“Marian’s father is a Warlord serving as a Fifth Circle guard in a Queen’s court,” Saetan said, his voice still quiet—and still filled with suppressed rage. “From the information I gathered, he doesn’t have the brains, the backbone, or the balls to advance any higher, but he deludes himself by thinking it’s his lack of the proper social connections rather than his lack of abilities that keeps him from being in the First or Second Circle. He likes to rub elbows with the aristo males in the court, and he likes to gamble—and some of them tolerate him because they find his expectations amusing and they like winning the quarterly pittance he earns whenever they consent to let him gamble with them. But they wouldn’t let him play on credit because they’d quickly realized he had no way to pay them back.

“But one night, a few weeks ago, they let him play beyond the marks he’d brought to the table. They kept refilling his glass, and they let him play because he had something they wanted. He’d been bragging recently about his younger daughters and how he expected them to become prominent witches once they completed their training as a Healer and a Priestess. But the eldest daughter was an embarrassment to him. A witch whose skills would never provide the family with any status, a witch who did—”

“Nothing important,” Lucivar murmured, remembering the defeated way Marian had held herself when she’d said those words.

Saetan nodded. “That was exactly what those aristo males wanted—a witch who did nothing important, a witch whose disappearance wouldn’t draw the attention of anyone in the court.” His hands curled around the edge of the blackwood desk. “So they let the bastard gamble until he was so far in debt he would never be able to repay them. And when he sobered up enough to realize his standing in the court would be ruined if he didn’t repay them, they offered him a trade—and he took it.

“He didn’t even have the courage to take her to the meeting place so she would know why she was being sacrificed. He just sent her there. Five Warlords with knives and Eyrien war blades. One terrified hearth witch, tethered so she could fly, since that made it more interesting, but couldn’t escape. Shallow slices to prolong the pain and fear. And when she couldn’t fight anymore, they pulled her down, intending to rape her while she bled out under them.”

Feeling sick, Lucivar closed his eyes. “So they raped her.”

“No. Jaenelle arrived before they began that part of their entertainment.”

Lucivar shuddered. Jaenelle had been brutally raped when she was twelve. Her body had healed, but she, and those who loved her, lived with the emotional scars. There was nothing that turned Jaenelle lethal and merciless faster than rape.