chandor864
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Clara Vance : the cost of the tickles
The New York Chronicle was a noise machine: the clattering of keyboards, shouted phone calls, and the smell of burnt coffee. In the middle of this chaos, Clara Vance was an anomaly. She wasn’t looking for contact; she was looking for the slightest trace.
At twenty-four, Clara held a "fact-checker" position that everyone else despised. Her desk was tucked away at the back of the newspaper’s library, a labyrinth of paper where she felt at home. Her obsession was known to all: she threw nothing away. She read everything. To her, a taxi receipt or a laundry bill told a truer story than a political speech. “People lie with words,” she thought, “but their expenses are brutally honest.”
One Tuesday afternoon, while filing accounting archives for the management, she stumbled upon a box of receipts from the previous year. Among the invoices for office supplies, a piece of yellow paper caught her eye. It was a receipt for "entertainment expenses" from a company called Peraccione Logistics. The amount was absurd: $50,000. The reason? "Editorial consultation." Clara frowned. Why would a newspaper pay a trucking company for editorial advice? Her blood ran cold. Digging deeper, she found more evidence: disguised transfers, forged signatures... and the final signature was that of Barnaby Moore, the paper’s charismatic and respected editor-in-chief. The newspaper wasn't just covering the mafia's activities; it was being handsomely paid to ignore them.
Unflinching, Clara told no one. She began photocopying the documents in secret, late at night. But she made a rookie mistake. In her excitement, she left an original on the scanner. The next day, the atmosphere at the office had changed. Moore no longer looked at her. In the elevator, two security guards she had never seen before stared at her insistently. She felt the adrenaline surge. She hid the evidence in an old edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, under the letter "C" for "Corruption," hoping to return for it later.
Rain lashed the windows of her small Queens apartment. Clara was nervous; she packed a bag to flee to her sister's, feeling danger closing in. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. Three sharp raps. When she opened it, she found two men in suits too wide to be honest. "Miss Vance? We have a problem with your latest article," one of them said with a predatory smile. "I don’t have an article in progress," she replied, her voice firm despite her pounding heart. "Exactly. Mr. Peraccione thinks you have a lot to write... but in the right order. He insists on offering you a car ride." Clara tried to slam the door, but a heavy foot blocked the entrance. In seconds, she was overpowered, a canvas bag thrown over her head. She was no longer the inflexible journalist; she was prey.
Clara regained consciousness in a setting that was nothing like a prison cell. She was in a luxurious lounge with dark wood paneling, located in an isolated villa on the coastal heights. Her hands were tied behind her back, and she was sitting in an expensive velvet armchair. A man entered, a cup of coffee in hand. It was Fredo Peraccione. He looked nothing like a movie gangster; he exuded a calm elegance and a glacial intelligence. "You have a beautiful writing style, Miss Vance," he said, placing her research notes on the table. "It’s a pity it’s being used to destroy careers."
Fredo sat across from her. He explained his worldview with disarming frankness. He confessed that killing a journalist is a strategic mistake: it creates a police investigation, a media vacuum, and morbid curiosity. "A dead journalist is a saint," he whispered. "But a journalist who takes back her words, who explains she was mistaken out of personal ambition... that is dust to be forgotten." He offered her a deal: she was to rewrite her investigation to clear the Peraccione clan and incriminate a political rival. In exchange, she would have a brilliant career and her life spared. Clara, true to her inflexible nature, spat her contempt in his face. He began to smile wickedly.
The air in the room was cool, but Clara felt a bead of sweat trickling down her temple. She was held firmly on an inclined chair, her wrists and ankles encased in supple but merciless leather straps. Fredo, sitting at a Louis XV desk, didn't even look at her. He seemed absorbed in reading an old manuscript. "You are a woman of conviction, Clara," he said without looking up. "But convictions are constructions of the mind. The body, however, does not know how to lie. Marco, start with the basics."
