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)
She stepped back, and she placed her hand on my bottom, held it in her little hand almost as possessively as my master liked to do with his much bigger one.
“This will be the most difficult part for you, receiving him here. Do not forget that it represents for your master the most dominant of acts. A spirited girl who learns to submit fully can win his heart as no other may.”
CHAPTER 25
Baron Gravamir
I had not intended to keep Chalondra waiting for longer than a few minutes. The message that came in just as I rose to leave the study, however, detained me. When I saw it had come from Hesborin, I nearly didn’t open it, since his messages almost invariably had to do either with trivial court gossip or with inconsequential details of ship production that would be much better handled by my factory agent than by me.
Chalondra had enchanted me so thoroughly, however, that I had the impulse to slow the night down as much as I could, so as to savor its pleasures: Franla’s consummate skill as a mistress of concubines would make my lovely blue-haired pleasure girl’s wait an important and special moment for her, I thought. I should take my time. I opened the message; as I did, I frowned, noticing that unlike Hes’ usual communications, he had sent this one using the heaviest possible encryption.
Grav, you don’t get to say you told me so, because I’m risking this message to help you get the fuck away, and I may not be able to do the same.
My blood went cold. Rather to my surprise, though I would never have expected it only a few hours before, my thoughts didn’t turn completely away from Chalondra. Instead, they stayed with my new concubine, but they changed radically. That was only in keeping with the way my life had just abruptly changed, in an equally radical manner. I didn’t even need to read the brief remainder of Hes’ message to know the end had arrived.
We lost at Dubhe. Even with your rank, you don’t even know how many eggs the emperor had in that basket, and there’s not even enough left for an omelet. The fleet doesn’t really exist anymore. They may not even tell anyone: the emperor may already be gone. The secret police are about to arrest anyone connected to naval production, just in case they want to have a trial. Get out, and I hope I see you on Yeg or somewhere else where the girls are pretty and the liquor flows freely. Hes
I blew out a long breath: the air I had held in my lungs since reading the first sentence of the message. I deleted it, mechanically, wondering for a moment whether if I could have deleted it from my brain, I would have, just for the sake of having a night with Chalondra that I could cherish as the walls of the empire collapsed around our ears. Despite everything, the thought of what she must look like, bound to my bedpost… the first pleasure girl I had chosen for myself, to buy and to own… already a treasure beyond price to me simply for the way she had looked up into my eyes, on her knees before me, as I had watched her learn what fucking was…
I couldn’t pretend. As much as I thought it probably wouldn’t come to a trial, that I would almost certainly have a better shot of escaping the conquest of Vion by the Magisterians if I stayed, rather than making a highly suspicious-looking exit, I couldn’t do that to Chalondra. I would, in all probability, be arrested—placed under guard here in Gravamir House, which represented the standard for nobles under suspicion.
Then, if I let it all play out, the secret police and the judiciary would melt away as they escaped the conquerors, and I could even make a deal with the Magisterians. I knew, after all, that their cause was the juster one, and that the empire was corrupt beyond any hope of reformation. That knowledge came from a deep understanding of imperial finance, which would allow me to help my new overlords recover a great many assets. I might not get a Magisterian peerage for myself, of course, but at least I would end up living in style on a world of my choice.
But the moment the police arrived, Chalondra would be taken from me. Most nobles thought the law archaic, and indeed barbaric. It came from a period of imperial history when suspicion had existed openly among the emperor and his courtiers, rather than covertly, as it did here at what seemed the empire’s end. Both as a form of retribution and perhaps more importantly as a way of removing from a noble under suspicion a possible means of communication with his co-conspirators, a noble’s chattel servants—including above all his concubines—were immediately alienated from them upon arrest.