The Price of Surrender
This novel is about a woman who chooses, freely and with full information, something most readers will believe she should not have chosen. It contains explicit sexual content and sustained depictions of psychological and physical coercion.
Beyond this page the site is built to resemble the institution in the book, and it is written in that institution's voice. Before any of it, you are asked to read two short documents in full: what is in the novel, and why it was written. About four minutes.
This is not a formality. It's the only arrangement that makes sense for a novel about consent.
Two documents, then a short affirmation. No email address is requested until the fourth screen.
A note on content
I value consent, so I need you to understand which topics I'm writing about. Picking up and reading this book is your choice, and I want you to make that decision with your eyes open. This book is not for everyone, and if, after reading this note, you decide it's not for you, no one will think less of you.
This book is explicit.
The novel depicts an adult woman who voluntarily enters a slave training institution and is sold, at the end, into a fixed-term contract of servitude. Everything that happens to her happens inside a framework she chose and can leave at any time until, toward the end of the book, she must decide whether to allow her servitude to become irrevocable. That framework is the subject of the book, not a disclaimer attached to it.
What is on the page, in detail
Corporal punishment — caning, whipping, strapping, the crop — administered systematically throughout, and written from inside the experience of receiving it.
Explicit and sustained sexual content: instructed masturbation under observation, oral and penetrative sex, and erotic training conducted as institutional procedure — including, in places, the use of devices and scenes with more than one partner. Some of it is clinical. Some of it is not.
Humiliation, exposure, the removal of privacy, the loss of bodily autonomy. Women handled, assessed, numbered, and priced.
Arousal that arrives alongside shame, fear, and grief — and does not wait for the character's permission. The discomfort of a body responding against the story its owner is telling herself runs through the entire book. It is meant to be uncomfortable. It is meant to be examined.
And underneath all of it, the question the book will not resolve for you: whether what happens to her is something done to her, or something she does to herself.
What this book is not
It contains no minors and no non-consensual acts presented as acceptable. The institution operates on documented, time-bound, revocable consent, and the novel takes that architecture seriously at every point. The darkness is real. The consent is not a fig leaf over it — it is the thing the darkness is testing.
If that is what you came for, it is all here, and none of it is glossed over.
— L.E. Hume
Author's note
This is fiction. Obviously.
We tell ourselves slavery is something we ended. We didn't. We outlawed it — France first and briefly, Britain with its navy and two hard centuries of trying, America at the cost of its bloodiest war — and then we went on living in a world that has more people in bondage now than it did when the slave ships were sailing. We didn't defeat it. We stopped looking at it.
So let me be clear about where I stand, because this book could be misread: I do not want slavery. Not anywhere, not for anyone, and least of all here, among the people who bled to be rid of it.
What I wanted was the question underneath it. Strip a woman of every ordinary comfort and protection, take away the choices that let the rest of us avoid ever finding out who we are — and what's left? I didn't write this to imagine a world with slavery in it. I wrote it to find out what a woman discovers about herself when she has nothing left to hide behind. That she chose the thing that strips her is what makes the question unbearable. It's also what makes it hers.
— L.E. Hume
Affirmation
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If you'd like to know what the book is without reading it, the description and the content note stay open below. If someone you know would want it, both are yours to pass on.
The Price of Surrender — description
Jenny Voss spent three years arguing that no one signs a five-year indenture freely. Then a firm on Oak Street that has never advertised in its life sends her a folder with a figure in it, and gives her twenty-eight days to change her mind. A novel about the distance between a choice that is legal and a choice that is free.
Questions or press: hello@authorlehume.com
You are under no obligation, and you will not be rushed.
The Bureau places only a small number of candidates each year. We do not recruit, we do not advertise, and we do not take an interest in anyone who has not approached us first. If you are reading this, you have chosen to be here.
What follows is the arrangement, in the order you would encounter it. There is nothing further to disclose at a later stage.
A candidate may withdraw for any reason or none, without penalty, without repayment, and without explaining herself to anyone within the twenty-eight day training period beginning with accepting the training collar.
No term under the Act may exceed five years, and no term may be extended beyond that by agreement, by conduct, or by any instrument the Bureau is party to.
We pay the highest prices for the most exceptional women. Consideration is set against profile, not against need. Once the permanent collar is accepted the sum is held in trust until the term expires. If you have outstanding debts on entry, once the permanent collar is accepted, your debts will be paid out in full from your agreed price.
The process
An email or a telephone call, or a completed online application. No one will contact you until you ask us to. If you'd like a confidential conversation with us, we will be happy to listen and answer any questions you have.