Marco, whose fingers were calloused but surprisingly agile, approached. Without a word, he removed Clara's shoes and stockings. She curled her toes, a sensation of extreme vulnerability washing over her. As soon as Marco's fingers brushed her soles, Clara flinched violently. She was what they call "hyper-ticklish." A mere feather would have made her jump; here, it was a methodical attack. The first laughs burst out in spite of herself, jagged sounds that resembled muffled sobs. Marco ran over her heels and toes, insisting on the sensitive arches of her feet. Clara arched her back, her ankles pulling against the restraints, while her laughter became louder and more uncontrollable. "This is only the beginning, Miss Vance," Fredo murmured.
Silvio then approached from the opposite side. While Marco continued his assault on her feet, Silvio slid his hands under the journalist's arms. His fingers crept into the hollows of her armpits. This was the breaking point. Clara's laughter became hysterical, a high-pitched, continuous sound that filled the wood-paneled room. She tried to fold her arms, to protect her sides, but the straps left her totally exposed. The interrogation had no questions, only this unbearable sensation. Silvio then moved down to her ribs, his fingers drumming on her ribcage with surgical precision. Clara gasped, her face red, her eyes watering. She could no longer catch her breath between two outbursts of convulsive laughter.
Finally, the two men converged on her stomach. It was the most sensitive area. Their fingers explored her waist and abdomen in rapid circular motions. At this stage, Clara was nothing but a mass of raw nerves. Her laughter no longer held any joy; it was a physical plea, a constant electric shock that shattered her ability to think. This lasted for an eternity. "Stop," Fredo finally said in a soft voice.
The silence that followed was almost more painful than the noise. Clara slumped back against the chair, her chest heaving with residual spasms, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. "Your mind says 'no', Clara, but your body has already surrendered," Fredo resumed, leaning toward her. "See how easy it is to make you say anything. Do you really want to start again, or are we finally going to write that famous article?"
Clara looked at him, her eyes blurred. For the first time in her life, the "firm and inflexible" journalist felt a gaping crack in her determination. The memory of that total loss of control was more frightening than any death threat.
The silence that followed the withdrawal of Marco and Silvio's hands lasted only a few seconds. Fredo, observing Clara with almost scientific curiosity, saw the spark of defiance still shining in the young woman's misty eyes. Despite her exhaustion, she gritted her teeth and whispered: "You... you’ll get nothing. Go to hell." Fredo sighed, a nearly sad smile on his lips. "Your courage is admirable, Clara. But it is a resource that runs dry. Resume. And this time, do not stop until I hear the sound of reason."
This second wave was far more devastating. The gangsters now knew exactly where to strike. Marco resumed his assault on Clara's soles, but this time, he used his knuckles to apply firmer pressure, rubbing the bottoms of the young woman's feet with an intensity that turned every tickle into an unbearable electric discharge. Simultaneously, Silvio attacked her armpits again, but with tenfold speed. His fingers seemed to be everywhere at once, moving up her ribs only to drop abruptly back to her waist. Clara was instantly thrown into a state of pure, wild, and desperate laughter. It was no longer just a physical reaction; it was a torment that invaded every fiber of her being. "No! Ahaha... please... hihihi... please!" she screamed, her words lost in a spiral of hysterical hiccups.
She writhed against her bonds with superhuman strength, her ankles turning red from the friction of the leather straps. But there was nowhere to escape. The attack then concentrated on her stomach. Marco and Silvio joined forces on this ultra-sensitive zone, their fingers digging slightly into her flanks, making her flinch so hard she seemed to leap off the chair. The lack of oxygen became critical. Clara could no longer inhale enough air between two spasms of convulsive laughter. Her vision began to cloud with black spots. She felt as if her very organs were vibrating under the effect of this ordeal. Every second weighed like an hour. The sensation had become a total psychological torture: she felt humiliated, robbed of her own will, reduced to a mere laughing machine under the control of her tormentors.
