Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
A pang of guilt stabbed at me. My mother, who had told me not to let them take my spirit, had also told me—many, many times—to refrain from anger, and from hatred. If I came home from school in tears because an older girl had teased me, and I told my mother I meant to get that girl back, she would always say, “Far better to win through love than through hate, Chalondra. Anger only poisons your spirit, too.”
“Turn around, Wetquim,” I heard Agent Delvik say from behind me.
My face twisted into a pitiful pout that I felt glad he couldn’t see. For a moment, my hatred warred with the love my family had left in my heart, but it all hurt too much, and I gave my thoughts to the fiery wrath that matched the burning the man in the red uniform had left in my punished rear end. That obscene name, the way it only described how he had so easily made my body betray me, together with the bodily pain of the terrible spanking, gave me the power to compose my face. I set my features into a hard mask that I hoped would betray no emotion at all, and I turned, telling myself I wasn’t obeying him but rather taking control of the situation and doing what I needed to do to survive.
I remembered to keep my eyes lowered, and I took it as a victory, all the better because Agent Delvik didn’t even know about it. If I had raised my eyes, I knew, I would have seen that cruel, satisfied smile, which I felt certain I couldn’t lay eyes on without losing all the stern, angry resolve I had just found.
“Look at me, girl,” he said.
I bit my lip and swallowed hard. Victory, I reminded myself. You won a victory that will give you a moment to win another one. If I could keep the flinty, uncaring expression on my face, I would gain an actual advantage over the company agent—and the company, and the empire—even if none of them would ever know it.
But to my amazement, when I did raise my eyes, and I did, using all my will, manage to look at him with utter impassivity despite all the shame, all the pain, all the hatred in my mind and my heart, Agent Delvik’s smile faded.
A real victory. One that I knew, if someone were to torture this horrid man the way he had tortured me, he would have to admit. Small as such a change in expression might be, it meant everything to me in that moment. My spirit had begun to raise her head.
“You will thank me for punishing you, and you will thank me for making you climax, Wetquim.”
He delivered these words in a bluff, rather officious tone, and I wondered whether my failure to look as humiliated as he wanted me to look—indeed, as humiliated and degraded as I truly felt—had affected him even more deeply than the loss of his smile would indicate.
I obeyed immediately. I didn’t want to think about the meaning of the words at all. I could sense in them something dark and dangerous. To consider the possibility of actual gratitude, for the terrible things he had done to me, with his hands and with his paddle brought me much too close to a part of my mind I desperately wanted to lock away. I had pushed those thoughts back with my surge of anger, and I clung to the anger as I spoke. Its burning in my chest, a counterweight to the fiery pain in my bottom and my thighs, let me retain the neutrality of my face.
“Thank you, sir.” I paused, waiting, because I felt certain I knew his methods well enough by this point that he would do what I expected. And I saw his lips twitch and his mouth start to open, to deliver the demand that I be more specific. I cut him off before he made a sound, so that he couldn’t claim I had interrupted him. “Thank you for punishing me with your hand and with your paddle, and thank you for making me climax.”
He touched the screen of his handheld, and the cage door swung shut with a beep.
“You’re going to go to sleep now, Wetquim,” he told me. “Sit down on the floor so that you don’t fall down and hurt yourself. Injured merchandise doesn’t fetch as high a price.”
I blinked, not understanding. My impassive expression became puzzled, my brow furrowing, but I managed not to show any of the creeping fear that his words instilled, even without my knowing precisely what they meant.
To my dismay, Agent Delvik’s smile returned, and he gave a mirthless chuckle, obviously taking back his sense of superiority. With his eyes still fixed on mine, he moved his finger.