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Dawn came cold, clear and early to the expansive estates of House White. From the armored spine of the Voltai mountain range to the east, to the shimmering pale golden ribbon of the Vosk river to the west, the city slept. Of the Free persons of the city did.

Slaves were never afforded the luxury of sleeping in, with the exception of soft and silk-clad pleasure slaves. Vam Rexen, former mercenary and now thrall of Esmerelle White, the matriarch of her House, reflected bitterly on this as he stepped through the service door of the House stables and took a shovel in one hand, the rough wooden handle biting into his calloused palm, and a large five gallon beaten-iron pail in the other.

The House's stable still slept, but lightly; the girls woke early, and woke ravenous, but not for food. Captivity had not been kind to Vam Rexen, not least of all because his Mistress was cruel. He subsisted on barely enough to survive and perform the most basic of chores. His frame had massed some 5'10" tall and nearly two hundred pounds when he had first set foot on the property. Now work and strict rationing of some sort of potato gruel had whittled him down to a slight one hundred forty.

In contrast, the horsewoman named Kaitha, the smallest of them, stood six foot three and massed two hundred seventy pounds, most of that being ass, thighs and calves. The largest, Iphanie, was an even match for the Captain of the House Guard, a full seven feet seven inches tall and weighing in excess of three hundred sixty pounds. She had once fractured three of Rexen's ribs merely by draping a rock solid forty-four inch thigh over his chest while sleeping, crushing him under its inert weight alone.

So it was that, while he cleaned each girl's stall, he kept a nervous eye on each woman, their bodies gloriously nude. He finished as quickly and quietly as he was able, a bitter monologue running through his head the entire time. The stables had a fully functional and very comfortable lavatory especially built for women of their metaspecies â€" huge, plush, clean. They declined to use it for the specific purpose of getting him out here. Where they could lay hold of him.

As he finished the morning chore, laying the handle of the shovel with torturous deliberation against the wall, his stomach sank under the sound of a heavy footstep. He didn't have to turn to know that it was Iphanie â€" he could feel the sheer mass of her body close in on him right through his skin and into his bones without any need to look.

He sighed, resigned to his fate â€" for his fate was exactly what he expected each time even one of these women seized him and used him, and he could hear the soft rustling of bodies sitting up from thick, soft straw, more heavy footfalls.

His cock wasn't big enough to be of any use to horsewomen. That, however, wasn't why they used him, over and over and over again. They simply enjoyed hurting him. "Please..." he begged Iphanie, "Please just let me go." She said nothing, merely stared down at him, her brown eyes unrelenting under her thick mane of wild black hair. "Please...?"

That elicited a giggle from her, which proved infectious to her sisters. She seized him by the throat, lifting him easily up to press the gagging, flailing human against the wall of the stable, tilting her head to watch him thrash like a marionette with a drunkard holding the strings, as the long-nailed fingers of her other hand slid down her abdominal muscles to nestle between her lips, circling slowly as her large eyes rolled back and closed, her long tongue moistened full lips.

He felt the blood trapped in his head as her palm pressed his chin back â€" her hand was large enough, the fingers long enough, that she held his entire neck in her fist, the thick cords of muscle in her forearms jumping into relief as her insanely massive yet impossibly gravity-defying tits swayed and heaved with the quickening of her breathing.

His eyes dimmed toward black as sparks popped and jumped in his vision. Then he heard a voice from somewhere, and the blood rushed into his head a millisecond before something hard and unyielding slammed into him from below.

He expected to find his balls and belly crushed to paste by a savage kick from the woman, but instead saw that he had only been dropped and hit the rough plank floor. He looked up to see the Captain of the House Guard, the vixen giantess Talis Vorran, ducking into the stable before straightening.

"Leave your fun for later, girls." She repeated. "There's work to do. Iphanie, you and Salia will pull me this morning. Kaitha, you and Yra will serve Cheya."

The sense of excitement building in the horsewomen took a different turn. "Are we going hunting, Mistress?" Iphanie asked hopefully.

"That we are, girl." The towering redhead smiled, and when she turned her jade eyes on Vam, the smile chilled him to the bone. "Milen ran this morning, we're going to go find him." The smile on her face took an even more predatory caste, and then Cheya joined her. Dwarfed next to the vixen giantess, Cheya was an even more terrifying presence to the human slave; still half again taller than he was and twice as muscled, a narrow waist as wide as his chest swelling to broad hips and thickly muscled thighs over diamond calves, shoulders and biceps flexing to reflect her bloodlust at seeing him

Her natural feline predatory impulses were not only unrestrained but encouraged, honed, and her raw, unbridled sexuality matched them measure for measure. She took customary delight, since he had been unrestricted, in using him to satiate both, exercising barely enough self-restraint to stop short of killing him half a dozen times.

"Hello, boy," she smiled at him with teeth bared, closing the distance between them with long strides on long legs that bulged with steel-hard muscle sheathed in short, soft black fur, shoving him back against the wall and seizing his face in her hands, her long, razor-sharp claws out, devouring his mouth in a seething kiss before forcing him to his knees.