Once you have completed the initial intake assessment online, and submitted the required photographs — head and shoulders, and full length — your file is assessed by our intake coordinators.
We will invite you to our offices at 31 Oak Street for an in-person interview with our staff. We will ask you screening questions designed to assess your suitability for the positions our clients demand.
During the invitation we will, with your full informed consent, give you a complete medical examination. If anything requiring further investigation is found, the full results will, with your permission, be forwarded to your physician.
If you pass the assessments and the medical screen is clear, you will be invited to a personal meeting with our founder and chief executive, Mr. Christopher Alexander. Mr. Alexander interviews every candidate himself, and it is on his word that a candidate is accepted or declined.
If Mr. Alexander accepts your application, a non-binding and non-negotiable offer is made to you. You are not required to decide on the spot. We understand that we are offering you a life-changing opportunity, and we respect that you need time to process and understand it.
We provide you with a sum that allows you to seek your own independent legal counsel. We strongly urge every applicant to visit a lawyer of her choosing, so that she understands what will be required of her.
Once you accept the offer, you will be given a date and time at which to appear at our offices to sign the required documents and to commence training. If you decide to withdraw at any point up until signature, you will not be contacted again, and we understand your decision to be final.
Once you sign the required documents, training begins immediately. You have twenty-eight days in which you may change your mind and withdraw with no penalty, leaving with what you arrived with.
Most applications to hold a contract are declined.
The Bureau's obligations run to the candidate. An owner is a party we are prepared to be answerable for, and the vetting is written accordingly. Applicants who find the process intrusive are, we think, correct.
There is no waiting list. There is no fee for consideration, and no route to reconsideration.
The full consideration is placed in trust before placement, together with the aftercare provision. Neither is contingent on the term running to its end.
Interviews with the applicant and with the household. Prior contracts are reviewed with the woman who held them, in private, and her account is taken as the record.
Quarterly attendance at the clinic. Unaccompanied access to Bureau staff on request. A private line she may use at any hour without notice to the household.
The Bureau may end a contract at its own discretion and without recourse. Consideration already placed is not returned. This has happened, and will again.
An owner is not our client. The contract is our client. We ask applicants to be clear about that distinction before they write to us.
The instrument is short, and it says what it does.
Executed under the Voluntary Indenture Act as amended. Fourteen pages. We have not found a way to make it shorter without making it less clear, and we would rather it were clear.
Fixed at signature. Five years is the statutory ceiling; most placements are two or three. The end date is printed on the first page and cannot be moved by either party.
Paid into trust before placement, released on a schedule she sets, to accounts she names. The Bureau does not hold a power of direction over it and neither does the owner.
Twenty-eight days from the acceptance of the training collar. Withdrawal is effective on notice, in any form, to any member of Bureau staff. No reason is asked for and none is recorded.
The contract is not terminable by her. This is the mechanism, and it is the reason for everything preceding it. The Bureau will not pretend otherwise at the interview, in the folder, or here.
Medical refusal in non-emergency care. Correspondence with two named persons. Practice of religion. Testamentary capacity. These are not conferred by the owner and cannot be waived by her.
On the clinic's report, on her request, or on our own view of the household. Intervention ends the contract; it does not renegotiate it.
We do not tell them what to write.
The Bureau asks women who have completed a term, women who are serving one, and women who withdrew during training whether they would be willing to set something down for those considering the programme. There is no form, no prompt, and no approval. We print what we are given, in full.
Two of the accounts below are unflattering to us in places, and one is from a woman who left on the twelfth day. They remain on this page for the same reason the twenty-eight days exist: a decision made on a partial record is not a decision we are prepared to hold anyone to.
The Bureau asks graduates whether they'd be willing to say something. They don't tell you what to say. I checked — I asked if there was a form, and the coordinator laughed and said the form was the thing I was supposed to be free of by now.
I don't know how to explain it to the person I used to be. She would want arguments, and I don't have arguments. I have mornings. I wake up and I know what the day is. I don't negotiate with myself about what matters, or whether I'm doing enough, or whether the person I'm performing for is pleased. The performance stopped and the person didn't stop. That was the thing I couldn't have believed from outside: that there was a person under it.
The training was hard. I want that on record, because the testimonials that skip it are lying to you. It was the hardest thing I've done, and I chose it every day, and choosing it every day is what made it mine.
I'm not going to tell you I'm happy, because that word does too much work. I'm here. I'm settled. I spent thirty-one years being tired in a way sleep never touched, and I'm not tired anymore.
