The room went still.
"...What?"
She turned her head on the quilt, cheek swollen with tears, body wrecked and leaking, certain she had misheard through the blood still roaring in her ears.
"You are going to... save my mother?"
"Of course." His thumb pressed, gently, into that untouched ring, and she bit her knuckle. "Though. You know me by now, wildcat. I want to enjoy you first. And if you are delicious enough, well." He smiled down at her, and it was the same smile from the abattoir. "I might have your mother too. She might be delicious. After all, she gave birth to you."
She trembled. Her fists gripped the quilt. Three years of being property, three years of not knowing if her mother was alive, three years of being meat that could not even choose its own buyers, and here it was, the whole ugly bargain laid out plain: her body, her mother's body, and one devil holding both strings.
She threw her pride away the way her parents had thrown away their clans.