"Cheya!" Talis shook her head. "I just told the girls they couldn't play with him!"

"Well, that's tough for the girls, isn't it?" she growled, her amber eyes blazing down at Vam.

"Well, you can stay here and play with him," Talis shrugged. "Or you can come with me and kill Milen when we find him."

Cheya growled even though her grin widened. "So the little rabbit finally made good on his threat to run..." she turned away from the trembling human slave. "I'll have fun with this one later. The Lady hasn't...?" she looked back at Vam with an unreadable expression, then back to Talis.

"No, she hasn't." Talis gave her a mildly disapproving look, and Cheya looked disappointed.

"Might as well have my fun where I can, then." She said, stepping over to the door and looking back with an odd expression of longing before brushing her long, thick black hair from her eyes.

After they had gone, Vam sunk back against the wall with a sigh of unspeakable relief... but his eyes were still full of dread. Rising after a moment, he made his way from the stalls to the back door of the kitchen.

The source of Cheya's mirth, and her constant rough use of him, the beatings, the crushings, was another feline in the house, Lia. Lia and Cheya could have passed for twin sisters, and it had occurred to Vam more than a few times that, perhaps, they were twins.

Lia's build, face, hair and voice were in every way identical to Cheya's â€" but her manner with Vam could not have been more radically different. Yes, she was forceful with him; but the very few times she'd hurt him had been accidents, and she had always taken him to the Infirmary immediately to have his ribs wrapped, his skin stitched shut, his bruises salved.

Now she looked down at him as he closed the kitchen door behind him and put his back to it, slid down to sit against it, and smiled with closed lips. Unlike her doppelganger, she was a house slave, wearing not thin leather strip armor but a wide black leather apron and nothing else.

Seeing the look of mingled fear and relief on his face, she turned from scrubbing one of the previous night's cooking pots and shook her hands dry, then stepped over, reached under his arms and lifted him gently to his feet. "Come here, mine," she purred, pulling his face to hers for a gentle kiss.

He felt himself respond to her through the thin fabric of the ridiculous black silk loincloth that was the only clothing permitted him other than a pair of thin sandals. Though she was, by virtue of feline muscle density and sheer bulk, at least three times stronger than he was, she was in contrast to Cheya so gentle, so loving, that he couldn't resist her â€" nor, truthfully, did he feel any reason to try. Of all the women in House White â€" and they had all used him by now to satisfy themselves in one way or another â€" Lia was the only one who showed him real affection, and the only one whom he wanted to be used by.

She was also the only one who, after his months of enslavement, he actually wanted to belong to.

"So, my sweet little pet," she purred, holding him wrapped tight in her arms, one of her prodigious breasts pressing against his cheek as she lifted him slightly higher, walking him toward her own private alcove. "Did anything interesting happen this morning?"

Her question had the obvious double-meaning â€" she was asking him, first, if he had been used by Iphanie and her sisters; more importantly, though, she wanted to know if they'd injured him in the process.

"Yes, my Mistress," he answered quietly; as another slave in House White, technically, he could only refer to her as his chain sister; but between the two of them, where no one else could hear them, she was his Mistress, not Esmerelle White, and he was her slave, willingly.

She released her embrace to look him over from head to toe.

"Not that," he laughed quietly, and she gave him a disapproving look for making her worry before she laughed, too. "No, Milen ran. The guards took the horsewomen into the city to go hunt him down." Then his look of amusement faded. "Cheya's going to kill him."

Lia looked at Vam gravely. "I'm going to hide you."

He shook his head, "You can't. They'll find me, and then she'll kill me, too, or Talis will. Or Esmerelle. At least if she does, it'll be quick. I wouldn't last a second."

Lia giggled, then turned her head and spit derisively. "Esmerelle? She's nothing, mine. Gods only know how she keeps that vixen freak from seizing the reins from her, or even any of the scullery boys. She's tiny."

Vam shook his head in dismay, "My Mistress, she's got muscle on her. A lot of it. And she's much, much stronger even than she looks. Maybe as strong as Cheya is."

"Nonsense, mine." She gave him a kind look and kissed him. "I won't let her touch you if I can help it. But you're right to look out for Cheya. She would kill you, and she'd make it last days if she can." Lia sighed. "And yes, she would find you. She never lost a game of ‘hide and fetch', not even one. Poor Milen, he was such a sweet boy..." she shook her head. "That's enough of that, mine." She pressed a long finger over his lips at the sight of his expression growing fearful again, as her other hand slipped the heavy apron from her hips. She leaned forward, resting on her hands and allowing her breasts alone to pin him to her cushioned sleeping furs as she swung one long, massive thigh over him, straddling him, her lips pressing to his as her long, thick black hair fell over their faces.

"Do you love your Mistress, my pet?" she purred low and soft in his ear as her hands seized his wrists, pinning his arms above his head as she moved over him, his body bracketed in her thighs, his stiffening cock teased and tickled by the short, silken fur that covered her hard abs.

