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“Her power is not so great as Falcon suggested,” Scourge commented one evening. They sat facing each other at the end of a long table while I ate at the other end, child to their parents. At least I sat in a chair. Always though, I perched on the edge, ready to slide to my place on the floor.
Marquise surveyed me, her face an exquisite blank. “Well, we haven’t really plumbed those depths with her yet.”
“Do you think so?”
She shrugged. “For humans, power comes from emotion, particularly sexual. Right now our pet has only wanting to please us.”
“That should be power enough.” Scourge frowned at me, as if I had failed him. I hunched my shoulder blades. “Besides, she reacted sexually when I spanked her.”
“Oh, yes. That was just lovely. We could do more of that. To really evoke her power.”
I shuddered inside my skin. I so hoped they wouldn’t go there. I turned the thought over, surprised I still hoped for something. That’s what those sidelong looks had been about. The “filthy source” of my power was sexual—an answer to so many questions. I tucked the knowledge away. For the day I might be able to be my own person again.
“It’s a shame Rogue put such restrictions on this.” Scourge looked sour.
“We still get to enjoy her.” Marquise pursed her lips and blew me a kiss, then tossed her ivory hair over a slim shoulder. “That’s the disadvantage of the intensive method. Falcon knows that. He’s a fool, preferring to weaken a tool to gain perfect control.”
Rogue’s name woke me further. I kept my eyes down, but turned over the new emotion surging into my heart. He knew what they would do to me. He’d kissed me and walked away, sending me to this. Burning hate clawed at my heart.
“Even Rogue cannot control everything. And perhaps he knows something we do not. Sometimes I wonder…”
“What do you wonder, sister-mine?”
Marquise held out a hand to me and obediently I went to kneel at her side, letting her search my eyes and my mind, keeping it carefully clear. Pure gray. “I think sometimes that she’s not vanished, but rather sleeping. Hiding.”
“Nonsense—our method works perfectly.”
“Of course it does, brother. But humans only seem like simple creatures. Their minds are labyrinths of conscious and unconscious thought. They have many places to tuck away bits of themselves in those dense, isolated brains.” She held my skull in her hands, pressing thumbs into my cheekbones with agonizing pressure. “What say you, darling? Have you hidden anything from me?”
She rifled through my mind like a sweet breeze, turning over my few, useless thoughts. I closed the door on Rogue and the Dog. They were down below ground, by the bottomless lake. Unreachable to me.
“She is perfect, isn’t she?” Scourge studied me with his pitiless gaze and I ducked my head.
“Do you doubt?”
“We haven’t really pushed her.”
“Oh yes.” Marquise flashed me a brilliant and sensual smile. The food roiled in my stomach. “We have a bit of time yet. Let’s see where her limits are.”
“Time to enjoy the side benefits?” Scourge’s voice held a cruel sensuality. I pressed my forehead against Marquise’s slim thigh, wishing I could beg them not to. Knowing I was so close to escaping. Just a bit more to endure.
It was the worst part.
They used pain still, yes, but they layered in pleasure now, teaching me to amp up the power.
Scourge would chain me naked to the wall and tease me with the whip while Marquise draped herself over the silver chair, drinking in the sight and holding my dress, sometimes stroking her cheek on it. The stinging whip flicked my nipples, my thighs, and I writhed under the torment. She taunted me softly, offering all I could do to make it stop. The cuffs were iron—I could turn them to water. The whip could be easily vanished. Didn’t I want to? It would be easy. Or maybe I didn’t want it to stop. Maybe I liked it. Then she’d take it down a dark and foul path of all the things they could do to me and how I couldn’t stop them. Or could I?
I knew better. Never did I fall for their tricks.
Only when they gave me a direct order did I obey. When Scourge asked, I immediately gave the whip metal spines that dug into my flesh. I took the glass of water I desperately thirsted for and turned it into a pretty stone at her request. They took great pleasure in teasing me to greater levels of arousal and frustration, seeming to feed off my energy, like sleek and fat lions gorging on a hapless ungulate. They stoked me higher, goading me to perform larger and more complicated magics, delighting in what they could get me to do.
I learned to follow their complex mental instructions as easily as the spoken ones. They let me answer them mentally now, though I was still never allowed to speak.
They pronounced me perfect. I hadn’t worn silver in a long time.
My skin felt as if it glowed where the bands had been for the past months. I thought it had been months. There seemed to be no seasons. Sometimes I thought time didn’t pass at all and I would be here forever, in this purgatory. I fought the urge to touch my throat, to keep making sure the collar was really gone.
The end came abruptly, with no forewarning. I sat in my walled garden one evening after another brutal day of school to watch the fading twilight. I held on to that bit of the real world, that the light changed and days really did pass. Garden was a misnomer, though, since only a few scraggly plants grew there. Barely alive. Not unlike myself.
