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She awoke to the glare of sunlight on her face as it reawakened the fading bruises on her cheek and jaw. Like all of her metaspecies called Homofelid Panthera, Lia's ability to recover from even extreme injury was more accelerated than that of anyone in House White other than her sister Cheya's.

She shook her head restlessly as she fought against waking; but it was too late. With a growl of resignation, she opened her large amber eyes and swept them warily over her surroundings. She pulled her arms against the chains that still bound them to cuffs which were flush with the deeply polished hardwood wall, then whimpered slightly as she found that the events of the previous night had not, as she had hoped, been a terrible nightmare from which she might awaken.

Her human, the enslaved soldier named Vam, was dead. She was still a slave. She was being punished for trying to steal the man and escape, to go off and keep him for herself.

She'd had no intention of freeing the human, but she loved him and wanted him for herself, wanted for him a Mistress who wouldn't break him. She had no idealistic notions, no silly idealism; human men should be owned by women. Not human women, of course, that would be ridiculous; but by Awakened women, who were stronger and faster than mundane human men, who deserved to be served by them.

But how could women expect to find good ones if all the good ones were dead, or so badly used that they could no longer serve at their best?

And now here Lia stood, her hands chained, only her feet free, a thick, dark stain on the floor before her attesting to the fact that she had taken a man's life herself the previous night. She didn't particularly feel one way or the other about that one â€" she knew he was no good. That one, a slight, balding, blubbering coward, had betrayed her and cost her her prize and her freedom.

Her ears twitched at the sound of footsteps echoing down the hallway toward Esmerelle White's chambers, the very ones in which Lia stood watching the door with sullen eyes. The outer lock turned â€" for such were the habits of the head of House White that she used her chambers to keep prisoners in as often as to keep unwanted intruders out â€" and the door swung open slowly, as if moving its weight required a tremendous amount of effort.

For a mundane human, it would. Lia growled.

She could smell him even before he stepped inside, the scent of expensive perfumes over lavender soap and honey shampoo, her nose wrinkling in disgust. Outwardly, she was always especially gentle with the house's display boys, the soft, small, effeminate men Esmerelle brought out and made to serve at ceremonies and official House functions where they would be sure to put visitors off their game.

Inwardly, though, Lia viewed them with a sort of thin disgust â€" not directed at them, of course, but at Esmerelle. Was it not enough for her that mundane men were already smaller and weaker than the women and girls of the House? Were even the largest and hardiest of field slaves not already fragile enough? What was the point in keeping such useless bits of flesh as the display slaves?

Lia refused to look at the diminutive blond boy as he did his best to be graceful under the huge breakfast tray. He set it gingerly on a table. "Your breakfast is ready." His voice was a soft tenor, and she wondered if he'd been so soft when he'd been caught or if he'd been here long enough that Esmerelle and the others had molded him into this over years of conditioning.

"Leave it." she growled, then caught herself as his stricken expression appealed to her kinder nature. "Please." she added.

He looked up at her, having to crane his neck slightly to do it. "Your hands are restrained. You'll need me to feed you." His eyes were big and apologetic, because he knew damned well that no woman or slave girl in House White would tolerate being fed by a boy for any reason other than because it might amuse her. And Lia looked like she was about as far from amused as a living being could possibly get.

She wasn't stupid; she knew exactly what their plan was, and she cursed herself inwardly for almost giving in and helping it along by being cruel with the boy.

They thought, because she had fallen in love with Vam Rexen and tried to take him from them, that she was soft on slave boys in general. They saw things in black and white, it seemd; either one was soft and indulgent with all of them, or one smashed them, ripped them to pieces, fucked them dry and then slaughtered them as if they came by the hundreds of thousands.

As if the only choices in the entire spectrum of dealing with slave boys were weakness or waste, softness or stupidity. "If you touch that food without my permission, boy, I'll snap your neck." she growled. "Do you understand?" He quavered, trying to speak with a suddenly dry mouth and failed, then simply nodded.

"Well?" she raised her voice slightly, and slightly was all it took.

"Yes, Mistress!" he yelped â€" despite the steel collar around her own neck, despite her long arms being fixed as they were to the stonework behind the hardwood wall, the soul of what she truly was reached out and seized his own by its metaphorical throat and wrenched the words out of him.

"Good boy." she said more softly. "The meat, first." After long minutes of the boy's soft, conversational musings, which she returned with occasional nods and murrs, the plate was empty, the mug of thin, weak tea sat empty beside it on the table.

As she ate and listened to the boy's trivial but pleasant small talk, she found herself wondering with a mixture of curiosity and dread what the point of this was.

She knew Esmerelle White to be many things, had learned some of them fast and hard the previous evening, but the most outstanding newly discovered trait of the head of the House was that the woman was coldly calculating, and did nothing without a powerful reason behind it.

It was little surprise to Lia, then, when the door to Esmerelle White's bedchambers opened again, effortlessly this time. What did surprise her was that it wasn't Esmerelle who stepped into the wide, deep room, but her sister Cheya.

The boy gasped; Cheya laughed softly, as pleased as ever by the fear and surprise she elicited from the display slaves on her sudden entrances.

"Well." she looked over at Lia with a smirk that wore a trimming of disgust around the edges. "And what has my little sister been up to this morning besides just hanging around?" The boy laughed, more out of duty and self-preservation than because it was funny; his eyes showed that clearly enough.

Cheya looked him over as he knelt before Lia. She still wore filmy, nearly translucent night clothes, which seemed remarkable to Lia, who rarely saw her in anything other than the leather strip-armor common to the House Guards.

Then Lia understood what Cheya was up to; her sister, identical to herself, was trying to pass herself off as a slave. Her suspicion was confirmed when Cheya slipped over next to the blond boy and knelt next to him. Even when both were on their knees, the muscular thickness of her calves and thighs had her hips even with his chest; her long, black hair lay free of its customary rope-thick braid, wild around her bare shoulders.

Shaking her head, Lia discovered with resignation but not much surprise that someone had braided her own hair in the style Cheya usually wore sometime while she was either unconscious or sleeping. She might have been drugged, though the thought didn't occupy much of her attention. It was an odd thing, a curiosity, but...

Cheya looked down at the boy, sneered at him in a habit she didn't bother to hide. "Mistress is beautiful, isn't she, brother?" she asked in a voice more mild than Lia had ever heard from her mouth to the ears of a slave.

The boy gulped; he, like Lia, could sense that it might be a trick question, though he couldn't guess how or why. He was clearly confused, though, by the identical women and by the sudden reversal in Cheya's tone toward Lia.

"Yes." he answered quietly.

"And what about me?" she followed almost on his words, her voice low, seductive and taunting. "Am I beautiful, brother?"