"Yes, my Mistress." he whispered back as her lips moved to his ear, her sharp teeth grazing his earlobe lightly. He struggled in her grip, but not to escape â€" dangerous though it was, he did it to excite her, to stimulate her feline instinct to play, to clamp down tighter on struggling prey. She was the only one he could trust not to take it too far.

"And your Mistress loves you, my sweet little pet..." she replied in part-whisper, part-growl, part-mew. She leaned up, scooting her thighs forward to bracket his thighs, hips and lower ribs, her hot, wet pussy finding the head of his stiff cock, before her hips lowered, spearing him into her tight hole in one long, slow but steady stroke.

Her growls of pleasure alternated with mews of need as she held her captive pet, riding him, his own body moving to match her rhythm as her claws slowly extended without her being conscious of it, her thighs scooping his body up, the cable-like adductors squeezing in on him until his ribs began to creak under the pressure, her wild mane of hair flying as she arched her back in a release that crushed the air out of her human pet and took every drop of his seed from him, leaving him limp and weakened, lying beneath her warm, firm body as she continued to hold him tightly wrapped in arms and legs, purring loudly as she held his cheek to her breast. "Mine." She purred. "All mine..."

Miraculously, no one disturbed them all through lunch, the afternoon, and then into dinner.

Dinner did come eventually, though, and Vam helped Lia hustle the cooking along. Beef from mundane cows and Awakened bovids alike was roasted, seasoned and adorned with fresh, crispy vegetables, fried brown rice with pork and rabbit meat... Vam shuddered. The estate, although it did have pastures and dairies, had no pens for mundane rabbits. He turned away from the cooking, suddenly ill and remembering a few afternoons spent raking autumn leaves with the timid, soft-spoken, almost perpetually terrified Milen.

This was one of the few times when he was grateful that the male slaves of the house were fed only a weak potato soup and a thick, bitter nutrient-enriched ale. True, unlike the girls of the house, who were fed meat, vegetables and copious quantities of growth hormone, he was shrinking, whittling away, while any woman who could reach him could rape, break or kill him at a whim â€" but at least he wouldn't be eating his late chain-brother.

Lia caught his sour expression, then looked to the rice as the connection was made for her, too. But unlike Vam, she merely shrugged. The dead boy wasn't her boy, and Vam was as far as her sympathy for men, or for humans, went.

She fed him his soup and his ale, since he wouldn't be strong enough to carry the seventy pound trays into the dining hall. He was nearly finished when Cheya stepped into the kitchen, cast a smirk at Lia, and glided over to Vam, lifting him from his kneeling position by his throat, then clear off his feet, and without a word to either of them, turned and simply carried him into the dining hall that way.

Vam watched helplessly as Lia could only glare at Cheya's retreating back. She carried him over to her chair at the table, her lips parting in a grin as Esmerelle lifted a glass of fine white wine toward her, then pulled out her chair, dumping Vam unceremoniously in front of it before pinning him to its legs by draping her own legs over him, trapping him groaning and helpless against the thick, hardwood legs and supports.

"So," Esmerelle asked, arching an eyebrow as she took a healthy bite of the rice, then chewed thoughtfully. "Obviously, you found the boy. How did that go?"

Vam barely heard the Lady's voice as Cheya pulsed her thighs gently but menacingly around his skull. "Oh, it was amazing," Cheya answered, punctuating the hold on Vam's skull so hard he saw stars and heard something creaking before she relaxed it enough for his sight to return, though all he could see was the underside of a table and eight pairs of enormous diamond-shaped female calves.

The powerful yet soft voice of Talis reached Vam through Cheya's fleshy vise, "We found him cowering in a vendor's stall that was selling drovers' coats." She giggled, a feminine sound utterly at odds with her size and physique. "Cheya grabbed him â€" well, you know what a runt he was â€" took the back of his head in her hand, just one hand, and threw him out into the street. You should have seen how the customers of the stall and the one next to it scattered."

"He actually picked himself up and tried to run," Cheya growled, her adductors beginning to flex at the memory,Vam's hands flew up to the rippling outer sweep of her thighs, a pointless gesture.

Talis snorted derisively. "He should have known better."

Esmerelle's soft, crystalline laughter reached Vam's ears.

"I tackled him right in the street. I made sure the drover was watching..." Cheya paused for effect, as if to illustrate the pause for the vendor, "Then I wrapped my legs around him â€" swallowed him nearly whole in them â€" and crushed him... slowly... bone... by... bone." As she made her point, Vam felt the seams of his skull begin to ache and then to howl under the increasing pressure of her massive thighs. His kicking legs, flailing arms and agonized animal screams finally drew her back to the present.

She relaxed her thighs just enough to pull herself back from caving his skull in. He hung limply in her grip, unconscious. Esmerelle fixed her with a look. "You know I haven't given you permission to kill him, Cheya. If you can't be more careful, I won't let you play with him at all."

She sulked. "Yes, Lady, my apologies."

Esmerelle smiled reassuringly. "It won't be much longer, if I don't miss my guess. Your sister is favoring him pretty heavily, isn't she?"

Cheya growled, the sound reverberating through Vam's head, bringing him around to a state of dazed, disoriented half-consciousness. "If I can't have him..."