The Bureau asked me to write this. I said yes for one reason: when I was researching, every account I found was from women who finished. The women who leave are invisible. We leave, that's the point, we're gone — and so the only voices you hear are the ones who stayed, and it starts to seem like staying is the only outcome, like the training is a current that carries everyone to the same place.
It isn't. I left on day twelve and I'm writing this in my own kitchen with my own terrible coffee and I'm glad I went in and I'm glad I came out. Both things. Hold them both.
Why I went: debt, like a lot of us, and curiosity, like more of us than admit it. The application was the most honest I'd been in years — the questions are designed so you can't lie to them without lying to yourself, and it turns out lying to yourself is the harder one.
Why I left: not the punishment, though I want to be honest that the punishment is real and I have no criticism of anyone who can't take it, because I nearly couldn't. Not the nakedness, not the schedule. I left because of a Tuesday. There was nothing special about the Tuesday. I was standing in the line for inspection and I felt something settle in me — not break, settle — and I understood that if I stayed it would take, that the thing the training does would work on me, that I would become the version of myself that wanted to stay. And I stood there and I asked myself whether the woman I was outside would want that woman to exist. And I couldn't say yes.
I don't think that makes me stronger than the ones who stayed. I think it makes me different, is all. Some of them found something true. I found the edge of something true about me too — that I want my life to be mine even when mine is worse.
The leaving itself: I said the words. I unbuckled the collar and set it down. My hands were shaking so hard I nearly dropped it and nobody laughed. Ms. Kovacs picked it up and walked me out and within the hour I was dressed and sitting in a car with my bag, and the driver asked if I was all right and waited until I actually answered before he started the engine.
The aftercare was real too. A counselor called me every week for two months, then every month for a year. She never once suggested I'd made a mistake either way. When I asked her whether she'd thought I would stay, back at intake, she said “I thought you were fifty-fifty,” and I asked which way she'd have bet, and she said “I don't bet.”
I'm not going to tell you to go or not to go. I'm going to tell you the thing nobody could tell me: you can try it and leave. It's not a failure of nerve and it's not a failure of theirs. The door is a door. I know, because I'm the one who walked through it, both ways.
The terms were as stated. I checked them against the contract afterward, line by line, because checking things is what I do. The escrow performed. The debt was cleared on the day specified, to the cent. The medical provisions were as documented — I still have the records. The aftercare was available; I used the financial planning and not the counselling, which was my choice, and it was respected as my choice.
I'm not going to tell you what it meant. Women who need it to have meant something write those testimonials, and I've read them, and I don't disbelieve them, but they aren't mine. I did the arithmetic before I signed. The arithmetic was correct. I would do it again.
One thing I will say, because nobody said it to me and it would have saved me three sleepless nights: the exit is real. I watched a woman use it on day nine. She took off her collar, set it down, and she was gone within the hour, and nobody touched her, and nobody said a word against her — not that day, not any day after. I stayed. That's the whole of it. The door was open, and I stayed, and everything else follows from that.
They said I could write anything. I've been sitting here for a while because there's nothing to explain. I didn't have a reason. I keep reading the other testimonials and everyone has a reason — debt, or a catastrophe, or a life that narrowed. Mine didn't narrow. I had a good job and a good flat and people who loved me, and I wanted this the way you want water. I wanted it before I knew the word for it. When the Act passed I read it and I knew, the way you know your own name.
My mother thinks I work in Aberdeen.
I'm happy. I know some of the others don't say it that plainly, so I will, because somebody should: I'm happy. I was always going to end up somewhere like this. I'm just the first one in my family who got to do it without it destroying her. Whatever you think of the Bureau, that's the thing it gave me — a version of this that I could survive. My grandmother's version didn't have a door. Mine does. I don't use it. That's mine too.
The Bureau asked if I'd contribute to this page and my first answer was no. I'll tell you why, because the reason is the reason I'm writing it now.
I didn't want to be on a website. Men in my position don't talk about this. The ones who do talk about it are the ones you wouldn't want buying, and I didn't want to be read as one of them. But the coordinator said something that stayed with me — that the women considering the program deserve to know who is on the other side of the auction, and that silence from the careful ones leaves the field to the imagination, and the imagination is worse.
So. I am fifty-four. I built a company, sold it, and discovered that the life I'd built it for required a version of me I had stopped being somewhere around year ten. I am not going to describe my household here — that's hers to describe, if she ever wants to, not mine.
I'll say three things.