Lia saw now where her sister was going with this game; Cheya was going to trick the boy into expressing lust for a woman of the House. One of the rules of the House was that boys were to keep their libidos in check; they were to be ready for use at all times, but they were never, never to initiate anything. Forbidding them this was one of the controls Esmerelle used to keep them weak, to keep them subservient, always hungry to please.

Now Cheya would pervert that rule yet further and trick the boy into showing lust; and it wouldn't matter for which one of them he expressed it. The law of House White considered intent as bad as commission of the crime, and commission of the crime as worthy of punishment as intent.

If the boy showed lust for Lia, whom Cheya meant him to think was a Free woman of the House, Cheya would kill him for his intent; if he expressed lust for Cheya, she'd kill him for actually committing the offense.

Cheya leaned toward the boy, placing the hand nearest him gently on his far cheek to press her lips to his ear, then whisper into it. "Do you want me?"

Lia's hearing was good enough that Cheya's whispering didn't matter a bit; she did it, apparently, for the boy's benefit. Lia noted with narrowed eyes how skillfully Cheya manipulated the boy, how careful she was not to suggest that she wanted him.

And now the boy began to sense the danger in the question. His trembling returned more strongly even as gooseflesh sprung into the sunlight on his slim, tanned arms and shoulders, his eyes widening with fear even as his cheeks reddened with the obviousness of his body's answer to the question.

Then he did something which surprised both Lia and Cheya. He looked over at Cheya, his eyes toward her neck as he looked to see if she had a collar around it. But she turned her head, the thick curtains of her coal-black hair sweeping over her neck to obscure his view. He reached out â€" Lia cringed, knowing what he would do â€" and moved her hair aside and back to her shoulder.

She moved fast, so fast that no human reflex could have saved him from the back-handed blow that caught him across the temple and flung him, sprawling and skidding, across the floor until the wall stopped him with a resounding crash.

She grinned up at Lia, her fangs bared and her green eyes glittering, before retaking her feet and walking gracefully and silently over to where the boy moaned in a fetal ball, his hand pressed to the side of his head.

He pulled himself up to his knees again, seeming stunned as much from the fact that he'd been slapped as from the slap itself. Because they were so much smaller than work slaves, or perhaps despite it, display slaves were seldom if ever subjected to the harsh physical abuse of work boys; emboldened by this, by the illusion of affection this sometimes engendered in them, some of them did tend, ironically, to become bolder than the other, bigger boys.

"Did I instruct you to touch me, boy?" Cheya hissed, placing one foot squarely on his chest, its claws extended, and flattening him back to the floor with a thrust of her powerful, hugely muscled thigh.

The breath slammed out of him, fresh tears of pain welling in his eyes. He could only shake his head ‘no' in answer.

"No, I didn't." she growled, and pressed down harder, shifting some of her 240 pounds of solid weight onto his weedy 115 pound body. He began to squirm involuntarily under her foot as it ground into his torso.

She turned her head fast enough to swing her long hair over her shoulder, obscuring her face so that the terrified boy who lay at her mercy couldn't see the devilish grin she flashed at her sister. Then she turned her face back to him. "See the Mistress on the wall there?" she asked. "You want to rut with her, boy? She's attractive enough, isn't she."

And that was it â€" she had him now, as if there had ever been any doubt she would maneuver him into just the answer she wanted. He stared up at her, mortified. "I â€" " he blanked. There was no answer that would save his life. A "yes" would mean he was showing lust toward a woman of the House without her permission. A "no" would be interpreted as an answer to the question of her beauty, an insult which would also get him put to death.

So it was that, in a final act of defiance, he simply refused to answer. It didn't bother Cheya in the least; she grabbed a fistful of his hair, lifting him to his feet by it as he cried out in pained protest, and flung him with one arm toward Lia.

Lia couldn't catch him with her arms â€" she didn't particularly want him crashing into her, either. She lifted and opened her legs, closed them around his body as he stumbled into her grip. She didn't squeeze, merely held him there.

But he was so small and so slender that the mere act of her thighs holding him upright was enough to set him shivering with fear at the feel of warm, hard flesh under cool, short, soft black fur, the limbs swallowing his upper body from waist to shoulders. She stared down at him, and the tip of her pink tongue flickered over full black lips as her large green eyes narrowed slightly.

Cheya caught the look and growled happily. "Go ahead, Lia. I can see you want to hear the sounds again. The ones the little doctor-boy's body made when you killed him."

The slender, fair-haired display boy looked up at her with fearful, pleading eyes. She stared back at him, unblinking, unfazed. And then it occurred to her that she should be, if not ashamed, disgusted with herself.

Because Cheya was right â€" she did want to hear it again. She had enjoyed taking the little traitor's life the night before, hearing him breaking apart inside, things bursting and tearing inside his body as she ground him to a semi-flat, hot, sticky pulp for what he'd cost her. And she'd enjoy it again if she got the chance â€" but not this way. "No." She shook her head and opened her legs, letting the terrified little slave boy fall to land on the floor with a surprised look on his face. "You tricked him into trouble."

Cheya growled. "So what!" she hissed, then sprang forward to sweep an arm under the boy's throat, looping her forearm under his chin and dragging him to his feet by the throat, the back of his head pressed into her large, firm breast. "Look at him! Look how weak he is, how tiny!" She tightened her grip and the boy struggled â€" but it was meaningless; escape from her, for him, would be impossible.

Her other hand came up to press against the side of his face, her long, sharp black claws extending, nicking his flawless skin. He hadn't throat enough to cry out at the pain of it. "What is this thing good for if not to amuse us!"

Lia shook her head again stubbornly. "I won't kill one that doesn't deserve it. And he doesn't. You had to trick him." she reminded her sister, who snarled and hurled the boy bodily across the floor to slam into the wall. He struck it face-first and crumpled to the floor, then curled up and sobbed in pain and fear. Both women wrinkled their noses at the bitter, acrid smell of terror in his pores, on his skin.

Cheya stepped up to her sister, her eyes narrowed in anger. "You have to learn what a woman's place is in this House, and what the animals we bring here are for." She growled, but her voice was lower, slightly softer. "You have a long day ahead of you, sister."

With that, she turned and strode quickly back over to the whimpering boy, stepping quickly around behind him and yanking him up off his back by his hair, then stepping quickly over his shoulders to secure his head between her large, powerfully muscled thighs, pulling his skull as high up into her crotch as it would go.

"Please, Mistress!" his begging came instantly, and a look of disgusted superiority blossomed on Cheya's face. She placed her feet together and the thick ribbons of inner thigh muscle expanded as she flexed them, turning his begging into wordless cries of agony.

"You see how fragile they are?" she asked Lia in a light, whimsical tone. Then she crossed her ankles, holding his head in place with one hand as she turned one thigh outward slightly to bring the powerful hamstring to bear on his trapped skull.

