She wouldn’t even have to wake. You could...
I was on my feet before I’d decided to stand. I told myself I was going to add another taper to the altar. I told myself that very clearly, but my feet didn’t go toward the altar.
Instead, I stood at the edge of her pallet and looked at her back. The tunic had twisted slightly in her sleep, exposing the back of one of her knees. The candlelight was doing things to the shadows in the hollow of it.
My hands were shaking. I pressed them together. A reflex. The prayer position.Boundless, I am being tested, and I need...
But the prayer dissolved. The words lost their shape. I was looking at the back of her knee and the arch of her bare foot, and I was thinking about Lancelot’s announcement this evening and the fact that they’d been gone for long enough that he could have inserted himself inside her. He could have succumbed to the call of the demon.
Had he?
The question had been in me since the moment they left, and now it was all I could hear. If he had joined with her, if the demon had managed to move through her into Lancelot, then I’d failed. I’d had her in my custody for long enough, and yet I hadn’t found the mark. I also hadn’t confirmed her status as maid or whore, and the demon had simply gone around me. Found another victim.
This was information I needed: to know whether she was truly a whore. This was why the examination was required.
I crouched beside her pallet.
She was on her side, knees drawn up slightly. I reached for the hem of her tunic with two fingers. Carefully. The examination required access. The Texts were clear about the relationship between bodily corruption and spiritual corruption. A maiden’s body was protected by innocence. If she was no longer a maiden, the corruption was demonstrable. Provable. I would finally have what I needed.
I shifted her.
Her eyes opened and she turned to face me.
(Trigger Warning: skip the rest of this scene if you aren’t comfortable reading on)
For one moment, she simply looked at me, blinking slowly the way people do when sleep hasn’t fully released them. Then her whole body snapped awake, and she scrambled back against the wall. Her elbow caught the wall hard, and she made a short pained sound.
“Hold still,” I said. “This is a disciplinary session.”
“Get away from me—”
“—hold still.”
I caught her ankle. She kicked. I was stronger than her, and she knew it, but she fought anyway. It was yet another example of that animal stubbornness she had, that refusal to simply accept the examination. I caught her other ankle and pressed her flat, and her hands came at my face. I grabbed her wrists and pinned them above her head and leaned my weight across her.
“You are making this worse for yourself,” I said. My voice was steady. I was proud of that.
“I’ll scream,” she said. “I’ll alert the guards!”
“And tell them what?” I laughed. “You have no rights here. You are a prisoner, a whore.” I reached down with one hand,keeping both her wrists pinned with the other forearm. “Holdstill.”
She stopped fighting. Not because she’d accepted it. I could feel her heart slamming against her chest, fast and panicked, and her eyes were doing that thing they did when they went very flat and present at the same time.
My hand moved up her inner thigh, and she made a sound low in her throat that sounded like a growl.
See?the voice said.The demon speaks through her.
The examination required information. I gathered it by finding the hole between her legs and pushing my finger inside her.
She is so tight. Imagine what that tightness would feel like wrapped around your…
No. I find no pleasure in this.
I pushed my finger deeper inside her channel of sin until my index finger was all the way to the knuckle. Her cunt walls closed around me, and I had to breathe deeply to slow my heart rate. I pulled my finger out and then shoved two back in, all the way inside her as she bucked beneath me. I could feel no maiden wall, nothing that would confirm her innocence.
She’s a whore. Just as you knew she would be.
I pulled my fingers out and shoved them back in again, enjoying the expression on her face, which was one of hatred against me. It was the demon looking out through her eyes, the demon promising retribution.