"Oh, you can have him when it's time. Lia is still coddling the males, though. She fancies this one her new pet, and thinks she can ‘save' him. How long would you have kept him if not for her?"

Cheya shrugged, and Vam could barely make out her answer, "As long as he kept to his place. She knew I wanted him, she's done this with all the boys I actually felt like keeping. That's why I had to kill them. If I can't have them for myself, neither can she."

Melodic laughter again. "Well, you can take him with you to the furs tonight after I've had some fun with him, but he'd better be walking when you bring him out in the morning. There's work to do out in the garden; that trellis Milen used to make his getaway needs to come down."

"Yes, Lady."

"Oh, and Cheya?" there was the sound of a smile in Esmerelle's voice.

"Yes, Lady?

"After that, I have no further interest in the boy." She stretched, yawned. "I'm ready to go hunting for another one. So once he's finished dismantling and disposing of the trellis, he will be your property to amuse yourself with in whatever way you see fit."

These were the last words Vam heard that night as the crush on his tortured skull mounted again and darkness overtook him.

He came to consciousness again lying nude on Esmerelle's bed, on top of the covers. His wrists and ankles were free â€" he would have taken this as kindness on her part, but he knew only too well that kindness was not something she showed her human slaves â€" ever; it was simply her confidence that there was no need for her to bind him to control him, to hurt him as she wished. There was simply nothing he could do about it.

He turned his face, his mind clouded by the combination of the alcohol and Cheya's crushing of him at dinner, and watched as Esmerelle entered the room in the same sky blue satin robe she'd worn to dinner. Her green eyes lit with pleasure at his visibly dulled senses, ruby lips curling at the edges in a smile, as she glided wordlessly toward him.

Her fingers slipped the thick satin belt free of its knot, letting the ends fall to her hips as she shrugged elegantly, allowing the robe to fall behind her slender feet as she continued toward him without slowing down.

She reached up to slip the pins from her long, wavy blonde hair, which fell in an untamed mass around her slim but muscle-capped shoulders. Her muscled arms lowered again as abdominal muscles moved with the rise and fall of her breasts, black silk unrolled slowly over rounded hips indented with the crease of powerful flesh. She stepped out of the black thong panties, kneeling beside his mostly insensate form on the bed to trace his cheek with a long, pink tongue.

"Last time, my little man..." she whispered in his ear, though he was barely conscious of the words. "I'm going to be gentle with you this time..." she took his shoulders in her hands to force him onto his back, and true to her word though not to her nature, she was gentle with him, stroking his cheek with a fingertip, running her hand through his hair, placing a trail of light, soft, wet kisses from the notch of his collar bone down his chest, down his belly and down to his cock, which had responded to her touch with or without a conscious will to direct it, until he was as hard as stone under her lips and tongue.

Then she slid over him and raped him gently as he could only lie there, drugged and delirious, and whimper in protest.

The next morning, Lia didn't see him. She finished scrubbing the pots and started the other girls and the two boys in the kitchen's collection of slaves on the midday meal, her unease and worry growing, along with an icy desperation in the pit of her stomach.

Setting them on their way to serve the Lady of the House and her guests, some pale-skinned elf from the northlands and a dark-skinned woman Lia caught a mere glimpse of, she excused herself on the claim that she was feeling unwell, a cheap excuse that Esmerelle surprised her by accepting with a mere nod and an upraised eyebrow.

Lia prowled the corridors, growling softly as her footsteps followed her intuition, her intuition leading her out the exit into the rear courtyard and toward the barracks where the women of the House Guard rested and took their pleasures from the House's stable of slave boys.

She could see that work had been done in the garden. The tall trellis on which vines had grown thick and heavy on the white latticework had been partially taken down, portions of it stacked neatly in a stone-walled pit for burning. Her eyes widened as her heart sank, knowing that few of the boys of the house still had enough strength to do that kind of work alone, and none of the women would be bothered with such menial labor â€" and since there were no boys lazing about, it meant that only one was tasked with it. And only one was still even slightly capable.

Vam. Hers. And he wasn't out here, which meant... he was in there.

She pounded on the door, hearing an agonized groan and faint rustling. It was his voice. She pounded on the door so hard her fist hurt. Finally, it opened â€" and it opened fast, Cheya lunged out through the door, seizing her by the throat and slamming her to her ass on the grassy square that sat in front of the barracks.

She disappeared inside the dim recesses of the barracks for a moment, and then Vam was hurled out, sprawling atop Lia, who wrapped him protectively in her arms and rolled to her side to shield him from... whatever. She looked up at Cheya, bared her fangs and hissed, her hair standing on end. "He's mine! Mine!"

"Actually," Cheya giggled, "he's mine. The Lady of the House has given him to me as a gift. As soon as he finishes his chore." She looked over at the partially disassembled trellis. "But I'm in no hurry." She planted her hands on her wide hips, gloating obscenely down at Lia, who carefully pulled Vam to his feet, her eyes traveling in horror over his bruised torso, his ripped shoulders. "You can use him until then if you want to." Cheya's tone was sarcastic, mocking; she knew her sister would never use the human in a way that would make her proud. "After that, though... say goodbye to him..." She giggled and closed the barracks door.