His cries rose to high-pitched screams as her thighs began to close. Her eyes rolled back in her head; her head tilted back as her lips parted, her tongue wetting her lips, which then parted to display her short but razor-sharp fangs as her thighs bulged around the tiny skull clutched tightly between them. Her hips began to rock faintly, forward, back again, forward, as her breathing grew deeper and quickened.

Suddenly, Lia looked down in amazement as she realized that she herself was growing wet from the awesome display, then looked up again, hungry and sickened at the same time by the unexpected pleasure of what she was watching.

She felt her own ass and thighs flex sympathetically with her twin's as Cheya arched her back to apply even greater pressure, felt her own breathing quicken rapidly as Cheya's thighs seemed to nearly devour their prey whole, and when the screams of her sister's victim reached a fever pitch, when the sound of bone grinding and cracking, the burst and gush of blood and matter burst from between Cheya's murderous thighs, both women came together, hard, for nearly five solid minutes.

When their breathing returned to normal, Cheya opened her thighs and let the body slump the rest of the way to the floor. Stretching her arms over her head, her breasts thrusting outward, she licked her lips again and smiled as though nothing particularly interesting were going on and walked over to where Lia hung staring at the mostly decapitated body.

Lia, for her part, found that it no longer particularly bothered her. After all, she hadn't really cared about this particular human one way or another.

"Do you think you have the stomach to clean that up without having to be beaten?" Cheya smirked. Lia stared at her, and Cheya seemed to take the meaning of that stare. "Good. Breakfast in the kitchen as usual. And by the way, you won't be serving in the kitchen any longer." She took a key from a nearby table and opened the manacles that had held Lia's wrists for that long, long night.

"What am I going to do today, then?" Lia asked, rubbing the soreness out of her wrists and the circulation back in.

"You're being re-trained." was all the answer Cheya would give her. "I'll be in the bath. Take that," she pointed at what remained of the display boy, "out back. There's a pit for it behind the barracks. I wouldn't bother looking into the pit if I were you, just throw it in."

Lia did her best not to look into the pit â€" she nearly did, but it only took catching sight of Vam's trousers, just the cuff of them, to turn her eyes quickly away again. She decided she had to stop thinking about what had happened to the human she actually had wanted to keep. She found her way back to the kitchen after giving herself a quick bath, and found her sister, the Captain of the Guard, the gigantic vixen Talis Vorran, and the Lady of the House, Esmerelle White, all in what until today had been her kitchen.

She stopped and blinked in astonishment. In the first place, it was highly unusual for any of the Free women of the House to come into the kitchen themselves. In the second place, here was the Captain of the Guard, one of the most important Free women of the House. And lastly, here was the most important woman of the House.

Esmerelle didn't bother wasting time with preamble. "You're to go with Talis for retraining, girl. After that, your sister will continue your new education. Then you'll come to me. Do you understand?"

She may not have liked it. She wouldn't have agreed to it if she'd had any say. But that wasn't what she had been asked â€" and she did understand. So after a moment of thinking it over, she simply gave a silent nod.

"Good." Esmerelle turned her emerald eyes away from Lia and back to Cheya. Obviously, Lia had interrupted some sort of conversation, and her sister was none too satisfied with her end of it by the look on her face. But she'd get over it.

Talis took her feet, looming over Lia for a moment before turning, her long red hair lying in wild waves down her back â€"â€" a back that was a map of ridges and valleys of muscle a mile wide to any average sized person, but on her immense frame was comparably slim and feminine.

The monstrously hard globes of her ass swayed as she walked, and Lia found herself forcing her eyes off them as she followed. She didn't have even the slightest sexual attraction to women, but Talis Vorran was simply such a monumental sight that no one, male or female, could help but stare from the time she entered a room until the time she either walked out or anyone who had been captivated by the sight lay scattered in pieces around her.

Talis had led her back out the kitchen door and into the rear courtyard where stood the Barracks, the Infirmary and the Stables. A small group of gagged men stood nervously, their wrists manacled behind their backs, as the two women approached. Two women, a yojimba and a tigress, stood on either side of the group, both nearly nude in their House armor, both formidable figures in their own right.

The men saw Talis's approach and began to shiver, muffled protests sounding through the thick black bundles wrapped between their teeth around the backs of their necks. Their eyes were wide, their faces pale.

"What am I supposed to do with them, Mistress?" Lia asked, already not liking where this was headed. She had discovered something in herself, and she had no doubt that her sister had told Esmerelle all about it. Now this. A house slave, an effeminate little display boy, that was one thing. She could live with that.

But these men weren't collared. They weren't adorned in either the woolen tunics of field boys, the arm bands and black loincloths of house slaves or the flimsy silks of display slaves.

These men were captives, and by their reactions to the women holding them captive, probably fresh off the streets of Teletus. Maybe plucked from markets, maybe from their own houses, Lia didn't know. But if she was expected to kill any of these to satisfy the stern giantess who held her captive as much as any of them, she didn't know if she could do it.

"You'll watch." Talis said simply, stepping closer to the group. The yojimba and the tigress on either side of the men shoved them back toward each other and Talis as they tried to withdraw from the oncoming titanic redhead.

Lia wasn't sure she could even do that. She had seen what just her twin had done to her pet, her Vam, and she didn't know if she could stomach what a woman Talis's size could inflict on a human. At least the little silk boy Cheya had killed had died more quickly. Talis, Lia had heard, liked to kill men slowly, horribly.

One of the men looked up... and up... as Talis drew nearer. He lost his bladder control, his urine steaming as it hit the ground. He began to sob pathetically behind his gag. Talis grinned, a mirthless baring of teeth, and seized his chin in her hand, the, crimson-enameled claws on thumb and fingers pressing the skin of his cheeks until they nearly punctured it as she did. "You're first."

He was a man of healthy size for a mundane human. Six feet tall, perhaps two hundred pounds. Well-muscled, with a handsome face. In Teletus, he'd probably had the interest of a dozen women. But next to the seven and a half foot vixen whose back alone was twice as wide as any part of him, whose hips, buttocks, thighs and calves were amazingly prominent even compared to her upper body, he was nothing.

She shifted the angle of her hand on his face, her hand covering his face entirely, and the cords of muscle in her forearms flexed, the thick, horseshoe shaped ridge of her triceps muscle rising under her skin beneath the thick chevron cap of her shoulder, and he began to scream.

His arms trapped behind his back still lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped, faster as his legs began to kick. Then he lost his footing and his legs kicked freely in the air as she lifted him by his face, one handed, the thick, steel muscles of her arm growing more visibly defined as they flexed hard under the skin.

A savage series of snaps provided percussion for alarmingly high-pitched screams that turned to thick, choking gurgles as his legs stopped kicking and twitched instead as she held him up by his face at arm's length. His bladder released again, then his bowels as Talis growled low in her chest, her arm beginning to tremble slightly with exertion as the crunching sound resumed in a swift, thick finale, an eerie, wet ripping sound coming with it now.

