Chapter 372 - 372: Without the Toy

The hollow Erna found behind the linen shelves exhaled on the lamp and put it out.

She did not scream.

She swore, relit, and hammered a board across the gap hard enough that plaster rained into her hair.

"If that is a person they can knock like one, if it is a mouth they can stay hungry, Rigel, your castle eats work crews and I am not feeding it another sleeve."

Rigel put his palm on the board.

No pulse.

Only damp.

"Nail the sides, leave a watch that still curses, if the wood starts answering questions you pull the watch and burn the shelf."

Cynthia heard that as she passed with two men for the west wall and did not stop to make it a debate.

Miena lasted until the house began to move.

Boots in the lower hall, Balzac being woken, a steward doing what Dolly had told him, all of it useful and all of it loud, and the stitch liked loud because loud made people look away from a bed.

Siena felt Miena's bound hands creep toward her own knot.

"No."

"I am not going to the door, I am only supposed to be ready, he said without the toy it has to be the mouth, he said if I wait for the Marquis I will be interrupted, he does not like being interrupted."

"That is not a preference, that is a thief in a hallway."

Dolly heard them and did not leave the latch.

"Miena, you will say the next order out loud so I can hate it properly, do not swallow it and act, I would rather hear filth than watch you obey in silence."

Miena's face went red, then white, then she obeyed Dolly in order to obey the other thing, which was a knot nobody in the room had tied.

"He wants me on my knees at the foot of the bed, he wants my clothes open, he wants Siena to hold my hair so I cannot hide, he wants me to ask for it with the same words I used when I was trying to be chosen, he wants Dolly to stay and see that the house still works when he is not in it."

Siena spat a word in their own language and still grabbed Miena's hair when Miena went down, not to help the order, to keep her from falling into the full performance unheld.

Miena opened the nightclothes herself.

The collar made the rest look willing.

Her mouth was already parted, already wet from panic, and she whispered the old line as if reading it off a wall,

"I want this most, I want you to use me first, I want my sister to watch so she knows I am not being taken away."

Dolly's knife stayed in her hand.

"If a man comes through this door I am cutting him, if no man comes then this is only a ghost fucking a child with her own voice, and I am not letting a ghost finish."

No man came.

The stitch did not need one in the room.

It only needed Miena's body to run the sequence it had learned in Rigel's chamber, hands, mouth, the shame that had been trained into usefulness.

Miena leaned forward against Siena's grip and made the shape of offering her tongue to empty air, eyes glassy, a sound catching in her throat that was half a sob and half the practiced hunger he had praised.

Siena shook her.

"There is no one there, look, look, you are sucking a command, that is all."

Miena looked.

For a blink she saw the empty rug.

The blink cost her.

The collar tightened the scene back into place and she moaned like a person being touched, hips shifting on her own heels, thighs closing on nothing.

"I know, I know there is no one, I can still taste him, that is the worst of it, the formula does not need his skin once it has been taught the ending."

Dolly crossed, put the knife flat against the collar, not cutting, promising.

"Stand."

The opposing pulls made Miena shudder and come like that, humiliatingly, on her knees facing a closed door, a small helpless clench that left her crying into Siena's wrist while her mouth stayed open for a man who was not in the prefecture.

Siena hauled her up onto the bed and dragged the nightclothes shut so hard a seam clicked.

"Enough, you hear me out there, enough, you got your filthy proof, she looked away from the bird and you still reached her, come put a body in front of me if you want the rest."

The corridor did not answer.

The steward's men passed, calling for the Marquis.

Someone tried the outer hall lamp and found only smear.

Miena, wrecked and bound, turned her face into the pillow and spoke into linen, longer than a plea,

"Write him, Dolly, write the real one, tell him the copy uses the part of me that was trying to survive, tell him if he wants his stitch to stay his he will have to come burn it out, I do not care if that is what he wants, I cannot do this every time a door opens after dark."

Dolly looked at the knife, then at the latched door, then at the space under the bed where cheap blue glass still hid.

"I will write him, I will also wake every man in this house who still belongs to us, and if the merchant is in the walls he will learn this place has more than one kind of collar."

—-

Rigel stopped in the linen passage with Erna's fresh nails shining in cheap wood and Cynthia's distant voice still dragging her father through his own memories, and the cool packet against his chest gave one small tick, late, like an echo arriving after the act it had been built to record.

—-

[A/N: Thanks for reading everyone!]