's jaw wanted to tighten, but the command to relax was still thrumming through her nervous system, keeping her shoulders soft, her breathing slow, her body betraying her with every exhale. "Go to hell," she said, but her voice came out breathy, almost amused, the curse twisting her tone into something compliant.

Connor smiled. He reached out and tucked a piece of her dark hair behind her ear, and she couldn't flinch away, couldn't pull back, stood there letting him touch her like she was a doll he'd been given permission to arrange. "You're the one in charge usually, aren't you? VP of finances. The one who says no. The one who decides who gets what." His thumb traced her jawline. "Tell me how much you hate this."

"I hate this," she said immediately, the words pulled out of her like thread from a spool, and her eyes were bright with humiliation because she did hate it, hated standing there relaxed and open while he touched her, hated that her body wasn't hers to command anymore, hated that some part of her—the part the curse had loosened—was responding to the simplicity of being told.

"I know," he said, and there was something almost gentle in it, which made it worse. "Isabelle's coming back. When she gets here, you're both going to come with me. We're going to find somewhere quieter."

Whitney tried to summon the executive function to argue, to plan, to escape, but the relaxation was total, a warm bath over her cortex, and then Isabelle was there pressing a red cup into Connor's hand, her eyes glassy, her cheeks still flushed from whatever he'd done to her while Whitney wasn't watching.

"Good girl," Connor said to Isabelle, and Whitney watched her friend shiver at the praise, watched Isabelle's pupils dilate, and felt her own stomach flip with dread and something hotter, something the curse was feeding. "Whitney, take my hand."

Her hand lifted. Her fingers intertwined with his. The zing sang through her like a tuning fork.

"Isabelle, hold my other hand."

Isabelle complied, and Connor stood there in the middle of the Pi Kap party holding both of them, two sorority girls in silk dresses standing obediently at his sides like bookends, and he caught Drew's eye across the room and nodded once, a signal passing between them that the situation had moved from observation to utilization.

Drew was already coming down the stairs with Arianna behind him, and Arianna's crown-bearer posture was gone, replaced by something softer, her eyes slightly unfocused, her ivory dress slightly askew at the neckline. She'd been upstairs for twenty minutes. Whatever Drew had done to her up there had rewritten her pageant-poise into something pliant and dreamy, and she moved when he touched the small of her back, moved toward the group converging near the kitchen doorway.

"Basement's clear," Theo said, appearing from the hallway with Kallyn in tow, Kallyn's analytical expression finally cracked open into something dazed and compliant, her short red hair mussed, her lips slightly parted. "Riley took the brunette and the blonde—" he gestured vaguely toward where Katie and Cassie had been "—to the side room. Marcus has the other one in the back den."

"Chloe?" Drew asked.

"Luke's got her in the coat closet off the hall," Theo said, grinning. "She's still trying to explain the parameters of the curse while he fucks her mouth. It's adorable."

Whitney felt the words hit her stomach like a stone. Eight of them. Eight of them accounted for, distributed, commanded into compliance by men who understood exactly what they had and intended to use it thoroughly. She tried to pull her hand from Connor's and her fingers wouldn't obey, stayed laced with his like they belonged there.

"Connor," she said, and her voice was small, the curse keeping her relaxed even as panic tried to spike. "Please."

"Please what?" he asked, turning to look at her with genuine curiosity, as if they were discussing a minor point of order at a meeting.

"Don't—" she started, but Drew interrupted, his hand firm on Arianna's back, pushing her forward slightly so she stumbled on her heels and had to catch herself against Isabelle's shoulder.

"Upstairs with me," Drew said to Arianna, and the zing was visible on her face, the way her eyes fluttered, the way she turned immediately toward the stairs without looking back at the others. "The rest of you—" he looked at Connor, at Theo, at the other brothers materializing from the party's edges, "—take them downstairs. The soundproofing's better."

Connor tugged Whitney and Isabelle toward the basement door, and Whitney's feet moved, carrying her toward the unknown darkness below while Arianna was being led up, separated from the herd, the president taken for private use while the remaining sisters were being consolidated for convenience.

The basement was cooler, concrete floors and exposed beams, a rec room setup with a couch and some chairs and a pool table that had been pushed to the side to make space. The lighting was dim, amber bulbs in metal cages, and Whitney saw Katie already there, kneeling on the carpet in front of Nate, her cardigan gone, her tank top straps pushed down her shoulders, her face turned up with an expression of glazed obedience that made Whitney's chest tight with horror and heat.

Cassie was on the couch, Riley behind her, her dress hiked up, her hands braced on the cushions while he moved in her with slow, deliberate strokes, and Cassie was making sounds—small, involuntary sounds—because Riley kept murmuring commands in her ear, "Stay still," and "Take it," and "Moan for me," and she couldn't not, couldn't stop herself from vocalizing exactly what he wanted to hear.