The body dropped from her grip without her opening her fingers. All but the rear third of his skull was a pulpy mass of dark blood and tissue shot through with shards of bone. She opened her hand and dropped what remained of his face onto his chest, then thrust that hand into a ready bucket of warm water, toweling it dry and clean after a few moments of scrubbing.

Lia stared in shock at the corpse. Like the other, there was no face left to see â€" no way to guess what it had been thinking in its final conscious, sane second. She inhaled, and under the pungent odors of the human's demise, she could smell something else.

It was familiar â€" it was something she smelled within the walls of the House all the time, and she had always thought she'd enjoyed it because of that familiarity. It was the smell of human fear. Only human fear came with a smell. In the House, it was ever-present, but it was subdued, low-key.

Out here, though, right now, it was strong and vibrant. It filled her nostrils, made her light-headed. She began to realize that what she was feeling was excitement. And then it occurred to her that she was also feeling... aroused. As she had when she had watched Cheya devour the display boy's skull between her thighs and take pleasure from his death, all the pleasure such a weak little man could possibly provide.

But Talis didn't seem to register any such pleasure â€" or at least, not as much as Cheya had. The towering vixen simply watched Lia, for the most part, impassively â€" though a subtle turn could be seen at the corners of her lips, the faintest of smiles.

"You handled that well enough." Talis acknowledged mildly. "There are two more. It's time for you to take more responsibility."

Lia gulped. "What do you mean, Mistress?" A cool breeze blew in off the city, and the smell of humans cooking their breakfasts reached her nostrils as the gust ruffled her hair, making her hungry.

"Human men," Talis said, seeming almost cheerful as she placed her hand atop the head of one of them and turned his face roughly toward Lia, forcing him to meet her eyes, "are animals. They're useful enough for light work, if they do it well, and so we keep some of them. But fundamentally, they are playthings. They amuse us, or they die. Sometimes we take them simply so that they will amuse us when they die. Do you understand?"

She wouldn't have understood, the previous night, or any day before that. But these feelings that had begun to stir inside her were undeniable. Yes â€" she was coming to understand this. She nodded, unable to find her voice.

"Now you choose, girl." Talis said, pulling the one on whom she had a grip out away from the last remaining man and standing him in front of Lia. "How will this one amuse us?" She gave Lia a look. "And be creative, girl. This is the one and only time you will ever give me a suggestion."

Lia gulped. Though she couldn't deny her reactions to the kills her sister and the Captain of the House Guard had made, she was still fighting them. She didn't want to see men this way. Something in her was beginning to, but she didn't want it. And yet... the man held fast in front of her was going to die. She knew better than to even hope otherwise. She racked her brain for the most merciful way.

"Smother him in your breasts?" Even given permission to make the choice, she didn't dare make it sound like an order. Not to anyone as immense as Talis Vorran.

The vixen roared with laughter as the man's eyes pleaded silently with Lia "You're really not getting into the spirit of this, girl!" Talis giggled. "But I have to say, this would be the first time I've ever made a kill with my tits!" she giggled again.

She spun the man around, reaching down behind his head to pull the gag free, then pulled it from his mouth, dropping it to the ground. "What do you say to that, boy? You like these?" She pushed her shoulders forward to squeeze her insanely large, firm breasts together.

His answer was obvious; his cock lifted slowly to eventually stand a rapt attention as Talis twitched her pectoral muscles, causing first one breast then the other to bounce at his upturned face.

"Oh, look at that!" Talis giggled to Lia, then reached down with her other hand to squeeze the hapless man's raging erection between a powerful thumb and forefinger. Her touch was overwhelming but gentle. She moved her hand with long, slow strokes, until the man was breathless and sweating, then took her hand away. She turned a wry look on Lia, her green eyes sparkling. "Do you want to use him before he... goes?"

Lia shook her head with a half-measure of regret. She did and she didn't. She liked human men for that; but there was still a ghost of Vam Rexen in those desires, so she pushed them down, or tried to.

Talis shrugged. "All right, then. I think I will." She set her feet slightly farther apart, at shoulder width, and reached around the man with one hand wrapped around the back of his head, the other reaching down under his crotch, to lift his once more terrified form into the air.

His struggles subsided for a moment as she guided his cock to her nether lips and sunk him into herself with one quick, deep thrust â€" but they renewed and redoubled almost instantly as her inner walls tightened around him, milking his cock invisibly but brutally as she pressed his entire head into the valley between her tits and sealed off air, light and sound in warm, firm darkness lined with short, soft fur.

Talis moaned, a low, guttural sound that almost resembled a snarl but for the edge of carnal need that laced it. Her columnar thighs flexed, once, then harder, a muffled howl of agony rising from the face held fast between her heaving tits. Her head tilted back in growing pleasure as his arms and legs flailed wildly, beat at her, hammered at her as he struggled for breath he would never get again.

Lia's felt an ache in her cunt, a tingling at her clit, as she watched this â€" no matter how she fought, it rose in her consciousness again and again, stronger each time.

She could feel the blood pounding through her limbs in time to the savage, lethal forced fucking the amazonian vixen inflicted on her puny human victim â€" and for just a moment, she no longer gave a damn about the man as a person. She watched Talis Vorran using him as a sex toy, a helpless, weak little doll from whom she would take what she craved and then demolish him â€" and as Lia felt her own powerful muscles flex along with the bigger woman's, she stopped fighting the urge in herself. She wanted to play, now, too.

Talis's moans grew more intense, her breathing thick and deep and coming faster as she rocked her hips in increasingly powerful thrusts, bouncing the comparably tiny human man in her grip. Her hips were wide enough to accommodate at least two men his size â€" Lia felt her limbs tighten and start to tremble as Talis's climax approached.

Then both women screamed bliss at the wide blue sky as Talis's victim partially dislodged from her grip, his lower body spasming and twitching jerkily, a thin river of blood flowing from the head of his mashed, ruined cock, the twitching finally dying away as her victim finally succumbed to the lack of oxygen. Talis held him there for at least five minutes more as she fingered herself to another climax. When she finally released the body, it crumpled at her feat, the glazed eyes staring up at her but seeing nothing.

Lia stared at Talis, her eyes burning, her fingers trembling. When Talis gestured to the two women holding the last man in place, when they let him go, Lia's mouth watered. When she turned to Lia, pointing at the man, and said, "That one is yours." Lia leapt at the man.

She stopped short â€" she didn't want to take him quickly. She wanted it to last. She already knew the lesson in this one; she wasn't stupid. The first one she had been made to watch; the second she had been made to decide â€" finally, now, she was expected to make the kill. What she hadn't expected was... she wanted to.

Maybe it was the nature of her metaspecies, the natural hunter-killer of all felids, great or small â€" and maybe mundane and Awakened. Maybe the Awakened higher intellect simply added a new ability to eons-old predatory instincts.