First: the vetting is real. It took four months. Financial records, references, a criminal background check, two interviews, and a conversation with a psychologist that was the most uncomfortable hour I've spent in a room I was paying to be in. They asked me why. Not what I wanted — why I wanted it. I didn't pass that question the first time. The man who asked me said, and I remember the wording exactly: “You have told me what she will give you. Tell me what you will owe her.” I came back three weeks later with a better answer.
Second: I have been offered, elsewhere, the same thing without the paperwork. Cheaper, faster, no questions. I know what that world is. Anyone who tells you the Bureau is just that world with better furniture is talking about something they haven't seen from inside. The difference isn't the furniture. The difference is that someone is watching, and she knows it, and I know it, and the watching is the whole point.
Third: the contract has a clause that says she can end it. Five years, and at any point she can pick up a phone and the Bureau will come and get her and the escrow math changes and I absorb the loss. I signed that without hesitation, and I'll tell you the truth about why. Not because I'm a good man. Because I know what I'm asking for, and I would not trust myself to ask for it if she couldn't leave. The door isn't for her. It's for both of us.
A note on these accounts
Women serving a term write under their number, which is their own preference and not a condition we impose. Those who have completed a term write under a name if they wish to. No account on this page has been shortened, corrected, or arranged with the writer in advance, and no account is removed at an owner's request.
A term ends on a Tuesday, and then there is the rest of her life.
The statutory provision is ninety days of housing and a medical review. We regard that as the minimum a serious firm would offer, and we have never offered only it.
Everything below is funded at signature, held separately from consideration, and unaffected by how the term ended — by expiry, by her withdrawal in the opt-out period, or by Bureau intervention.
Twelve months of unconditional housing in a city she names, in her own name, with no Bureau visit and no reporting requirement.
Five years of care through the clinic or a practice of her choosing, at our cost. Her file is released to her and to no one else, including the party who held the contract.
The Bureau does not confirm to any employer, lender, or public body that a person has held a contract with us, and has resisted three requests to.
We write once, at ninety days. If there is no reply we do not write again. Reinstatement of contact is available to her at any point, permanently.
Employment, references, or introductions. A firm that placed her should not also be the route back out, and we decline that role.
Documents from the passage of the Act.
One document a month, reproduced in full and unannotated. Subscribers to the reading list receive each as it is published.
§1. Mr. ABERNATHY. Madam President, I have read this bill four times, and each time I have looked for the sentence that says a woman may leave. It is not there. It is not there because it cannot be there. A term that she may end at will is not an indenture, and the sponsors of this measure know that, and so the omission is not an oversight. It is the product.
§2. I am told that no one will be forced. I accept it. Nobody in this chamber intends force, and force will not be necessary. What will be necessary is a hospital bill, a mother in a facility, a debt at nineteen percent, and a courteous man in a good suit who says, without lying once, that he can make all of it stop by Friday. My colleagues call the signature at the end of that afternoon a free choice. I ask them to say the sentence aloud and hear it.
§3. I have five requests, and I will not make a speech of them.
First, that the term be capped at two years and not five.
Second, that she retain a right of termination at any point in the term, on notice, without cause.
Third, that the opt-out period be ninety days and not twenty-eight.
Fourth, that no contract be valid where the consideration discharges a medical debt of the candidate or of her family.
Fifth, that a federal registry of contracts be kept, open to inspection, so that we may know in ten years what we did here today.
§4. I have been asked whether I would accept the bill with these five. I would. That is the whole of my position, and I am aware of how it sounds. I am not asking the Senate to be brave. I am asking it to be slower than the people who wrote this.
§5. Madam President, the firms that will do this work are not in this room and will never be. They will not advertise. They will not have to. They will have a good address, and a brass plate, and a folder with a figure in it, and every one of them will be able to say, truthfully, that she read the contract and signed it herself. I yield the floor.
The Price of Surrender
Jenny Voss spent three years arguing that no one signs a five-year indenture freely. She testified, she organized, and she was good at it.
Then a firm on Oak Street that has never advertised in its life sends her a folder with a figure in it, and gives her twenty-eight days to change her mind.
A novel about the distance between a choice that is legal and a choice that is free — and about how courteous the second one can be made to look.
About the author
L.E. Hume writes fiction about institutions and the people who agree to them. The Price of Surrender is her second novel. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Content note and author's note remain available at any time: content note · author's note. Press and rights: hello@authorlehume.com
This is fiction. This is a marketing website for the book The Price of Surrender by L.E. Hume. Any references to a person, living or dead, or any company or trademark are purely coincidental. L.E. Hume does not endorse or support real slavery.