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)
Next to the pistol lay a paper print-out of a letter whose key sentences I knew by heart.
For extraordinary service in enriching and enlarging the Empire of Great Vion, Quarren Gravamir is made Baron Gravamir of Berstolin. Please accept this side-arm as a token of the emperor’s regard, and retain it in the imperial presence.
He had sold Berstolin to the Tri-System Mercantile Company, as had been the intention behind the gift, and I lived the life of a Vionian noble here in his palace, as a result. From the rough-hewn roots of a disreputable miner, Quarren, Baron Gravamir had become a courtier and a financier. The barons after him, down to me, had followed suit, building the family fortune and adding on to the palace at roughly equivalent rates.
When I looked back at Franla, I found that her eyes had followed mine, just as I had intended. I smiled when she returned her attention to me.
“Certainly my establishment does bespeak that sort of prosperity,” I said. “My grandfather had, I believe, six concubines.”
Franla’s eyes went suitably wide at this news. I felt reasonably sure she feigned her surprise, though. I personally had two acquaintances at court who each had seven girls, one for each day of the old standard week that for some reason every human world had kept as the basis for its calendar.
“Oh indeed,” Franla said. “I suppose that’s precisely what I meant.”
I liked her, I had to admit. Her eagerness to please and her rather charming officiousness seemed to show a good deal of skill in navigating the demands of court culture. I supposed a concubine who had earned her limited franchise and had risen to the rank of mistress over those among whom she had served had to possess a special spark of intelligence.
She did not seem quite as I had expected, though, and I needed to enquire about that, once I had laid her anxiety about multiple girls to rest.
“I’m not of that disposition, though,” I told her. “I can’t speak for my grandfather’s girls, but I note in the conduct of my friends who have several concubines—even those who keep only two—a lack of attention to… shall we say… detail. When I possess a young woman, I wish to know her with the greatest possible intimacy, so that I can enjoy every benefit of her obedience and submission to me.”
“Oh indeed,” Franla said again. “How marvelous.” The smile on her lovely red face, only slightly lined by age—she seemed about forty, measured in standard years—seemed genuine.
“I must ask, though,” I continued, “whether you think you can train a high-spirited girl to obey my every command, no matter how shameful. I am an exacting master, and the girl is likely to require a good deal of discipline before she learns to give the pleasure I expect. If I may say so without offense, Madame Franla, you seem rather more easygoing than I had anticipated.”
A bright smile lit up her visage. “I might say the same about you, my lord.”
I laughed. “Fair enough. Your reputation has preceded you, as you can imagine. And I had the chance to admire the evidence of a caning you had delivered the other day, on the backside of one of His Grace the Duke of Gadev’s Kamnians.”
“Ah,” Franla said, her smile widening. “Yes, poor Thria. She didn’t wish to provide her rear portal to one of His Grace’s guests. She left me no choice.”
In the woman’s face I saw just what I had hoped to see: she had a deep interest in helping her girls embrace their lives in sexual servitude. I still wondered if this idea of buying a concubine with whom to while away what seemed very likely to be the last days of the Vionian Empire made any sense beyond the emotional—and sexual—gratification it would bring. I knew, though, that I had found the mistress to train my purchase for my bed.
Chalondra
Agent Delvik put his fingers inside me. I cried out, unable to believe for a moment that the man had just… done that.
“Oh, yes,” he said, his voice dripping with mocking superiority and degradation, “you’re very wet indeed, girl.”
I didn’t even know what it meant. I could tell that it didn’t have anything to do with the shame of having wet my panties: something in the agent’s voice seemed to intimate an even deeper kind of humiliation, a darker truth about what the Vionians did with their concubines—even something about my body that no one had ever told me, because it was too embarrassing.
I could feel it, though: the awful probing of the man’s fingers was lubricated by some kind of slickness inside the sheath of my vagina. I gasped in sudden discomfort as he pushed them just far enough in that their tips came up against the barrier there that my mother and my aunts had taught me to call my virginity.