Maybe it was the discovery, the previous night, that it was within her power to kill a human man and enjoy it. After all, it had long ago been known that power corrupts.

Maybe it was simply that after she had lost the one human she cared for, she saw no reason to spare any of the other ones who crossed her path.

But whatever the reason, Lia grinned in a gleaming display of teeth and claws, her eyes wide, her long black hair wild, and stalked her prey, playing with him, just as it was her instinct to do.

He backed away, fearful and yet this one's cock, too, was erect, bobbing and swaying with his stumbling retreat. Lia growled joyfully. Their fear was almost more delightful than their pain, she was discovering.

Talis must have gestured to them unseen by Lia, for the women who had held this last captive withdrew fully from the edges of her vision to circle around and watch with the giantess as the captive continued to retreat, shaking, not looking at where he was going because he was helpless to take his eyes from the vision of sensual, beautiful Death that relentlessly stalked him.

Suddenly, she stilled and looked over her shoulder at the three women watching. Her eyes burning, her teeth bared, she almost seemed to demand, "The key!"

The yojimba turned to look up at Talis. The giantess shrugged dismissively. "Go ahead. Give her the key." It was not, after all, as if the man would live, even if he did manage to beat or break free of Lia.

Lia snagged the key from midair on one unsheathed claw, then lunged for the man, wrapping her arms around him. She pressed her forehead to his, her thick black mane blocking everything from his sight but her large, luminous eyes staring down into his. "Do you want a chance?" she growled softly.

He must have nodded yes â€" or perhaps he didn't and it simply didn't matter, the spectators couldn't tell which. But then his hands were freed and the manacles fell to the ground as Lia gave him some distance.

He actually did something smart â€" rather than shunning the steel bracelets that had confined him, as anyone so confined would most likely have done, he picked them up off the ground, took one of the bracelets in his fist and closed the ratcheting steel loop around his fingers; he now had a makeshift weapon that resembled a combination of brass knuckles and a very short flail, for which he actually received nods and whistles in admiration of his ingenuity.

Not that it would matter in the end, of course.

He dropped into a low, fluid fighting posture, his left arm out across his chest, the weapon in his right hand low at his hip. He continued to back away, but with growing confidence, circling this way and that as Lia closed in.

Talis began to laugh quietly. Lia may only have been a slave girl, not a trained fighter, but the man was obviously beginning to fancy his odds far more than he would have had he known that this untrained slave girl had surprised even the Mistress of the House, which thing Talis had overheard Esmerelle White grumbling to herself about only that morning.

As Lia came to nearly within arm's reach of the man, he lunged forward, his left arm sliding out quickly from across his own chest to cross Lia's firm breasts, slapping them hard as his right hand shot up vertically, then down diagonally, the improvised flail whistling harshly as it descended toward her eye.

It never connected. With a snarl, Lia dropped her own stance low, her powerful legs coiling, then leaned forward into him and released the coiled columns of muscle to launch them both through the air, her arms wrapping around him in mid-flight, her greater body-weight pounding him into the soft earth as they came down.

Her face descended as he struggled hard under her but only for a moment before his body seized and he screamed. Lia unwound her arms and rolled away, spitting his ear into the grass, her bared teeth now red with his blood, and crouched to face him again.

Behind her, Talis looked faintly surprised. Watching Lia, she saw a doppelganger of Cheya when that one had been training as a House Guard, many years ago. If anything, Lia looked to Talis's practiced eye as though she might eventually be more dangerous than her sister; while Cheya fought and killed and destroyed out of sadistic pleasure, what Talis saw in Lia was different. Darker. What Talis saw was rage.

The man staggered to his feet. This alone warranted a brief flicker of admiration from Talis, who knew how easily even human soldiers could be led by physical discomfort. He brushed the back of his unarmed forearm across his eyes, shook his head and then glared balefully at Lia, who now circled him slowly.

For his part, though, the man was not about to be the one to charge in again. He had clearly never fought a felid before, with their superhuman strength, speed and reflexes. Nevertheless, the stakes of this small battle were high enough that he seemed compelled to be a quick study.

"This might be interesting, after all." Talis remarked quietly to the tigress standing beside her, who only nodded, engrossed in the show.

Without any further warning, Lia leapt in again at the man, her massive but lithe body sailing toward him with outstretched claws, bared fangs and a roar in her throat â€" all unbridled enthusiasm and raw kinetic energy. This time, though, the man did something wholly unexpected. He dropped and rolled up onto his shoulder blades, both feet coming up together.

Lia's claws skimmed his chest as her solar plexus came down on the balls of his feet.

His rearward momentum combined with her forward momentum, and his slightly flexed knees straightened to launch her further. She was sent crashing to the soft grass. Talis and the two women with her laughed uproariously and began to applaud the man with genuine appreciation for his inventiveness.

Lia lay where she had come to a stop for a moment. Partially because she was pretty well winded by the unexpected move. A greater part of the reason, though, was that she was more infuriated than she had ever been â€" a frozen, shaking rage gripped her. This wasn't the same as when her Vam had been taken away from her â€" that anger had been shot through with loss and sadness. This was different â€" a silently howling fury so hot it felt cold, as though every cell of her body burned with an eerie white glacial flame.

The man stood unsure for a moment, not having expected to be applauded, of all things, and narrowed his eyes at the three spectators, wondering which of them he would have to take on next â€" or whether, having dispatched the big black cat, he'd now be charged by all three of them. His hand lifted to the bloody hole where his ear had been, covering the torn skin where the shell of his ear had been.

While his eyes were still narrowed and focused on the spectators, a pair of hard footfalls sounded from behind him, and before he could react, a thickly corded, black-furred forearm shot up under his lifted arm while another slipped around his throat. Lia growled low before lifting her legs up and around the man's sides. Her weight pulled them both to the ground.

She wrenched the hold on his neck down hard, her bloodstained teeth flashing triumphantly as her thighs powered in on his trapped sides.

The man was robbed of breath. Unable to make a sound, all he could do was thrash his legs, try valiantly to pull his trapped arm from Lia's grip. His other hand was clenched into a white-knuckled fist. He beat on her thigh. If she noticed, it only had the effect of causing her to squeeze in harder. He tried to pry her forearm from his throat, but that was equally futile.

The body trapped in Lia's grip began to convulse, a series of horrifying snaps emanating from it as the black fur on thick thighs powered in on rapidly bruising tanned skin. Finally he lay as limp as a doll in her grip, blood flowing from the corner of his mouth, his eyes bulged, glassy, staring at a horizon none of them could see.

Lia lay there panting and grinning, her eyes wild, for a moment or two more before she looked down at the body clutched brutally hard in her long limbs. With a muted sound of protest, she sprung up and away from it, letting it crumple to lie in the grass.

