Her nails were broken, her hands laced with scratches. Her nightgown was torn and dirt-smeared. A sudden, wet warmth flooded down her legs. She stared at the spreading dampness for a full minute before she understood she had wet herself.

It was almost an hour before she dragged herself off the bed, washed herself, and dressed in a clean nightgown. Then she huddled in a chair with a quilt wrapped around her, staring out the window, desperately waiting for the dawn.

2 / Terreille

Kartane inserted a key into a small, inset door hidden by a row of shrubs. The parents who came to Briarwood during visiting hours didn’t know about that entrance—unless a parent was also a select member. They didn’t know about these softly lit corridors, thickly carpeted to muffle sounds. They didn’t know about the gaming room or the sitting room or the little soundproofed cubicles that were just big enough to hold a chair, a bed, and other amusing necessities. They didn’t know about the tears and screams and pain. They didn’t know about the special “medicines.”

They didn’t know about many things.

Kartane strolled through the corridors to the “playpen,” hungry for some amusement. He was furious with Sadi and that little bitch for spoiling the game tonight. It was hard enough to bring girls in. Oh, they could buy lower-class Blood—the right kind of drink during the right kind of game and a pretty girl became a marker on the card table. But it was the aristos, the girls gently brought up with delicate sensibilities, that were the most fun—and the hardest to procure. It usually took enticing the father in order to get the child…except during Winsol, when a little safframate could be slipped into the sparkling wine. Then the girl could be broken and cleaned up before being brought back to her naive parents. The day after, when the hysteria started, Dr. Carvay would just happen to call and explain to the distraught parents about this prepubescent hysteria that was claiming a number of aristo girls of the Blood. The girl would be tenderly led away for a stay at Briarwood, and in a month or two—or a year or two—she would be returned to the bosom of her family, and eventually married off to spend the rest of her life with that slightly glazed look in her eyes, never understanding her husband’s disappointment in her, never remembering what a fine little playmate she’d once been.

Of course, a few genuinely disturbed girls were also admitted. That little tart Rose had been one. And Sadi’s whey-faced bitch.

Kartane shivered as he stepped into the “playpen,” that guarded room where the girls selected for that evening waited in their lacy nighties for the uncles. The girls didn’t seem to notice the cold, but the attendant had his shoulders hunched and kept rubbing his hands to warm them. It was like this sometimes. Not always, but sometimes.

Kartane’s perusal of the girls stopped when he met a glazed, unblinking sapphire stare.