Lia looked the semiconscious human over again, then took him carefully in her arms, lifting him and carrying him to the Infirmary. She knocked on the door, fighting back tears that threatened to break loose harder with every minute that went by without him coming out of the daze he seemed to be in. A small man she didn't know, smaller even than Vam, opened the door. He was clad in the green silk loincloth of a medic slave. He blinked up at her, then saw Vam and quickly turned to lead her to a cot.

After a few moments of running his fingers over Vam's chest, he looked up at her. "Nothing's broken, but from this bruising I'd say they were very careful to get right to the edge of that without actually doing it."

The slave, who didn't give his name and whom Lia didn't care to ask for it, shone a small light in Vam's eyes, watching his pupils. "He's in shock. See how his pupils respond? There's no brain damage, he's just coping."

At the news, and as the boy pressed a foul-smelling cloth under Vam's nose and Vam turned his head away with a look of disgust on his face, Lia collapsed next to him, taking him in her arms and unleashing a torrent of tears and sobbing kisses onto him, forcing the boy in green

to step back.

After a few minutes, her sobs subsided and she just held Vam, rocking gently on her heels and finally lowering him back to the cot, wiping at the dampened fur of her cheeks before fixing the boy in green with a dangerous look. "You didn't see me do that." She slowly rose to her full height, towering over him.

"N-no, Mistress!" he backed away, not even seeing that, like Vam and himself, she wore a steel band around her own neck. "I didn't see anything!" he began to tremble as she took one slow step toward him, then another. "Please, I didn't! I swear! Please!"

"Good." She said softly. "Because if I hear even a whisper about it, anywhere..." she leaned forward, taking his chin in her hands and slowly extending her long, lethal claws, "I will kill you. Do you understand me?" His Adam's apple worked up and down, but he couldn't think straight enough to speak, instead simply nodding. "Leave the Infirmary, and wait until I come out before you come back in." He ran like a bat out of Hell.

She made her way back to Vam, who groaned as the pain of bruised ribs and torn flesh slowly settled to merely excruciating rather than mind-blotting. His eyes were clenched tightly shut against a river of tears which coursed his cheeks anyway, his jaw clenched against screams that took hold in his throat, shallowed though they were by the short breaths he was constricted into.

She knelt by his side, afraid even to touch him now that she could see how much pain he was in, holding herself back by raw force of will from doing so anyway. She leaned close, whispered in his ear, "I'm getting you out of here, mine, tonight. I can't let her kill you, too." Her eyes began to well with fresh tears; because there was no answer from him, and because there was little else left to say, she pressed the gentlest kiss she could to his damp cheek, then whispered in his ear, "I love you..."

Then she stood straight again, straightened her apron and walked out wordlessly past the medical slave, straight back to her kitchen, and began her planning.

Vam finally came around to a fog that enveloped his entire consciousness. He was aware that he was wrapped in something heavy and soft and tight, and his first thought was of Lia cuddling him like a human plush toy, something she did on the nights when Esmerelle didn't send him to her bedchambers â€" something that rarely happened anymore... he forced his mind back to Lia, and it didn't take much forcing.

But he was cold, and he was never cold when he was cuddling with Lia. He forced his bloodshot eyes open, and harsh lamp light stabbed into them. "You've been half-dead long enough, haven't you?" someone asked, and it almost sounded like Cort, his old instructor.

"Cort?" he asked, trying to turn to his side to get a better look. The man was indeed bald, but too young.

The man blinked at him, and the face was familiar, too, but still...

"That was my father's name. I'm Lot. Who are you?" The man stood up, bringing the lamp closer and setting it carefully on the table next to Vam's cot, safely out of reach. He was, even compared to Vam, short and scrawny, all of five feet six inches and perhaps one hundred twenty pounds at most. But the face was the same, if much younger, the bald scalp gleaming in the lamp light.

"I'm Vam." He said. "Your father trained me on the sword and the bow. What do you mean, ‘was'?"

The smaller man shook his head. "These... people. They demanded he sell them men from the Company. Men like you. You were supposed to be soldiers, but..." he indicated Vam's silk loincloth.

"Your father would have never betrayed us." Vam shook his head. "I don't believe that."

"No. They lied to him. Told him the men were dying honorably in battle. But he found out..." Lot shook his head. "He found out what was really going on. He and I came here to inform the High Council of the city." His face fell. "They intercepted us. Killed him on the spot, in front of the High Council Chambers, they tore his..." he choked on the words.

Vam stared in a mixture of horror and resignation; horror for a son forced to witness his father murdered in the brutal ways the women of House White enjoyed, and resignation because he knew those ways only too well.

"What time is it?" he suddenly looked around for a timepiece. "It's... God, it must be past the evening meal!"

Lot nodded. "It is. Long past, it's nearly midniâ€"" he stopped as a soft rapping sounded at the door. He looked to Vam. "Reach under the cot."

