Interlude (3)
I coaxed and placated Sean well enough, and sent him on his way. Only once I was certain every trace of his footsteps had faded did I finally slump down onto the bed.
"A gap is bound to open up before long," my ass.
Bianca would be disposed of soon. And by none other than my own hand. The irony of that was almost too rich. Could there be any wordplay more absurd than a fingerless cripple "taking matters into her own hands"? Probably not, I decided.
I turned my hand over and studied the back of it. Small, slender fingers stared back at me — unscarred, perfectly whole. Not a trace remained of the price once paid for poking my nose where it didn't belong. Well, of course there wasn't. That had been my old body. But the wounds carved into my heart, into my soul, were still there.
I swore I'd never sacrifice myself for anyone ever again. So don't go nursing pointless kindness. They were strangers at the end of the day, and they couldn't be saved anyway. I had resolved never to live selflessly at my own expense again.
Either way, the best thing is to handle this while Rihardt knows nothing. Either spirit Bianca away without a trace, or get rid of Sean along with her. What mattered was that Rihardt stay in the dark. Feasibility aside — if I wanted to live, it had to be that way. If he found out, then whether things resolved well or badly, a scandal would follow. And that would be no different from tossing a juicy slab of meat to a starving monster.
The one bright spot is probably that Rihardt will be busy with the knighting ceremony coming up. Sooner or later there would come a stretch when his watchfulness slackened. For now, I would simply watch how things unfolded.
Swish, swish. Broom sweeping along the grain, I gathered the dust into one pile. As you can see, I was cleaning — Rihardt's basement, specifically. He hadn't ordered it, but I figured even chores like this were honest, necessary work all the same.
Surprisingly enough, he took little issue with me entering the basement alone. Was he trusting me? Yeah, right — not from that Rihardt. It was closer to a let's-see-what-she-pulls arrangement than any real trust. What is he, some fisherman laying out crab traps? Grumbling inwardly, I looked the place over. It did feel tidier than when I'd started, so my labor hadn't been entirely in vain. The gloom, well, that was baked into the atmosphere itself — nothing to be done about that.
Cleaning's about done. Time for the deodorizing. There was a vent in Rihardt's basement, but underground was underground — proper ventilation was a lost cause. Which made it a pain to scrub out the stench that rose whenever he conducted his affairs, or his sinister brand of sadism. What else could explain Rihardt sprinkling dry earth across the floor to smother the smell of blood? Rihardt, admittedly, had a strong constitution; no stench was going to fell him. But I hadn't been blessed with that young master's stomach. Viewed one way, this was cleaning born purely of my own inability to bear it. That wasn't the only reason, mind. I also needed a close look at the condition of someone I might well have to kill. Call it killing two birds with one stone.
"Working hard, aren't you, maid?"
There were exactly two toys in this basement. One was Bianca, the worn-out toy; the other was Karen Florence, the brand-new one. The one who'd spoken was, naturally, Karen Florence. As for Bianca — perhaps because it was by my hand that her body had been defiled — she kept her distance of her own accord.
"Because that's my job," I answered flatly.
"Devoted to your work? Funny. For someone so devoted, you seem to be relishing Rihardt's attention."
So she was still nursing that pointless misunderstanding. Sure, I'd staged that rosy little tableau, but that was nothing like what our relationship actually was.
"No need to bare your teeth at me. I didn't come here today to break in Miss Karen."
At those words Karen flinched, and humiliation soon bled into her eyes. "Who the hell would ever be tamed by the likes of you?"
"Funny thing — I've never met anyone who said that and managed to hold out to the end."
That was how it went, mostly in smutty comics. And this novel I'd possessed into was, when you got down to it, mostly smut as well, so didn't the rule roughly apply? My barb seemed to land; Karen Florence's brows knotted into a scowl.
"You must have plenty of experience, then — with sticking knives in the backs of people who trusted you."
"Regrettably, this is my first time."
"You're awfully good at it for a first-timer. Maybe it's your true calling."
And who on earth would have betrayer as a calling? For all the wretched state she'd been driven to, Karen was proving she still had fight left in her. Hadn't Rihardt said that with this type, you had to grind them down steadily, step by careful step? Honestly, I'd rather she burned with hostility like that. Watching someone do nothing but suffer was truly hard to stomach.
