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Please.Had I just imagined that the woman’s silvery, impossibly elegant—though I couldn’t even have said what made it sound that way to me—voice had spoken with that modicum of politeness? But I couldn’t have imagined it, because it made no sense at all.Wetquim, look up, please.The words seemed to battle one another, to fall apart.
“Is she giving you trouble, milady?” another voice asked, masculine, dripping with obsequiousness. Then, rougher, louder: “Wetquim, you don’t want the punisher, do you?”
Shiny black boots below a red uniform had appeared. The very sight brought a shudder, from the memory of Agent Delvik.
He’s half a galaxy away,the logical part of my brain tried to reassure the rest of my whirling thoughts.That agent is a completely different man, in the same boots and trousers but maybe without the same cruelty—if you don’t provoke it.
That idea—the hope that I might avoid more useless punishment—finally helped me collect myself enough to do as they had ordered me. I looked up, despite how what I saw pierced the comforting sense of detachment and unreality that had engulfed me. The numbness that had cushioned me since the bottom of the drop ship had opened and the robots had started to pick up our cages and carry them here vanished. I heard and saw the reaction to the agent’s words that traveled through the crowd of gorgeously dressed Vionians walking up and down the long row of cages.
The men laughed. Some of the women giggled. Vionians of both sexes drifted towards the little scene the couple right in front of my cage had created, with my help, as involuntary as my contribution to it had seemed.
“Oh, and now you’re looking up,” the agent said. His voice terrified me, because in it I heard so very clearly what he would do, and then he did it. I screamed as the cage sent the terrible burning pain to my pussy. I bent at the knees and waist, about to sink to the floor, my eyes closing as I tried to show that I hadn’t meant any disobedience.
“Wait,” the woman in front of the cage said, though she spoke with no urgency. “We told her to look at us.”
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—andyoung, I realized now; not much younger than me—woman, I saw that she felt no sympathy whatsoever. My agony, my tears: they… they hadamusedher.
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.
Turn around and bend over. Please.
