"Move, bitch!" The white-shirted man did not spare her another glance, his attention already sliding past her crumpled form as he simply just waved at his followers. "How dare you try to stop us! Oi, punish her! Did she forget who we are?!"
Two of the men moved without hesitation, grabbing the maid by her arms and hauling her back before she had any chance to find her footing. What followed was ugly scene that can be only done by those who have done it countless number of times in their life.
BOOM! THUMMP! SLAPPP!
"AA! ACK!"
She cried out with each blow, her body folding under the force of them, her clothes tearing at the seams under rough and careless hands.
"Young Master!" The pregnant woman's voice cut through the room with sudden sharpness, exhaustion stripped away for a moment and replaced with something fiercer underneath it. "What do you think you are doing?! Stop this! Even your father does not want trouble today. He has his image to keep up with all the important people present in this house!"
The white-shirted man turned to look at her slowly, as though the interruption were mildly interesting to him rather than anything worth taking seriously.
"You are one of Father's, are you not?" He looked her over with open contempt pulling at the corners of his mouth. "What is your number?"
Agh.
Sio and Gracie had moved without discussing it, positioning themselves side by side with their shoulders almost touching, eyes locked hard on the men across the room. The fury radiating off both of them was barely being held in check, visible in the set of their jaws and the careful stillness of their hands.
"Does it matter?" The pregnant woman met his gaze without flinching, her fingers curling into the fabric at her sides.
"Oh, it absolutely matters." His grin turned razor thin. "Because otherwise, how do I explain to my father that ONE WOMAN IS MISSING FROM HIS COUNTING???? HEHEHE! OR DO YOU WANT TO DIE BEFORE YOU EVEN GIVE BIRTH?"
He stepped toward the bed with slow, deliberate intent, and before anyone could say another word, he reached out and pressed his hand against her belly, his fingers trying to pierce her swollen belly.
The pregnant woman's face tightened in pain, jaw locking hard, breath pulling in sharp, through her nose as she tried to keep herself composed.
"This child is important property," he said with a threatening tone "So why do you not be quiet, you bitch of a woman?"
"STOP THIS!"
Sio's voice came out louder than she had intended, sharp and hard and cutting clean through every sound in the room. Every head turned toward her at once.
The white-shirted man pulled his hand back slowly, taking his time with the movement. He turned to look at her with fresh interest, the corners of his mouth already pulling upward as he stepped away from the bed and came toward her instead, dropping himself with easy arrogance onto the edge of the mattress nearby.
"Ohh, sorry, sorry!" His grin spread wide across his face. "I made our temporary maid angry! Keke!"
Sio stood straight. She did not step back. Beside her, Gracie had arranged her face into something careful and unreadable, every line of her expression professionally neutral. Sio's eyes, on the other hand, were burning with something that had no intention of being neutral.
The man looked between them with lazy, predatory enjoyment, in no hurry at all.
"Hey. You." He pointed at Sio with one loose finger. "I like you. Come be my woman."
"Don't want to," Sio said flatly, holding his gaze without so much as a blink.
"I can pay you well."
"Don't want to."
"Five years' salary."
"Don't want to."
"Ten years."
"Don't want to."
"Twenty."
"No."
"Thirty."
He tilted his head to one side, studying her with something approaching genuine curiosity. "Hmm. Guess you are already living pretty well then."
"No," Sio said. "But still no."
"Hehe." The grin widened by another degree. "Interesting."
SNAP!
The single sharp crack of his fingers brought a rush of movement that filled the room in under two seconds: guards flooding through the doorway, weapons drawn, spreading out until they had formed a complete semi circle around the small space. Cold weapons caught the pale window light and reflected back to everyone eyes giving them a sting on irritation. Nobody in the room moved. Nobody breathed too loudly. The air itself seemed to go rigid.
Then...
SNAP!
Another click, and they withdrew just as quickly as they had come, filing back out through the doorway until the room settled back to normalcy.
"Oi. Stop beating her. Bring her over here."
The two men stopped. They took the maid by her arms and dragged her forward across the floor, dropping her to her knees directly in front of the white shirt man. She swayed where she knelt, trembling in long, uneven waves, her clothes torn open in several places with bruised skin showing through the gaps. Her head hung forward with the weight of pain. Her breathing came in ragged pulls that she could not quite get ahead of.
"Kekekke!" The men laughed at the sight of her without any embarrassment.
The white-shirted man turned his attention back to Sio, his expression settling to patient look now, his eyes showcase a gaze that knows how the next few minutes are going to unfold.
"Here is how this works," he said pleasantly. "I will have this maid killed for disobeying me. And that pregnant woman over there—" he gestured toward the bed with a carelessness that made the gesture worse somehow "—can disappear too. One less will not hurt my father's numbers that much. They are property of the Parmesarson house. I can do whatever I want to them." He spread his hands open in a gesture of generous simplicity. "But you, I cannot touch directly. That is a shame." His smile sharpened at the edges. "So the choice belongs to you. Will you become my woman, or will you not?"
He settled back and watched her, making no attempt to hide the enjoyment he was getting from every second of the calculation playing out behind her eyes.
Grrrrrrr.....
Sio's jaw was locked so tight she could feel the ache of it spreading up into her temples. Her eyes did not leave his face. Beneath the stillness she was holding onto, her mind was moving at full speed, burning through every option she could see from where she stood.