Finally, after what seemed like hours of uncontrollable shaking, her body suddenly went limp. Her head slumped to the side, her bursts of laughter dying away into a groan of absolute exhaustion. She no longer had the strength to contract a single muscle. Fredo signaled with his hand. The hands finally pulled away. "Look at yourself, Miss Vance," he said in a velvet voice, leaning over her. "You are a wreck. Why go through this again? The next round will last twice as long. Your mind is proud, but your body is begging me to make you sign this paper. Listen to your body."
Clara, her face drenched in tears and sweat, her gaze vacant, felt her last defenses crumble. The idea of those hands returning to touch her had become physically terrifying. It was at that precise moment she realized that to survive, she had to become a professional liar.
After these sessions, Clara was shattered, her nerves at their end. Fredo returned with a pen and paper. "You are exhausted, Clara. Your muscles ache, your dignity is in tatters. Why continue? No one knows you are here. Your editor has already prepared a story saying you resigned due to depression." It was the moment of truth. Clara realized she couldn't win by brute force. She began to understand that to destroy Peraccione, she had to enter his game. She feigned a breakdown. She shed a few tears (partly real) and agreed to "relearn" her speech.
Clara began writing under Fredo's dictation. But in her librarian’s mind, a plan took shape. She agreed to become the mafia’s "tame journalist." She used the precise vocabulary Fredo demanded, but she inserted anomalies. She knew that if she wrote exactly what he wanted, he would release her so she could publish her "mea culpa" in the paper. She played the role of the broken woman, all while memorizing every detail of the villa and every name heard in the hallways.
Fredo, convinced he had "broken" Clara through her ordeal, had her driven home. However, she was not free. Marco remained stationed in a black car in front of her building, and her phone was tapped. The next day, she returned to the Daily Chronicle. The reception was icy. Barnaby Moore, the corrupt editor-in-chief, called her into his office. "I’m told you’ve found your senses, Clara. Write this retraction. Say your sources were false, that you acted out of personal vendetta. Do it, and you’ll keep your job."
Clara sat at her desk. She knew Fredo and Moore would read every word before publication. She then began a work of exquisite craftsmanship. She wrote the "surrender" article Fredo demanded, but she hid a steganography within it (a hidden message in innocent text). Having spent her life in libraries, she used an ancient coding technique: the first letter of each paragraph, combined with precise references to page numbers of accounting ledgers she had memorized, formed an IP address and a password. This was where she hid the ultimate proof: she hadn't left everything at the newspaper. Before her kidnapping, she had sent a copy of the Peraccione Logistics receipts to a dead-drop email address, the access to which was concealed in her "mea culpa" article.
The article was published on the newspaper’s website at the end of the day. Fredo, while eating dinner, read it and smiled, savoring his victory. But what he didn't know was that Clara had sent an anonymous message to the financial crimes unit and a rival newspaper, the Metropolitan Post, giving them the key to decode her article. As Marco was walking up the stairs to "congratulate" Clara at her apartment, he was intercepted by a SWAT team. At the same time, police burst into the Chronicle’s offices. Barnaby Moore tried to destroy the files, but Clara stepped out from the shadows of the library. She held the original receipt for $50,000 that she had hidden in the Encyclopædia Britannica (under the letter "C"). "Archives never lie, Barnaby."
Fredo was arrested at his villa. His confidence had been his undoing: he had underestimated the will of a woman he thought he had broken. The "persuasion" method of tickling, though grueling, had only strengthened Clara's hatred and her determination to see him behind bars. Clara’s article became a national scandal. Not for her retraction, but for the code it contained, revealing the city’s entire system of corruption.
A few months later, Clara Vance was no longer working for the Chronicle. She had founded her own independent investigative newspaper: The Unflinching. She sat at her new desk, reading a report on a rising new politician. She felt a slight tension in her feet and ribs whenever she thought back to Fredo’s villa—an invisible scar she would always carry. But as she picked up her red pen to edit a text, her gaze was like steel. She would never be silenced again, but above all, she never wanted to experience the ordeal of the tickling ever again.