I shifted my gaze to the quiet cell. Bianca's cell. A woman with rather long brown hair and brown eyes to match. Her full, generously curved figure was the sort that could tempt any man breathing. In a way, she was Karen Florence's complete opposite. Unlike Karen, she wore no iron chains on her wrists and ankles — she wasn't dangerous enough to warrant binding, and besides, she had lost the will to resist altogether. That was how most women who fell into Rihardt's hands ended up. Rihardt de Line had a singular gift for shredding a woman's mind to ribbons, for taking it apart piece by piece. One look, apparently, was all the estimate he needed. Break this woman this way, and she's done. That sort of estimate.
Was that why he'd let Karen's training proceed without a single injury? Because Rihardt, too, judged that approach the more efficient one. Suppose physical torture had proven effective at shattering Karen Florence's mind — even if I'd dreamed up some other plan, Rihardt was more than capable of breaking her in his own fashion. But for better or worse, Karen Florence was the type who only hardened the more force you applied. And so the route had settled on "sexual molestation," where her defenses were comparatively thin.
But Bianca was no Karen. Unlike Karen, both approaches worked on her — physical torture or sexual abuse alike. So that man had simply chosen both. He had subjected her to abuse that was sexual in name and torture in practice. I didn't want to know what moments she had endured; I didn't want to hear them. But piecing together the marks left all over her body with what I'd read in the novel, I could more or less picture it.
He must have forced a wooden phallus carved in the likeness of a stallion's cock into her sex. Tearing, bleeding, splinters of wood burying themselves in her flesh. Even as Bianca wept and begged him to stop, Rihardt did not stop. Did anyone expect that bastard to halt just because she asked? If anything he'd have smirked and told her to cry louder. It was a passage that made my face twist merely to recall.
Stretched and ruined by that harrowing training, Bianca was in the end made to couple with a stallion in heat. You ask how? They smeared the secretions of a mare in rut all over her sex and rear to work the stallion into a frenzy, then forced the mating. Naturally, Bianca died in the process. Think about it with a shred of common sense: how was a human woman — fifty, sixty kilos at best — supposed to endure the weight of a horse ranging anywhere from three hundred kilos to a full ton? And not merely its weight, but the full-bodied power of a stallion mad with lust. Even a grown man couldn't have withstood it. What chance did a woman, more delicate still, ever have? The species mismatch alone narrowed the possible positions to a precious few, and Rihardt had insisted on mounting her from behind. And so, the novel recounted, under the frenzied hammering of the stallion's loins and the crushing force of its hooves, Bianca's shoulders and back broke and she died — and when the incident later came to light, it struck a heavy blow to Rihardt's face and reputation alike.
That was why I had once counseled Rihardt never to make Bianca couple with a stallion. Of course, the noble daughter who'd actually cost him his face and his name ended up in his clutches soon after, and her life was well and truly finished. I'll admit that part had felt rather satisfying. Maybe because it read like poison curing poison.
"F-forgive me. A lowly creature like me, d-daring to meet your eyes — I'm sorry. I was wrong. P-please, don't torment me."
Ah, damn. Had my tangled thoughts run on that long? Bianca's gaze — anxious and trembling already — was shaking faster now, and the disgust in Karen's eyes, already brimming, climbed even higher. Did she take me for Rihardt? I felt the need to correct the misunderstanding. For the sake of my thread-thin dignity, and of whatever humanity I was still, barely, holding onto.
"No. I had no intention of anything of the sort, Bianca."
Not that I expected her to believe such words from the very person who had defiled her body so thoroughly. And sure enough, Bianca only kept shivering, murmuring to herself. If Sean had walked in on that scene, his jaw would have hit the floor.
Some people say that pain which fails to kill you only makes you stronger. No. That holds only for rare specimens like Karen. Ordinary people are not steel refined by grinding and tempering. They simply break under the pain — and, breaking, keep breaking, until at the end of it nothing of themselves remains at all. Bianca's state was the very edge of that final ruin. Perhaps a glimpse of what my own future self might have become.
That was why I couldn't bring my lips to move. My plan, after all, had been to broach the subject — to ask whether she would like to see Sean.
I saw to their meals, straightened the bedding, and left the basement. What am I supposed to do? It was turning into one of those days when thoughts crowded in for no reason at all.