Briley Ann was bent over the pool table, Marcus standing behind her with his hand in her hair, her strawberry-blonde waves wrapped around his fist, her cheek pressed to the felt, her skirt flipped up to reveal white lace that was already being pulled aside. She wasn't crying—she was flushed, her eyes half-closed, her body moving back against him in little involuntary rolls because he'd told her to, because the curse made her participate in her own debasement.

Chloe was pushed through the door behind Whitney, her glasses askew, her dark blonde bun coming undone, Luke's hand on her neck guiding her forward. She stumbled and caught herself and looked around the room with wide, comprehending eyes, taking in her sisters in various states of undress and compliance, and Whitney saw the exact moment Chloe realized that her documentation, her careful parameters, her scientific distance had been utterly useless against the reality of being commanded.

"Kneel," Luke said to Chloe, and she knelt, her knees hitting the concrete with a sound that should have hurt but didn't show on her face, her expression smoothing out into the same glazed compliance the others wore.

Connor released Whitney's hand and stepped back, surveying the room like a director assessing a stage. Isabelle stood beside Whitney, trembling slightly, waiting for the next command, and Connor looked at them both with that empirical appreciation, that warm curiosity.

"Isabelle," he said. "Take Whitney's dress off."

The zing was immediate. Isabelle turned to her, hands reaching out, and Whitney stood there relaxed and unable to resist as her friend—her sister, her cursed companion—unzipped the emerald silk and pushed it off Whitney's shoulders, letting it pool on the floor. Whitney stood in her black lace bra and matching thong, her skin prickling with exposure, with the cool basement air, with the eyes of the men watching.

"Now yours," Connor said to Isabelle, and Isabelle stripped with the same mechanical obedience, pulling her dark blue dress over her head, standing in matching pale pink lingerie that contrasted with her flushed skin, her nipples visible through the lace, hard and betraying her arousal.

"Touch her," Connor commanded Isabelle, gesturing toward Whitney. "Kiss her. Make her feel good."

Isabelle stepped forward and her hands came up to cup Whitney's breasts, and Whitney gasped because she couldn't stop her, because Isabelle's mouth was on her neck, her collarbone, descending to the lace edge of her bra, and the curse made Whitney stand there and take it, made her arch involuntarily into the touch, made her hands come up to grip Isabelle's shoulders not to push her away but to hold her closer, because Connor had said "make her feel good" and Isabelle was compelled to succeed at that command.

"That's it," Connor said, his voice lower now, rougher. "Both of you on the couch. Whitney on her back, Isabelle between her legs."

They moved, compelled, Whitney lying back on the couch cushions where Cassie had been moments before—Cassie now moved to the floor, Riley guiding her down, spreading her legs wide and settling between them—and Isabelle positioned herself over Whitney, her mouth descending, her tongue tracing the lace of Whitney's thong before pulling it aside with her teeth.

Whitney cried out, the sound involuntary, her hips bucking up because Isabelle was compelled to be skilled, compelled to be thorough, compelled to make her feel good, and the sensation of being eaten out by her friend while unable to control her own responses while men watched was overwhelming, humiliating, electric. She looked up and saw Connor unzipping his pants, stroking himself as he watched, saw Theo pushing Kallyn to her knees in front of him, saw the room filling with the sounds of wet mouths and wetter sex and the soft, desperate noises of eight sorority girls being thoroughly used.

Katie was being face-fucked now, Nate's hand in her blonde hair, her eyelash extensions clumped with tears that weren't from sadness but from the physical reflex of being used, her throat working as she swallowed around him because he'd commanded her to take it all, to not gag, to look up at him while he did it. And she did, her eyes watery and obedient, her body trembling as she serviced him with the total commitment of someone who had no choice but to commit.

Briley Ann was being railed in earnest now, Marcus's hips snapping against hers, the pool table rocking slightly, her fingers scratching at the felt because he'd told her to hold still and take it, to push back, to beg for more, and she was babbling, "Please, please, please," not knowing if she was begging for it to stop or continue, the curse making her participate in her own ravishment.

Chloe was on her hands and knees, Luke behind her, her glasses finally knocked off, her face pressed to the carpet as he drove into her with the enthusiasm of someone who had been given a particularly interesting puzzle to solve, and Chloe's analytical mind had shut down, replaced by pure sensation, pure compliance, her body rocking back to meet his thrusts because he'd commanded her to fuck him back, to be enthusiastic, to be a good girl.

And upstairs, separated from the chorus of degradation below, Arianna was being molded by Drew in the private room, her pageant training repurposed into poses of submission, her athletic body bent and opened and filled, her mouth used when he wanted it, her cunt used when he wanted that, her ass—virginal, untouched, preserved for marriage in her previous life—now being slowly opened and claimed because Drew had commanded her to relax, to let him in, to enjoy it, and she was moaning into the pillow, her crown long forgotten, her identity reduced to a set of holes that obeyed.