The New York Chronicle was a noise machine: the clattering of keyboards, shouted phone calls, and the smell of burnt coffee. In the middle of this chaos, Clara Vance was an anomaly. She wasn’t looking for contact; she was looking for the slightest trace.
At twenty-four, Clara held a "fact-checker" position that everyone else despised. Her desk was tucked away at the back of the newspaper’s library, a labyrinth of paper where she felt at home. Her obsession was known to all: she threw nothing away. She read everything. To her, a taxi receipt or a laundry bill told a truer story than a political speech. “People lie with words,” she thought, “but their expenses are brutally honest.”
One Tuesday afternoon, while filing accounting archives for the management, she stumbled upon a box of receipts from the previous year. Among the invoices for office supplies, a piece of yellow paper caught her eye. It was a receipt for "entertainment expenses" from a company called Peraccione Logistics. The amount was absurd: $50,000. The reason? "Editorial consultation." Clara frowned. Why would a newspaper pay a trucking company for editorial advice? Her blood ran cold. Digging deeper, she found more evidence: disguised transfers, forged signatures... and the final signature was that of Barnaby Moore, the paper’s charismatic and respected editor-in-chief. The newspaper wasn't just covering the mafia's activities; it was being handsomely paid to ignore them.
Unflinching, Clara told no one. She began photocopying the documents in secret, late at night. But she made a rookie mistake. In her excitement, she left an original on the scanner. The next day, the atmosphere at the office had changed. Moore no longer looked at her. In the elevator, two security guards she had never seen before stared at her insistently. She felt the adrenaline surge. She hid the evidence in an old edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, under the letter "C" for "Corruption," hoping to return for it later.
Rain lashed the windows of her small Queens apartment. Clara was nervous; she packed a bag to flee to her sister's, feeling danger closing in. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. Three sharp raps. When she opened it, she found two men in suits too wide to be honest. "Miss Vance? We have a problem with your latest article," one of them said with a predatory smile. "I don’t have an article in progress," she replied, her voice firm despite her pounding heart. "Exactly. Mr. Peraccione thinks you have a lot to write... but in the right order. He insists on offering you a car ride." Clara tried to slam the door, but a heavy foot blocked the entrance. In seconds, she was overpowered, a canvas bag thrown over her head. She was no longer the inflexible journalist; she was prey.
Clara regained consciousness in a setting that was nothing like a prison cell. She was in a luxurious lounge with dark wood paneling, located in an isolated villa on the coastal heights. Her hands were tied behind her back, and she was sitting in an expensive velvet armchair. A man entered, a cup of coffee in hand. It was Fredo Peraccione. He looked nothing like a movie gangster; he exuded a calm elegance and a glacial intelligence. "You have a beautiful writing style, Miss Vance," he said, placing her research notes on the table. "It’s a pity it’s being used to destroy careers."
Fredo sat across from her. He explained his worldview with disarming frankness. He confessed that killing a journalist is a strategic mistake: it creates a police investigation, a media vacuum, and morbid curiosity. "A dead journalist is a saint," he whispered. "But a journalist who takes back her words, who explains she was mistaken out of personal ambition... that is dust to be forgotten." He offered her a deal: she was to rewrite her investigation to clear the Peraccione clan and incriminate a political rival. In exchange, she would have a brilliant career and her life spared. Clara, true to her inflexible nature, spat her contempt in his face. He began to smile wickedly.
The air in the room was cool, but Clara felt a bead of sweat trickling down her temple. She was held firmly on an inclined chair, her wrists and ankles encased in supple but merciless leather straps. Fredo, sitting at a Louis XV desk, didn't even look at her. He seemed absorbed in reading an old manuscript. "You are a woman of conviction, Clara," he said without looking up. "But convictions are constructions of the mind. The body, however, does not know how to lie. Marco, start with the basics."