Vam sat up, his limbs leaden and numb, and his hands immediately went to his tingling shoulders â€" they were thickly bandaged, as was his chest. He knelt carefully next to the cot, his hand reaching under to feel a thickly wadded bundle of cloth. He pulled it out, unrolling what turned out to be a thick, hooded gray cloak concealing deerskin boots, socks, leather breeches and a gray linen shirt which would ordinarily have been two sizes too big for him.

Not knowing what they were for, his eagerness to wear real clothing again after months of virtual nudity took hold and he slipped into the breeches, feeling the almost ecstatic exhilaration of being clothed, then slipping the shirt over his head and lacing up the collar, which concealed both the steel around his neck and the thickly wrapped gauze and cotton around his body.

The soft socks and light but sturdy boots cushioned and cradled his toughened feet like a lover, and he felt he could have died of happiness in that instant, a grateful lump forming in his throat as he heard the Infirmary door open, a soft, hushed voice speak.

He turned to look, and saw a tall, cloaked figure standing there, and she didn't even have to lift the edge of the hood to let the lamp light gleam in her amber eyes before he knew it was her, and knew what she intended. He grabbed up the cloak from the cot, took a firm grip on Lot's thin shoulder, looked0 him directly in the eyes â€" something else he hadn't done in months â€" and said firmly, "Thank you." Then he turned and the two of them were gone.

Lot watched the empty doorway for a long moment before the stepped over to it and closed the door softly. He hadn't reminded them of it, but it was the foremost thought in his mind: a slave had escaped from the Infirmary under his watch. He prayed those two found their way out to the city and beyond â€" whether they succeeded or failed, though, the boy called Lot knew that his freedom would come with death, and soon.

They made their way quietly in the darkness, eyes casting left and right, bodies crouched to pass under the windows of the house on their way to the stables. The grass was soft and silent beneath their boots, the evening wind whipping chill sheets over them and through their tightly drawn cloaks, but they didn't mind.

The air, smoke-scented by the hearths of the estate and the city beyond, chilly though it was, was fresh; it promised freedom beyond the walls and gates, if they could only reach the streets, then the docks, a ship, sail down the river to seize that freedom out of the grasp of the House White.

But first there was the way out. Vam cursed under his breath as he tried his weight on what remained of the trellis, heard it clatter under his hands. It might have supported him â€" barely â€" but Lia, who had a hundred pounds of solid muscle or more on him, would have brought the whole rickety thing clattering down, drawing Talis, Cheya and God only knew who else out of the barracks, and then...

They skimmed the wall, instead, heading for the stables, Vam leading the way. He didn't much like the idea of going anywhere near the horsewomen, sleeping or not â€" their ears were incredibly sensitive and he's have to be insanely careful pulling off the plan that occurred to him â€" but there was a backup keyring for the gates on a hook in the stables. None of the girls had any reason to want to leave the house â€" all the food and exercise they wanted, male slaves handed down now and then for them to play with for as long as the unfortunate boys lasted...

But Vam knew where that keyring was, and he prayed to hell it was there tonight. With Lia waiting uncomfortably outside the door. Vam slid the thick human-sized door open with aching slowness, the heavy but well-oiled hinges issuing the rumbling hiss of metal over metal, just enough to slip himself inside.

Inside the stable it was nearly pitch-black, the aromas of warm straw, soft earth and female musk like a familiar blanket settling over him, weighing him down as he slipped one foot, then the next, up onto the railing that bordered Iphanie's stall with his whole body beginning to ache again as Lot's painkillers began to fade.

He paused a moment in his slow, careful climb, thinking he'd heard one set of soft breathing pause â€" but he listened again, and all four girls breathed deeply. His fingers caught the edge of something cold and curved, and his heart leapt for joy in his chest as he carefully brought the ring of keys down, slipped it into the deep pocket of his cloak, and made his way quickly and silently back to the door.

He slipped it shut behind him an instant before Lia folded him into her arms and held him tight. He smiled reassuringly up at her, and they continued on. At the edge of the drive out to the gates, though, they encountered a problem. They should have foreseen it, but they didn't. Even at her much greater weight, Lia's feline grace, combined with the greater size of her feet, made dispersing her weight over the gravel driveway a silent affair.

Vam wasn't so lucky. He took the lightest step he could, rolling his foot as best he was able inside a deerskin boot â€" but he had never been trained for stealthy movement. He was a trained soldier, not an assassin â€" the gravel crunched audibly under his foot. He stopped, looked to Lia, his eyes panicky, suddenly unsure of what to do.

Her own face reflecting a moment of fear at the unexpected, seemingly deafening sound, she froze along with him. Then a small smile played across her lips, and she padded silently back across the gravel to him, slipping one arm behind his legs, the other behind his back.

Intuiting what she meant to do, he closed his eyes, trusted her and leaned back. She lifted him into her arms, turned and started back across the gravel with her boy. The gate, and their freedom, was mere seconds away.

Then three shadows separated from the shadows of the house, and Vam's world fell out from under him. Fortunately, Lia's arms didn't. But the half-whimper, half-sob that escaped her throat didn't feel much different to him than hitting the cold ground would have.