I could take them. Probably... But if I do, if I blow our cover right now in this room, everything falls apart. Everything we came here for becomes worthless. All of it.
So what do I do?
The silence stretched itself out between them. One second. Two.
Then suddenly Gracie stepped forward.
The smile she brought with her was so professionally warm, so perfectly calibrated in its grace, that it could have convinced anyone in the room that she had simply wandered into a pleasant social occasion rather than a room full of lustful men and a woman bleeding on her knees.
"Young Master," she said, her voice carrying just the right current of flattery running beneath it, tilting her head with a practiced ease that invited him to feel clever for noticing her, "you have really put her in quite a difficult spot! A man of your power and position, a Crown person of such standing in the great City of Eirs, bringing his full weight down on two poor maids like us?" She let out a light, airy laugh, as though the entire situation were charming rather than anything else. "Surely someone as magnificent as yourself, the one overseeing the most prosperous house in all the city, can afford to give two poor and helpless women just a tiny chance to save our self first, right??"
She bent into a graceful, unhurried bow, every movement of her limbs attract attention from the men.
The white-shirted man blinked. He leaned back by a fraction, and for the first time since entering the room, he was reassessing something rather than simply taking inventory. His eyes moved over Gracie with slow and genuine appreciation, finding things he had apparently not noticed before.
"Hmm... Interesting." He glanced briefly at Sio, then returned his attention to Gracie with considerably more interest than he had shown thirty seconds ago. "I thought the other one was the one worth looking at, but you..." He gave a short, satisfied laugh. "You are something else entirely. Hehe! Fine, fine. I suppose I was pushing a little hard just now. Where is the fun in taking what you want without a proper struggle first, right???? Kekke, struggling is far more entertaining anyway!"
He snapped his fingers at one of the men stationed near the doorway.
"Bring her that food plate."
The man crossed the room and retrieved one of the serving plates from the tray Sio and Gracie had carried in, still fully loaded with dishes that had not been touched. He held it out toward Gracie as she subconsciously took it.
The white-shirted man turned back with a wicked, knowing smile already in place.
"Here is the game," he said. "You hold that plate out in front of you, arms fully horizontal, completely level. If your arms drop below hip height at any point, you fail. And you have to stand on one leg the entire time." He held up a single finger for emphasis. "Ten minutes.... If your raised foot touches the ground before time is up, or if the plate so much as tilts past the point of your hip level, you have failed. And as your prize, If I win both of you belong to me. You will become my women, entirely for the rest of your life!!!" He let that sit for one moment before shrugging with an ease that bordered on theatrical. "But if you last the full ten minutes, you walk out. Both of you. Free and clear."
His eyes drifted pointedly to the plate and then to Gracie's arms, his smirk making his expectations abundantly clear. He expected this to collapse somewhere around the three-minute mark, maybe less.
"You look like an experienced maid," he added with the tone of someone offering a small and somewhat sarcastic compliment. "Surely this will not be too difficult for you?"
Gracie looked at the plate.
It was heavy. There was no pretending otherwise. The stack of bowls and dishes loaded onto it pushed weight into the hands, enough that the tendons of her wrists were showing the strain. Gracie's fingers flexed once at her sides, a single quiet motion she allowed herself before going still again. Not a single thing moved across her face.
"Big Sister..." Sio's voice came out low, pulled tight at the edges with worry she was not managing to fully conceal. Her eyes moved from the plate to Gracie's face and back again, measuring something.
"Don't worry." Gracie's voice was steady all the way through, carrying no tremor in it. She turned to give Sio a small, firm nod that settled the matter. "I can do this."
She stepped forward with the plates in her hands.
Slowly, with complete deliberateness, she extended her arms outward until they were fully horizontal, the plate rising to level and holding there without a tremble. Then she shifted her weight onto one foot and raised the other, pressing the sole against the opposite knee in a clean, controlled posture. She straightened her spine from the base of it upward, squared her shoulders to the same degree on both sides, and stood perfectly still.
Fully balanced with full control of her body. Every line of her body holding its place.
"Kekek, nice posture!" The white-shirted man's eyes slid shamelessly downward from her face, drifting to where the skirt of her maid's uniform had ridden up from the movement of her raised leg, the fabric gathering above her upper thighs as the pose demanded.
Agh.
Gracie closed her eyes for one quiet second. She drew a slow breath in through her nose, held it for a beat, and let it out at the same measured pace. The heat of their stares moved over her skin giving her shiver as if an insect is crawling on her body and she felt every second of it.
She shut all of it out. She gathered all the negative feelings and locked it behind the wall of her focus and left it there to sit until this was over.
Ten minutes. That is all. Just ten minutes.
Her arms held steady. The plate did not waver so much as a degree.
And the countdown began.
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END OF CHAPTER
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AUTHOR BLABBERING
My longest writing session ever is still going on—and somehow, it refuses to end! Usually, I have a clear start and finish line in mind, and I manage to wrap things up within a few days before scheduling a bunch of chapters ahead. But this time? Nope. It just kept going… and going… and going—until my pre-scheduled chapters finally caught up with me!
I seriously thought I would be able to schedule more and more and stockpile so much that I could climb Mount Everest and come back ( No this author is not going there at least not now! ) but nope—life had other plans. Ah well, that's how it goes, right? Things rarely unfold the way we expect. We just smile, keep typing, and hope the story ( and we ourselves ) end up somewhere better in the end.
Anyway, time's up. Shoo! Bye!! 👋
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