Talis watched the play of emotion the girl tried to subdue. She nodded, mused to herself. "Definite potential." She called out to Lia. "Come over here, girl."

Lia came on shaking legs and knelt in front of the giantess. "Yes, Mistress."

Talis rested a huge hand in the girl's hair. "Well done. And now here's the moral: killing that one was only optional." She looked down in time to see the girl's large amber eyes well with sudden tears of confusion and anguish.

"Mistress?" Lia whispered.

"The first exercise was to see if you could watch one die without flinching." Talis explained. "The second was to give you a hand in it by letting you choose how the beast would die. But the last..." she allowed a slow, wicked smile, "was to allow you to take the entire decision into your own hands, to decide whether that one would die. And there was no wrong choice."

"You mean I could have..." Lia sat, her ass resting on her heels and her knees in the soft, warm grass, and felt sick. Turning her head, she looked back at the torn and crushed body lying a few meters away. The body of a man she had killed â€" not because she had to. Because it was fun. Just for the fun of it.

Her guts felt as though they were filled with ice, then something rose in them â€" maybe remorse and guilt, maybe bile. She leaned to one side and almost apologetically vomited into the grass.

She expected to be struck for it, but she was surprised when she looked back at Talis and found that she was only smiling, and with a wholly unexpected warmth to it. "Don't feel bad, girl. I excused my breakfast too, the first day. You'll get over it. We all do." Talis gave the other two women a look, then said, "That's enough for today, Lia. Go bathe yourself and then come for lunch. You can spend the rest of the day doing as you like, but exercise and rest would serve you well. Tomorrow will be much harder."

Lia thought back on that word of caution from the giantess as she stepped into the hastily constructed arena the following morning just as dawn was breaking. She adjusted the odd helmet for what felt like the thousandth time, hating the way it confined her ears, then slipped on the pair of thick cushion gloves and instantly hated them just as much.

Cheya didn't seem to be any happier about the strange, crude protective gear than her sister was. She shot sidelong, angry glances toward the other guards, who in turn giggled and returned her glares with lovingly crass gestures.

Lia watched this interplay with a bemused curiosity; the rude and crude banter would have been enough to get any of them into a fight who had heard or seen it from a stranger, but the uncouth names they were flinging at each other seemed to be taken more as terms of endearment than anything else.

She spotted the only one who wasn't engaging into the verbal sparring sitting to the left of the giantess Talis; the Mistress of the House, Esmerelle White, sat and watched only Lia and her sister, with a focus so intense it sent a feeling of awkwardness drifting through the girl.

Esmerelle set herself apart from her guards in still another way. Unlike the other women, who wore tight-fitting and almost-obscenely minimal leather strip armor that covered only those few areas their fur didn't, Esmerelle was dressed in a way that must have been absolutely stuffy in comparison; a sun-dress of some deep indigo fabric that looked expensive sheathed the curves covered short, fine ivory fur, and her long blonde hair was piled atop her head under a broad-brimmed hat of the same color. Her large emerald eyes were focused and apparently anxious for the beginning of the show.

Talis stood, towering over the seated spectators, and opened her long arms wide; that was all she had to do to get everyone's attention. So it was almost redundant when she said loudly, "All right, my pretty little cunts, shut 'em!" She turned slightly and bowed toward Esmerelle, "Good morning, Lady."

Esmerelle shook for a moment with quiet laughter. "Good morning, Talis."

Talis turned back toward the two identical, and identically gloved, booted and helmeted, contenders in the arena. "This morning's presentation will last for three rounds, until knockout, until submission or until desist order and technical judgment!"

She pointed toward Lia, "In this corner, the Duchess of dumplings..." the women laughed. "The Princess of pot roast..." the laughter grew louder, and even Lia giggled, "the scullery girl who will rock your world... Lia!"

Lia took a little bow, somewhat relaxed by the joking. Then the affectionate barrages of insults the women had flung back and forth at each other began to make sense. Still, it wasn't water she was comfortable testing yet, herself.

But it came as no surprise at all when Talis pointed at Cheya and announced, "Oh, and over there's Cheya, the horrible little bitch." Howls of laughter rose from the spectators as Cheya mugged for the crowd.

"Round one!" Talis raised her voice to carry over and crowd, and they hushed. "Fight!"

Cheya and Lia began to circle. Though her training was negligible, Lia's instincts were as strong as her sister's. Lia's movements were cautious, but her sister's were calculated. Both women's' eyes were fierce, narrowed with concentration. Lia realized that Cheya was playing a game of sorts with her. She thought back to their last fight, to how move led to countermove, and how Cheya had only taken the upper hand when Lia had lost her focus and struck from emotion rather than at the sight of opportunity. So now they danced with feline grace, total lethality and unswerving focus.

Cheya made the first move, an impatient left swipe. Lia hadn't heard any rules, and she made the most of that and just hoped she wouldn't cross any unspoken boundaries. Leaning back just out of reach of her sister's whistling swing, she rebounded with her whole body, then lifted her leading shin up into her sister's crotch, hard. Cheya hissed and fell back, closing her legs, and Lia took advantage, spinning to sweep her whole left leg out and into Cheya's knee, toppling her into the soft dug earth of the arena, then danced back.

There was a roar from the spectators that was half applause and half surprise. Cheya was back up on her feet instantly, a roar of indignation rocketing out of her as she charge toward Lia. Lia sidestepped, catching Cheya's elbow and sweeping her leg around and up to catch Cheya in the ass, knocking her headlong back into the dirt again.

This time, Cheya climbed back to her feet, dusted herself off with the gloves, and blinked at her "little" sister in confusion. Where the hell had this come from?! her eyes seemed to ask. A hush had fallen over the spectators as well that seemed to carry the same perplexed energy. Lia held her focus, dancing lightly on the balls of her feet, ready for Cheya's next move.

Cheya began to circle again, closing the distance slowly, more carefully this time. She offered a jab, then a pair, but danced away each time, no longer willing to underestimate the slave girl. Lia began to tire, eventually, and impatience took hold. The chilly breeze ruffled her hair across her back, sent a low whistle through the helmet that bound her ears. Her belly rumbled slightly â€" she thought of her breakfast.

Cheya's glove caught the chin pad of her helmet, jarring her, and then a knee came up and landed square in her solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her. Her back hit the soft dirt before she could regain her focus or her composure, and Cheya grinned icily down at her, her glove drawn back for a knockout. She had let her concentration slip, and now she was about to pay for it.

She rolled to one side as Cheya stepped in to deliver the knockout punch. Lia hooked one foot around her sister's ankle and completed the motion of rolling onto her side by slamming the top of her other foot into the inside of the same knee, then swiveling her hips hard to bring her sister down to the ground as well.

Cheya hissed in frustration, lifting her other leg to bring it down over Lia's, the two entwined together, clamping down on each other with long, muscular legs, leaving only their hands free. At least the helmets kept the razor-sharp fangs of the two from coming into play against each other.

