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)
The pain vanished, and I let out a sob of relief. Breathing hard through my mouth, I found myself reflexively looking down again, at their feet—now more than a dozen feet, it seemed, all turned towards me to see the spectacle of the disobedient concubine’s discipline.
“My mistake,” the agent said gruffly, and then spoke to me. “Well, Wetquim? Are you going to obey or not?”
I noted with a strange kind of curiosity, puzzlement even, that I still had a part of my mind that urged me to demand an apology. I would have demanded an apology if I were at home on Kamnos, and my mother had scolded me for something one of my sisters had done. That was when you didn’t belong to the company. When you hadn’t lost the right to refuse anything, challenge anything.
I looked up, feeling the tears trickle down my cheeks, pain mingled with humiliation. My bottom and thighs hurt much more now than they had a few moments ago: my writhing at the agony from the cage’s punisher, though it hadn’t made me fall, had brought tormenting tension in the places Agent Delvik had paddled with such force and at such length.
“Oh, she’s crying,” the woman said.
My lips parted. I almost spoke. I almost, absurdly, said, I’m alright. The plain meaning of the words had tricked me, because I had never in my life—even in dealing with the cruelest and most callous of my schoolmates—heard someone say that sort of thing without at least feigning compassion. But looking into the sky-blue eyes of the beautiful—and young, I realized now; not much younger than me—woman, I saw that she felt no sympathy whatsoever. My agony, my tears: they… they had amused her.
She looked into my face with a little smile on her lips, and she spoke to the agent.
“We wanted to see how severely she had to be punished. She’s very beautiful, but we don’t want a bed girl who’s going to give us any trouble.”
“Ah,” the agent said. “Well, I can’t say I’d recommend Wetquim here in that case, but you should certainly have a look if you like. Go ahead and tell her how to display herself. I’ll give her another taste of the punisher if necessary.”
“Jorlin,” the young woman said, her gaze still locked with mine, “she’d be your birthday present. Go ahead and tell her what you want to see.”
Jorlin’s handsome face had an arrogance that made me think immediately of Agent Delvik. When he spoke, the resemblance only became closer.
“Wetquim,” he said, “let’s see your backside. Turn around and bend over, please.”
CHAPTER 11
Chalondra
“Feel free,” I heard the agent say, “to have her come closer to the cage door, so you can reach through and try her cunt out a little. I haven’t looked at her file, but I’m guessing they named her Wetquim for a reason. Would you like gloves for that purpose? I’m afraid we can’t allow anything more invasive than a finger since she’s a verified virgin.”
A man at the back of the little crowd that had gathered, his robe a deep shade of green, guffawed.
“You break it, you buy it,” he called out, and a few of the others laughed at this witty remark.
Some dispassionate, still detached part of me tried to distract the rest of my brain by focusing on the faces and outfits assembled around my cage. That somehow-calm voice made the observation that there seemed three different sorts of imperial citizens present, among the people who had clustered around Jorlin and the young woman who must be his consort.
They—Jorlin and the woman who was considering buying me for his birthday—belonged to the group I automatically decided were the nobility. A second group, whose clothing looked nearly as gorgeous but who didn’t wear the long robes, and who seemed to hang back a little, must represent wealthy commoners, if I remembered my lessons on Vionian imperial society correctly. The third group, the smallest, were women who either accompanied nobles—of both sexes—or seemed to have come alone but mingled freely, on their own, among both the nobility and the commoners. They all wore simple dresses in nearly identical styles, made of light gray fabric that made me think them servants of some kind, though their frank bearing seemed to belie that idea: one of them seemed to be speaking to a nobleman, a little ways behind Jorlin and his consort, as if their social status were the same.
“To be clear,” said the agent, his voice dry, “any damage to Wetquim’s hymen would incur a charge to your account of approximately fifty thousand credits—that is, the average price differential between a verified virgin Kamnian girl and a non-virgin one.”
My focus snapped back to the couple in front of me. I saw in the man’s slightly raised eyebrows that he must be expecting something, and then I remembered the humiliating command he had given me, before the agent’s intervention had sent my mind desperately spinning off in hope of some mental escape.