Downstairs, Connor approached the couch where Whitney was being devoured by Isabelle, her orgasm building involuntarily, her body betraying her with every wave of pleasure. He stood over them, stroking himself, and said, "Isabelle, stop."

Isabelle pulled back immediately, her mouth glistening, her eyes glazed and obedient.

"Whitney, turn over. Hands and knees."

Whitney moved, her body heavy with arousal and compliance, turning onto her stomach and then pushing up to her knees, her ass presented, her thong still pushed aside from Isabelle's ministrations, her cunt wet and open and visible to the room.

Connor stepped behind her and entered in one smooth thrust, filling her completely, and Whitney screamed into the couch cushion, not from pain but from the sudden fullness, the sudden reality of being taken, being used, being railed by someone who had simply commanded access to her body. He set a hard pace, gripping her hips, his fingers digging into her flesh, and he commanded her to push back, to meet him, to beg for it harder, and she did, her voice breaking, "Please, harder, please," the words pulled from her by the curse, her body slamming back against his, the sound of skin on skin filling the basement.

Isabelle was pulled away by another brother, positioned on the other end of the couch, her legs spread, her pale pink lingerie ripped aside, and he entered her with the same casual entitlement, fucking her with deep, steady strokes while she lay there and took it, her breasts bouncing, her mouth open in a permanent O of shocked pleasure.

One by one, they were passed around, shared, the frat brothers taking turns with the cursed girls who couldn't say no, who had to obey every command to spread wider, to take it deeper, to moan louder, to come on command, to swallow, to present, to serve. Kallyn was bent over the arm of the couch and taken from behind while she recited, at Theo's amused command, the chemical formula for ethanol, her analytical mind providing the words while her body was invaded, the juxtaposition making her flush red with embarrassment even as she came, clamping down on him, her orgasm ripped from her by the command to "come now."

Cassie was glazed with sweat, her hair plastered to her forehead, having been made to ride Riley while looking him in the eye and describing exactly how it felt to be commanded, to be controlled, to be used like a toy, the words pulled out of her humiliating and true, her voice breathy and breaking as she bounced on his cock.

Katie was on her back on the carpet, Nate having finished in her throat and now fucking her with slow, deep strokes, her legs pushed back to her shoulders, her blonde hair spread out like a halo, her expression vacant and blissed-out, thoroughly railed, thoroughly claimed, her body marked by his hands, her cunt stretched and filled.

Briley Ann had been moved to the center of the room, made to kneel while brother after brother used her mouth, her hands tied behind her back with her own cardigan—Marcus having commanded her to hold still while he tied her—and she serviced them in sequence, her strawberry-blonde hair being used as a handle, her throat working, her eyes watering, her body trembling with the need to be filled elsewhere, commanded to wait, to be patient, to be a good little cocksucker until they were ready for more.

Chloe was against the wall, Luke holding her up by the hips, her legs wrapped around his waist, her back pressed to the concrete as he drove up into her, her dark curls wild around her face, her glasses gone, her analytical facade shattered into pieces as she was fucked senseless, commanded to look at him, to tell him when she was going to come, to ask permission for her orgasm, and her voice high and desperate, "Please, can I come, please," until he granted it and she spasmed around him, her head falling back, her body going limp with pleasure.

And Whitney, on the couch, Connor finishing inside her with a groan, pulling out and stepping back, only to be replaced by another, and another, each using her, filling her, leaving her dripping and open and glazed with sweat and seed, her hair tangled, her makeup ruined, her executive function completely obliterated by the sheer physical reality of being a vessel for their pleasure, commanded to come again, to tighten around them, to milk them dry, and she did, her body responding to the curse with perfect, humiliating obedience, her orgasms rolling through her like waves she couldn't control, couldn't stop, commanded to feel pleasure until she was sobbing with it, overwhelmed, overstimulated, thoroughly railed.

They were all glazed by the end, lying in various positions around the basement, the couch, the floor, the pool table—hair matted, bodies marked, lingerie torn or pushed aside, skin flushed and sweaty, eyes unfocused and dreamy, the curse keeping them compliant even in aftermath, keeping them from covering themselves, from hiding, from doing anything but presenting themselves for whatever came next.

Connor stood surveying the room, zipping his pants, looking at the eight KDS girls in their state of total debasement, and he smiled, satisfied, already thinking of what commands he might give next, what else they might be made to do, how long the curse might last, and how thoroughly they could be used before morning.

"Good girls," he said softly, and eight voices answered, breathy and broken, "Thank you," because they were commanded to be grateful, to be polite, to acknowledge their use, and they did, lying there glazed and railed and waiting for the next command, the next instruction, the next use of their cursed, obedient bodies.