"Well, well well." Esmerelle pushed back the hood of her thick white fur cloak. "Another runaway slave. And look, Cheya, your sister caught him for you."

Cheya stepped into a pool of lamplight. Unlike Esmerelle, she stood fully, magnificently nude. Talis towered behind both of them, merely watching with a wicked smirk. Cheya stepped toward her sister and the shuddering human. "Give him to me." Lia backed away, shaking her head wordlessly.

Cheya lunged forward with a snarl, long, thick black hair flying, and grabbed Vam, wrenching him out of Lia's arms and hurling him bodily a few yards to land hard, skidding over the gravel until Esmerelle's boot came down hard on his chest, knocking the wind out of him and pinning him to the ground. She hardly had to use any pressure on his already-tender rib cage to make him squirm and groan under her heel.

With the human safely tucked away, Cheya turned on her sister, claws out, and slashed at her, catching her across the cheek with an open-handed slap that would have left a human with a concussion; and though Lia and her sister were far stronger than humans, it still sprawled Lia to the gravel, her eyes dazed.

But only for a moment. Though she was no trained fighter, neither physically nor mentally conditioned for killing, she was still feline, still had a cat's reflexes, natural speed and strength, and at the moment had an advantage her sister didn't â€" she was infuriated.

Lia leapt up at just the right moment to slam her knee up into the charging Cheya's stomach, doubling her over with an expressive of absolute disbelief plastered across her face, which immediately rocked under a thunderous slap from Lia, who then charged forward, pressing her advantage by lifting her leg again, slamming her heel out into Cheya's abs, sending her sister flying to land nearly in the same spot Vam had.

Bewildered at the unprecedented ferocity from her ostensibly meek and mild-mannered sister, Cheya stared dumbfounded for a moment before snarling and reaching for Vam. Esmerelle lifted her foot away, her own face colored more by amusement than surprise or concern, and Cheya hauled herself and the human to their feet.

"Don't you hurt my pet!" Lia snarled.

Esmerelle laughed, a cold, bitter sound. "He's not yours, girl. Cheya, you can have him early. He's yours as of right now."

Cheya growled with sadistic pleasure, wrenching Vam in front of her and flexing her rock-hard thighs and shoulders to drive him down to his knees. Lia screamed, a feral, wild sound, and launched herself at Cheya, but Esmerelle stepped deftly between them, launching a lightning-fast left hook that cracked off Lia's jaw and laid her flat on her ass in a spray of gravel. "Don't you dare get up again until I tell you to." Esmerelle's voice was as cold as black ice, and the gigantic Talis stepped up beside the Lady of the House, sending a tidal wave of terror screaming through the cat girl's veins.

Cheya stood tall with Vam's sides trapped between the iron bars of her inner thighs. Reaching down with her claws out, she shredded the thick gray cloak, ripped it from him and tossed it contemptuously aside. Then she straightened up again, crossed her ankles with a terrible, lazy slowness, and Vam grunted as she began to apply pressure.

Her fingers worked through her hair, her nipples hardening and her breath deepening into soft growls of pleasure. Her eyes, closed in enjoyment, opened to glare down at her sister. Her breaths grew heavier; with each breath, she pulsed in on her helplessly trapped victim, crushing another groan from him, which gave rise to another half-growl, half-mewl of pleasure from her.

The cycle tightened down, and all four women could hear the creak of bones in the pitifully thrashing human, then the empty hiss of the last of his breath as Cheya crushed it from him, her moans growing in intensity as her enormous legs devoured and engulfed, pulsed and flexed, squeezed and...

Something inside Vam's chest snapped, and at the popping sensation against her hard, arousal-sensitized flesh, Cheya gave a guttural moan, her thighs pulsing in harder against the body trapped between them, snapping three more bones in rapid succession, the sensations of that fueling her even higher into a mindless cycle of orgasms and destruction, each fueling the other until she felt the warmth of the body mingle with the sensation of her inner thighs clamping hard against each other through a thin layer of tissue and crumbled spine.

She had literally crushed her victim flat, his mangled body thickly coated in her cream, the gravel beneath him stained dark in the moonlight with blood and other fluids. Lia lay curled in a fetal ball, wailing with fury and terror and grief.

Cheya snarled with the satisfaction of the kill and of triumph over her sister, seizing a fistful of the late Vam's hair and dragging his body to the wailing girl, then flinging it atop her. "There. Now you can have him." She spit in the vague direction of her sister and her all-too-brief human slave and stalked off toward the Barracks, leaving Talis and Esmerelle to stand watching with supreme satisfaction. Talis followed Cheya a moment later, but Esmerelle, the Lady of the House, stayed and watched.

After a long moment of shuddering sobs gone silent, Lia looked up at Esmerelle. "You tried to steal from me." Esmerelle looked haughtily down her nose at the girl, then stepped forward to seize Lia's long hair in a small but iron-hard fist, hauling her to her knees and rocketing a slap off her cheek that sparked white light behind Lia's eyes, sagging her in Esmerelle's grip.