The crowd began to chant â€" some for Cheya but, surprising, as many for the remarkable challenger. All but a few of them had lost track of which one was which, though, in the turning, rolling, tumble of the two identical bodies in the dirt of the arena.

Cheya leaned up on one elbow and delivered a slap that descended on Lia's helmet like a hammer, bouncing her head off the floor of the arena and setting off a starburst behind her eyelids. Lia spit out a scream of pain and fury, then lifted both her legs and slammed them brutally back to the ground â€" a faint ‘pop' could be heard as Cheya's knee, subject to the agonizing torsion of Lia's hold on it, dislocated.

Tears of pain and humiliation streaming from her eyes, Cheya was forced to reach back and slap the earth with her glove three times, the signal of submission. She let go of Lia's legs and rolled away, clutching her knee and fighting to keep the pain from showing on her face. She found that was easier to do with her back to the spectators.

The crowd was absolutely silent. Finally, Talis stood and marched out toward the two. Lia felt her fingers trembling at the sight of the woman's approach. She had no idea whether she was about to be allowed to go eat or whether the giantess was about to slap the face right off the front of her head.

The taller woman just looked down at her with an unreadable expression, then seized her wrist. Lia was sure that at any moment she was going to lose control of her bladder, right down the insides of her thighs, until Talis turned and lifted her arm. "The winner, by submission â€" Lia!" She led Lia up out of the arena and into the stands, where Esmerelle took her feet, simply looked her up and down once and then nodded. From the corner of her eye, Lia watched as a pair of guards led Cheya off, presumably to the Infirmary to get her something for the pain of her dislocated knee.

"Tomorrow." The Mistress of the House said simply. And then they let her go have her breakfast. She exercised for the rest of the day, then rested.

The following morning she was roused from her cushions early again. This time, Talis made her roll them up and carry them under her arm out the kitchen door and over toward the arena. Sleepy eyed and confused, Lia could barely contain the yawn that swept over her as they stepped into the chill pre-dawn air. She fought to keep up with Talis's long strides as they marched toward the arena. This didn't make any sense. Was she being punished for something they hadn't told her about, after all?

But Talis continued past the arena, and the sound of a hammer pounding nails into wood finally caught Lia's attention. She hadn't solved the riddle in her ears until now, thinking it much too early for construction and mystified by what was being built at such an ungodly hour.

They rounded the corner of the barracks wall, though, and there it stood â€" whatever it was. Lia's excellent low-light vision showed her a single-story building, smallish compared to the barracks, about the same size as the kitchen. It had narrow horizontal slot windows as the barracks did. It really resembled nothing so much as a miniature version of that building, with a thick hardwood door, single on this one compared to the double doors on the barracks, and this one sported a thick iron band so that it could be locked from outside.

"Is it a jail, Mistress?" she inquired of Talis in a still-sleepy voice.

"Don't call me Mistress, Lia." Talis answered. Lia blinked and turned to face the larger woman, unsure of herself. She turned, as it happened, just in time to see Talis's hands reaching out and around her neck. "Don't move." the larger's voice was hard, but just hard enough to freeze Lia in place. She heard and felt something moving in the lock of her collar, and then it opened and Talis took it from her neck.

"I don't understand." Lia said.

Talis slipped the steel band onto her belt, then closed it again with a faint click. "By breakfast time, girl," she explained. "You'll either be free or dead. Either way, you're no longer a slave. At least, not in the normal sense." She chuckled at the fact that her answer could only have raised more questions than it put to sleep. "You have one more task ahead of you, though."

"What is it...?" Lia's voice trailed off, now having no idea how she was supposed to address the Captain of the House Guards.

A voice spoke up from behind them. "Your last task is... me."

Lia spun in surprise, not having heard them being followed by the Mistress of the House. Esmerelle stood wrapped in a thick fur cloak against the crisp morning winds, and suddenly Lia's mind was filled with an awful and sickening sense of déjà vu, reminded of the early morning when she and Vam had been caught out here, almost in this very spot by these very people. She began to shiver, and it no longer had much to do with the cold of the early hour. All she could do was nod mutely, no longer sure of anything, thoroughly outside anything she was accustomed to.

"Talis," Esmerelle said. "Bring coffee for three. I like mine with cream and sugar."

The vixen giantess's eyes narrowed at that, then she nodded and departed with long, silent strides. Esmerelle watched her for a moment with a mildly irritated expression, having caught the look, then turned back to Lia. "Do you know what I like best about being head of this house, girl?" She still addressed Lia as though she were a slave, so Lia followed her lead.

"What's that, Mistress?"

"The power." Esmerelle answered without hesitation. She gestured at the expansive estate around them. "All this is mine. I've shed blood and spilled my own in getting it, and now it's mine. But not just the land, or the buildings, or the furniture or the paintings... all of that is nice. But power doesn't come from owning things, girl. Power comes from owning people."

At any time, day or night," she continued, ambling with easy grace to the side of the arena, "I can order any of my Huntresses to go down into that city out there and bring me anyone I want. And I do mean anyone. These buildings don't give me that power; the people in them, though, they give me power over not only my own estate, but over the entire city. Let the Assembly and the Governor say what they want to keep the rabble down there complacent, fat and happy. I own them all."

Lia had no idea what to say to that; or perhaps she simply couldn't articulate it. Her eyes certainly seemed to, though, because when she caught the twinkle of merriment in Esmerelle's large green eyes, hers must have spoken for her.

"I can even," Esmerelle continued, "reach out and take men from other cities if I want them. If I think they'll amuse me or someone in my House who has earned such a prize. Now let's you and I talk about the one you tried to take from me." At Lia's sour expression, she held up a hand, palm out. "You've already been punished. This is just talk, now, girl."

Lia nodded slowly, but there was still sudden resentment on her face.

"You see, you didn't do anything to earn that boy. You took good care of it, I'll say that. He wouldn't have lasted half as long as he did if you hadn't done." Lia growled low at that, but Esmerelle cut her off. "Shush, now, and listen to what I'm saying, not what you only think you hear. You showed that you can take care of a pet if you're given one."

Lia blinked in mild surprise at that, but couldn't think of anything to say in answer to it. Still, her mind was turning it around and over. "Is that why you gave him to Cheya instead of giving him to me?"

"Frankly?" Esmerelle nodded. "Yes. He would have been yours if you had only asked to have him. But when you tried to steal him, well... face it, girl. You got him killed." Lia simply stared icily ahead at that news. "Now," Esmerelle continued. "I think you're hot enough to take me on for a little rematch."

Still Lia said nothing, coldly seething, and swung herself down into the arena. Now she knew what Talis had meant. This wasn't going to be a show of nerve like it had been with the three humans, or a contest as it had been with Cheya. She was going to tear Esmerelle White's head off her neck and play kickball with it.

