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)
CHAPTER 14
Chalondra
I barely noticed the agent leading me away to the corral where the already-sold girls stood waiting. The terrible, vague images that had passed through my mind over the few moments I had spent atop the auction block crowded everything out: rough discipline aboard a starship… girlish fantasies of living in a palace, like those of the nobility on Vion Prime… Baron Gravamir holding a paddle like agent Delvik’s, looking at me as if he meant not to punish me but to devour me…
The agent thrust me into the corral. My eyes met those of the four girls who had stood before me on the block and learned who they would belong to, one after the other. All of them wore the same expression I knew must occupy my own face: blank incomprehension—the desperate pretense of ignorance about what had just happened to us, together with true ignorance of what would befall us now.
One of them spoke—Silverstar, I remembered, the one whose beauty had received such praise.
“Um,” she said, “I… I don’t know your real name…” She had focused her attention on the girl auctioned right before me. Darkeyes, the auctioneer had called her, named I could see for her deep brown irises.
Darkeyes’ brow furrowed deeply, and she bit her lip. “Halana,” she told Silverstar.
“I…” Silverstar started, but she seemed unable to continue.
The girl whose service name seemed almost as cruel as my own, Heartarse, seemed to know what Silverstar had meant to say.
“What did he mean,” she asked timidly. “About… you know… about not being a… a virgin?”
I could see on Halana’s face that she had expected the question. Her cheeks had gone pink before Heartarse had even finished asking it.
“I’m not,” she said, clearly trying to make her voice sound proud and defiant. “I… was… with… a boy I liked. A few weeks ago.”
I frowned, and I could see similar expressions of puzzlement on the faces of the other three girls. Lot three, whose service name I didn’t remember, said, “You were with him? Like, you took a walk with him?”
In my village, boys and girls didn’t have the chance to do that sort of thing. If I had tried for some reason to sneak away from my house to the fields to go for a walk with a boy, I would undoubtedly have ended up not being allowed to go anywhere with my friends for a month.
Halana’s face had turned an even deeper shade of red. She had fixed her eyes on the ground, but I thought I could still see some rebellion in them, as if she knew she should feel shame—and she did feel shame—but at the same time she didn’t actually regret whatever she had done with the boy.
“We did what husbands and wives do,” she said. “In bed. It’s called…” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Fucking.”
I looked around at the others, my own cheeks burning. The agents had used that word, hadn’t they? They had made it clear that fucking was one of the things our owners would do to us. One of the things they would enjoy doing to us. One of the reasons they had bought us.
“Wetquim,” I heard a woman’s voice say. “Come over here, please.”
My attention had been seized so thoroughly by the alarming conversation with Halana that at first I didn’t even remember that Wetquim represented my name. I simply kept looking at her, hoping and fearing at the same time that she would say more about fucking.
“Wetquim,” Silverstar whispered urgently.
I looked up at her, still not associating the terrible word with myself until I saw from her expression that she could only be trying to warn me.
“Wetquim,” said the feminine voice again, from behind me, more urgently, and indeed, I understood only at the last millisecond, in a tone of warning. Then my pussy exploded with pain.
I cried out and turned, and I saw both of them standing on the other side of the corral’s low fence: the baron and the mistress, looking at me intently. I felt my knees buckle and my arms struggle desperately against the metal cuffs, trying in vain to get them loose so I could clutch my pussy, the only thing that seemed to soothe the agony of the punisher at all, as shameful as it seemed to hold myself that way.
But the pain vanished as soon as I had turned. It had gone on a much shorter time than it had lasted on any previous occasion when the agents had punished me for inattention or disobedience. I straightened up, and then I realized I had my eyes raised to look at them, the man who owned me and the woman who, it seemed, worked for him to… what?
To train me. I felt my face pucker with mortification as I realized what her work must entail. She had a handheld in her hand. She had activated the punisher: part of training a bed girl obviously lay in getting her to pay attention when her mistress calls her.