Lia forced her eyes to focus and looked up at the Lady as if seeing her for the first time, the unlikely power behind the slap in shocking contrast to the woman's petite frame. The fine white fur and emerald eyes, the delicate bone structure, the large soft ears were exactly what one would expect of an Awakened mouse, but she hit as hard as Cheya did, and that was unthinkable for one of her species.

This thought occurred to Lia, this and the loss of her pet â€" hers! â€" and she roared with outrage, slapping the inside of Esmerelle's elbow, reaching up with both arms to wrap them around the Lady, and uncoiling her legs to launch them both through the air, slamming Esmerelle to the gravel, her razor sharp fangs bared, dark hair and tall, lithe body totally obscuring the smaller woman. "He was mine." She growled low. "And now I'm going to kill you."

Esmerelle's eyes were wide, the absolute nerve of the girl's response utterly confounding her. Slaves didn't act this way! But clearly this one was, and she had better do something about it, and fast. Lia's normally soft, pretty features were drawn in a rictus of cold fury, her nose wrinkled, her full lips pulled back to expose dagger-sharp incisors, her amber eyes narrowed and blazing in the moonlight â€"

Esmerelle, in that moment for the first time in literally decades, knew exactly what it was to fear for her life. She slammed one knee up into Lia's stomach â€" and her fear grew as the first strike, hard enough to have sent a human man flying, did nothing at all. Lia raised her arm back to slap Esmerelle, her long, sharp claws out, in a blow that would have caved in the smaller woman's skull and shredded her face off at once.

Seizing the moment, Esmerelle reached up and dug her fingers in behind Lia's collar bone, seizing the bundle of nerves there and clamping down with everything she had, the muscles in her forearms, biceps, triceps and shoulders bulging and bunching with the effort.

Lia howled in agony and rage as her arm on that side went numb, falling useless to her side. Unbalanced without the arm to hold her up, Esmerelle rolled them over with a grunting effort, then straddled the whimpering Lia, raising her other fist and slamming it down hard into Lia's cheek, bouncing her head in the gravel.

Lia snarled and bucked under Esmerelle; Esmerelle re-tightened her grip on the cluster of nerves under her fingers and Lia howled again, whimpering, her body going rigid, back arching as she tried to pull away from the searing agony of overstimulated nerves. Esmerelle brought her fist down again like a hammer, again and again, until Lia stopped struggling.

Grabbing the unconscious girl's collar, she dragged her through the gravel, the big girl's body leaving a wake in the crushed stone path.

Lia came to under the care of the medical slave. Her left eye swollen shut, she peered at him with her right, which narrowed when she saw that it was the small, bald man who gave his name as Lot. Her arms were manacled to a wall. She turned her head wildly from one side to the other to see that she was in Esmerelle's bedchambers.

"I've salved your cheek. You won't lose the eye, but you could have." His voice was soft, and carried a quavering quality to it.

"Stay right where you are, boy." Esmerelle's voice carried into the room, but it had come from Lia's temporarily blind side. She came into view a moment later, wearing only a black thong that accented her snow-white fur. Lia gasped; it was apparent now how the mouse had bested her. The woman was densely packed with muscle.

Not bulging, but â€" obvious even through her coat of short, thick white fur â€" hard as steel. The only places Esmerelle White was soft were the places where a woman absolutely must be soft: large, firm breasts and a small strip of slightly longer, finer fur where pubic hair would be on a human were the only places on her body other than her face which weren't covered in hard, rounded muscle.

Esmerelle's emerald eyes narrowed with a mixture of menace and mischief. "Submit to me and live, girl. Otherwise you'll die right there, right now, and I'll enjoy every second of it."

Lia nodded. She was still angry â€" still furious, in fact â€" but she wasn't stupid. She sighed. "I submit, Mistress. I beg your forgiveness."

"I don't forgive, slut. I correct. I teach. You're worth teaching... for now. But if you prove me wrong, Gods have mercy on you because I will not." She lifted a hand to the trembling human, resting long fingers and hard palm at the back of his bald head. "You've met this boy, haven't you?"

Lia nodded.

"He helped you try to steal my property." Lia bristled at that â€" her property! â€" but then stilled herself with a forlorn sigh. Esmerelle continued. "But after that..." Esmerelle shoved Lot toward Lia, "after that, he betrayed you."

Lia stared at the boy, then looked up at Esmerelle, her good eye reflecting confusion. "How?"

"As soon as you and the boy left his Infirmary, he came and begged me to spare his life for his misdeed." Esmerelle's smirk of satisfaction was sour.

Lia growled. Lot tried to back away, but Esmerelle shoved him forward again. Lia could see by the terror and misery on the boy's face that it was the truth. Growling, she tugged her wrists against the manacles from which she hung suspended â€" it was futile, naturally.

But then she realized something, and her teeth showed in a feral grin as she understood

what the Lady of the House meant for her to do. It was twisted. It was cruel, to her and to Lot. And she didn't care.

Her legs, unrestrained by manacles or chains, rose from the floor and snapped shut around the terrified Lot.