Talis glided out of the pre-dawn shadows with a tray in her hands. On the tray was a tall, thick white porcelain carafe and three mugs, as well as a smaller pitcher and a tray of sugar. Two work boys brought a light but sturdy wooden table and a few chairs. The table and chairs were set down as Esmerelle shrugged out of her thick cloak. Talis set out the coffee while Esmerelle lowered herself into the arena, then the vixen loomed over the two comparatively tiny boys as they knelt, one at each of her heels.

The morning wind gusted hard, fluttering the edges of the white napkins under the coffee mugs and whipping blonde hair across Esmerelle's face, and that's when Lia leapt. It was a soundless leap, the unuttered roar of a lioness. Lia seized Esmerelle by the throat in one hand, the other scooping the Mistress of the House up by the knees, and flung her into the center of the arena to land in a graceless, scrambling heap.

Lia had the immediately obvious advantage of her natural coloration when fighting in the dim light. Only her blazing yellow eyes and gleaming, dagger-like fangs shone out of the dark jungle of black hair. Her form swayed and danced with a terrible sensuality as she stalked and angled closer to the smaller woman. Her long tail lashed and her ears flattened back as she hissed loudly, her fur standing and lending her the silhouette of predator death itself in the shadowless darkness.

Esmerelle scrambled to her feet, her eyes wide and her arms out at her sides to steady herself. She panted as she got her wind back. "That's the second time you've surprised me, girl!" Then she laughed lightly and crouched low, making herself smaller in answer to Lia's natural illusion of having grown larger. Retreating slowly toward the split-log wall of the arena, Esmerelle dodged easily under one lethal swipe after another.

Frustrated by her constantly retreating opponent, Lia lunged and swung a long, looping right â€" and that was Esmerelle's opening. Using her shorter stature to full advantage, Esmerelle stepped into Lia's forward momentum, the larger girl's outstretched claws whistling past one pink ear, scoring it neatly and painfully but otherwise only sending Lia off-balance and still moving forward.

Esmerelle hammered a tiny but rock hard left fist up into Lia's stomach, then brought her other powerful arm around to shove, turning her hips into the motion and slamming Lia bodily into the rough wooden wall of the arena, knocking the breath entirely out of her. Before Lia could regain her composure, before she could even turn around, Esmerelle followed on her heels, driving brutal punch after vicious jab into her lower back, forcing agonized cries out of her until Lia simply hung from the wall, her claws buried in the rough bark of the top log.

Finally winding herself slightly, Esmerelle took a moment to breathe â€" she shouldn't have. Lia's whimpers lengthened into a growl, then a snarl, and the bigger girl hauled herself up and launched herself backward, blind, in one swift, fluid motion. Esmerelle's shock at her opponent's eerily rapid recovery turned to horror as she watched Lia's leg fold up and then, as if in slow motion, rocket back at her.

Lia's kick may have been blind, but with her feline hearing, she didn't strictly need to see her target. The ball of her foot connected with the center of Esmerelle's torso, just under her breasts, and exploded her backward and upward, launching her into the air and depositing her almost all the way across the arena, where a small, thin cloud of dust rose under her impact. She heard gasps, and realized with bitter satisfaction that it hadn't been just the slave boys those gasps had come from, but even the giantess, Talis.

Lia stalked over to the fallen Mistress of the House once more. She was almost certain the woman was faking her recovery, yet she didn't care. She still burned at the memory of her pet, and if Esmerelle was playing at a ruse to keep her from exacting retribution, she was simply going to turn that ruse around on her and make her pay all the same.

She saw she had been right as she got within reach of Esmerelle â€" who sprung to her hands and knees, ready to leap to her feet. Lia gave her no chance to finish, instead driving her heel out like a steel piston into Esmerelle's ribs, lifting her off her hands and knees and pounding her bodily into the log wall. Before she got her breath back again, Lia took her slim white throat in her powerful fingers, claws out, and hauled her into the air with that one hand, the woman's trachea squirming under her palm. Lia's right hand drew back, her claws so close to tearing that pretty face open she could already feel the soft fur and tissue rending under them.

There were a dozen things on her mind, last words to the woman, but she had temporarily lost the capacity for speech along with any inclination to use it. Her body was running on instinct alone, and her instinct was to rip the squirming animal clutched in her fist into pieces, and then â€" maybe â€" she would say a few words over the corpse.

In that life or death instant, her eyes bulging and panicky with the denial of air, Esmerelle did the last thing anyone expected her to. She reached out with one hand and caressed Lia's cheek. Lia blinked in obvious confusion, then dropped Esmerelle. The other woman landed clumsily on her feet, staggered back and steadied herself against the logs at her back. Lia backed away warily, hands still up, fingers curled and claws still unsheathed. "Why did you do that?"

Esmerelle coughed once, twice, then cleared her throat and in a slightly hoarser voice than usual said, "Because it's hard to tell you that you've impressed me when you're crushing my larynx." The ghost of a smile played at her lips, though Lia couldn't be sure if it was real or an illusion.

"I don't understand."

Esmerelle shook her head. "Give your blood a moment to cool and you might." She hopped up out of the arena and sat on the edge, beckoning Talis over, who brought her cloak and a mug of still hot coffee. Esmerelle took a sip, cleared her throat again. "I told you that the city down there unofficially belongs to me."

One of the boys held a cup of coffee in his hands, slightly extended in Lia's direction. She forced herself to calm so that she could retract her claws before walking over to him and taking it; she never took her eyes off Esmerelle, though. "I remember."

"I want it to belong to me... officially." Esmerelle said. "I maneuvered the fat fool Governor into a wager. His best slave versus mine in a fight to the death." She smiled wryly at Lia. "He's coveted my estate, well... I covet his city. And now I know just what my odds of winning the wager are."

Lia tilted her head slightly, puzzling this over. "So I'm still a slave."

"Technically speaking, yes." Esmerelle nodded. "I do have some honor, girl. I won't use your sister, or Talis here, and be accused of putting in a ringer. Talis is Captain of the Guard for a reason, and I know damned well how your sister would react to being enslaved even temporarily for such contests." She looked to the boy that had given Lia her coffee. "Come here, boy."

He walked over to her. Lia felt her eyes drawn to him; he was somewhat shorter than Vam had been, perhaps all of five feet eight inches tall, and slightly built. But his eyes held a certain intensity, the set of his jaw firm and resolute, that made him larger than his physical proportions. His bright green eyes flicked toward Lia as he felt her gaze on him. At last, he knelt at Esmerelle's left heel, his head held high but his eyes lowered.

Esmerelle looked down at the boy, then at Lia. "This one hasn't been given a name. It's tradition in my House that only the slave's owner may name them. So," she leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and lifting one eyebrow slightly with a sardonic smile. "What's his name?"