His first night with Zezili, she made him strip in her bedroom in her country house. She cuffed him across the mouth, drawing blood. She told him to kneel. He was so startled, he did not even cry out.

She took his chin in her hand and said, “You’re mine. All of you. Every bit of you. You’ll service my sisters, because it’s required. But never forget you’re mine.”

She took out a blade and cut her initials into the flesh between his shoulder blades. When she finished, he was trembling. He heard her set the knife down at her feet deliberately, with a solid thud. He saw the sheen of his blood on the blade. She licked at the blood of his wounds. He gasped. She reached for him and found him, absurdly, embarrassingly erect.

“Well,” Zezili said with a laugh, “they paired me well.”

Zezili was a brutal mistress, demanding, violent. She entertained herself with him until his vision was hazy, pain and desire twisting his insides, turning his voice to a high-pitched wail, begging for release. Yet when she finished with him, he felt somehow obscene, disassembled. She knew him for what he was.

And he loved her for it.

He sat awake nights and cut himself while she was away; the insides of his arms, his thighs. He spent time examining the big blue veins in his wrists, wondering if Zezili would mourn him if he died, or simply have him replaced, as she would her dog or one of her dajians.

But he always put the knife back down and stored it at the back of the drawer of his dressing table behind a box of white powder, among the kerchiefs. He hoped Daolyn would find it someday, or Zezili, and ask, “What’s wrong?”

When Zezili came home for leave this time, she dragged him to bed immediately. Then again twice the next day.

After, he bathed. She attended her foreign guests.

He sat at the end of his bed and began the old ritual, the simple cuts. The knife was comforting in his hand. The knife was something he could control.

He concentrated on the lines, the perfect symmetry. It calmed him.

As he cut, the air around him stirred. His vision blurred. Blood welled down his thigh. A strong wind knocked him back. Bloody haze crept across his vision. The knife slipped, plunged deeply. He cried out.

The world opened.

He fell against the bed, knocking his head. But then the bed was gone. He continued to fall back into… nothing. Darkness. He screamed and scrambled back toward the light. Cold bit at his skin. The air around him swarmed with a fiery mist.

As he groped back into the room, the door opened. Daolyn stood there. Her face contorted. She put her fist to her mouth.