Marco, whose fingers were calloused but surprisingly agile, approached. Without a word, he removed Clara's shoes and stockings. She curled her toes, a sensation of extreme vulnerability washing over her. As soon as Marco's fingers brushed her soles, Clara flinched violently. She was what they call "hyper-ticklish." A mere feather would have made her jump; here, it was a methodical attack. The first laughs burst out in spite of herself, jagged sounds that resembled muffled sobs. Marco ran over her heels and toes, insisting on the sensitive arches of her feet. Clara arched her back, her ankles pulling against the restraints, while her laughter became louder and more uncontrollable. "This is only the beginning, Miss Vance," Fredo murmured.
Silvio then approached from the opposite side. While Marco continued his assault on her feet, Silvio slid his hands under the journalist's arms. His fingers crept into the hollows of her armpits. This was the breaking point. Clara's laughter became hysterical, a high-pitched, continuous sound that filled the wood-paneled room. She tried to fold her arms, to protect her sides, but the straps left her totally exposed. The interrogation had no questions, only this unbearable sensation. Silvio then moved down to her ribs, his fingers drumming on her ribcage with surgical precision. Clara gasped, her face red, her eyes watering. She could no longer catch her breath between two outbursts of convulsive laughter.
Finally, the two men converged on her stomach. It was the most sensitive area. Their fingers explored her waist and abdomen in rapid circular motions. At this stage, Clara was nothing but a mass of raw nerves. Her laughter no longer held any joy; it was a physical plea, a constant electric shock that shattered her ability to think. This lasted for an eternity. "Stop," Fredo finally said in a soft voice.
The silence that followed was almost more painful than the noise. Clara slumped back against the chair, her chest heaving with residual spasms, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. "Your mind says 'no', Clara, but your body has already surrendered," Fredo resumed, leaning toward her. "See how easy it is to make you say anything. Do you really want to start again, or are we finally going to write that famous article?"
Clara looked at him, her eyes blurred. For the first time in her life, the "firm and inflexible" journalist felt a gaping crack in her determination. The memory of that total loss of control was more frightening than any death threat.
The silence that followed the withdrawal of Marco and Silvio's hands lasted only a few seconds. Fredo, observing Clara with almost scientific curiosity, saw the spark of defiance still shining in the young woman's misty eyes. Despite her exhaustion, she gritted her teeth and whispered: "You... you’ll get nothing. Go to hell." Fredo sighed, a nearly sad smile on his lips. "Your courage is admirable, Clara. But it is a resource that runs dry. Resume. And this time, do not stop until I hear the sound of reason."
This second wave was far more devastating. The gangsters now knew exactly where to strike. Marco resumed his assault on Clara's soles, but this time, he used his knuckles to apply firmer pressure, rubbing the bottoms of the young woman's feet with an intensity that turned every tickle into an unbearable electric discharge. Simultaneously, Silvio attacked her armpits again, but with tenfold speed. His fingers seemed to be everywhere at once, moving up her ribs only to drop abruptly back to her waist. Clara was instantly thrown into a state of pure, wild, and desperate laughter. It was no longer just a physical reaction; it was a torment that invaded every fiber of her being. "No! Ahaha... please... hihihi... please!" she screamed, her words lost in a spiral of hysterical hiccups.
She writhed against her bonds with superhuman strength, her ankles turning red from the friction of the leather straps. But there was nowhere to escape. The attack then concentrated on her stomach. Marco and Silvio joined forces on this ultra-sensitive zone, their fingers digging slightly into her flanks, making her flinch so hard she seemed to leap off the chair. The lack of oxygen became critical. Clara could no longer inhale enough air between two spasms of convulsive laughter. Her vision began to cloud with black spots. She felt as if her very organs were vibrating under the effect of this ordeal. Every second weighed like an hour. The sensation had become a total psychological torture: she felt humiliated, robbed of her own will, reduced to a mere laughing machine under the control of her tormentors.
Finally, after what seemed like hours of uncontrollable shaking, her body suddenly went limp. Her head slumped to the side, her bursts of laughter dying away into a groan of absolute exhaustion. She no longer had the strength to contract a single muscle. Fredo signaled with his hand. The hands finally pulled away. "Look at yourself, Miss Vance," he said in a velvet voice, leaning over her. "You are a wreck. Why go through this again? The next round will last twice as long. Your mind is proud, but your body is begging me to make you sign this paper. Listen to your body."
Clara, her face drenched in tears and sweat, her gaze vacant, felt her last defenses crumble. The idea of those hands returning to touch her had become physically terrifying. It was at that precise moment she realized that to survive, she had to become a professional liar.
After these sessions, Clara was shattered, her nerves at their end. Fredo returned with a pen and paper. "You are exhausted, Clara. Your muscles ache, your dignity is in tatters. Why continue? No one knows you are here. Your editor has already prepared a story saying you resigned due to depression." It was the moment of truth. Clara realized she couldn't win by brute force. She began to understand that to destroy Peraccione, she had to enter his game. She feigned a breakdown. She shed a few tears (partly real) and agreed to "relearn" her speech.
Clara began writing under Fredo's dictation. But in her librarian’s mind, a plan took shape. She agreed to become the mafia’s "tame journalist." She used the precise vocabulary Fredo demanded, but she inserted anomalies. She knew that if she wrote exactly what he wanted, he would release her so she could publish her "mea culpa" in the paper. She played the role of the broken woman, all while memorizing every detail of the villa and every name heard in the hallways.
Fredo, convinced he had "broken" Clara through her ordeal, had her driven home. However, she was not free. Marco remained stationed in a black car in front of her building, and her phone was tapped. The next day, she returned to the Daily Chronicle. The reception was icy. Barnaby Moore, the corrupt editor-in-chief, called her into his office. "I’m told you’ve found your senses, Clara. Write this retraction. Say your sources were false, that you acted out of personal vendetta. Do it, and you’ll keep your job."
Clara sat at her desk. She knew Fredo and Moore would read every word before publication. She then began a work of exquisite craftsmanship. She wrote the "surrender" article Fredo demanded, but she hid a steganography within it (a hidden message in innocent text). Having spent her life in libraries, she used an ancient coding technique: the first letter of each paragraph, combined with precise references to page numbers of accounting ledgers she had memorized, formed an IP address and a password. This was where she hid the ultimate proof: she hadn't left everything at the newspaper. Before her kidnapping, she had sent a copy of the Peraccione Logistics receipts to a dead-drop email address, the access to which was concealed in her "mea culpa" article.
The article was published on the newspaper’s website at the end of the day. Fredo, while eating dinner, read it and smiled, savoring his victory. But what he didn't know was that Clara had sent an anonymous message to the financial crimes unit and a rival newspaper, the Metropolitan Post, giving them the key to decode her article. As Marco was walking up the stairs to "congratulate" Clara at her apartment, he was intercepted by a SWAT team. At the same time, police burst into the Chronicle’s offices. Barnaby Moore tried to destroy the files, but Clara stepped out from the shadows of the library. She held the original receipt for $50,000 that she had hidden in the Encyclopædia Britannica (under the letter "C"). "Archives never lie, Barnaby."
Fredo was arrested at his villa. His confidence had been his undoing: he had underestimated the will of a woman he thought he had broken. The "persuasion" method of tickling, though grueling, had only strengthened Clara's hatred and her determination to see him behind bars. Clara’s article became a national scandal. Not for her retraction, but for the code it contained, revealing the city’s entire system of corruption.
A few months later, Clara Vance was no longer working for the Chronicle. She had founded her own independent investigative newspaper: The Unflinching. She sat at her new desk, reading a report on a rising new politician. She felt a slight tension in her feet and ribs whenever she thought back to Fredo’s villa—an invisible scar she would always carry. But as she picked up her red pen to edit a text, her gaze was like steel. She would never be silenced again, but above all, she never wanted to experience the ordeal of the tickling ever again.
