Blurb: 

Den is a courtesan, forced to serve a heartless master -- little more than a slave. His only friend is a fellow courtesan, a dryad named Yemia. When Yemia is captured and nearly killed, Den angers a client in order to rescue her--and sets in motion a chain of events that will change his life forever...

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Picture is Den.

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Oxcin 19, 1760041 GF

Fleauria House, in the city of Aradia

"How dare you?"

Iralaae is seething, the foot-long yew stick in her hand constantly moving. Her cupid's bow lips quiver, her stance is wide, and her shale black eyes glitter with fury between the strands of hair she dies a garish copper.

Den stays on the ground, because he knows better than to move.

Iralaae hits him over and over again--though she's careful to use the correct angles, to not leave bruises or break bones. That almost makes it hurt worse, the knowledge that no one will notice or be able to see.

The understanding that though Den bears scars, even they don't belong to him. Even they are something someone else controls.

He--everything he is, everything he ever will be--belongs to Iralaae.

"How dare you bring shame on this house?  You're a disgrace, Dairin Sondira, and you always will be!" Den hates that name. It isn't his name, not anymore. She knows it, and uses it against him.

He refuses to be baited, still unmoving on the ground. He's laid here so many times that he knows the colors and thread count of Iralaae's rug by heart. Her stick comes down a few more times before she finally tires of it and stalks behind her desk again--where she started the evening, when she summoned him an hour ago.

"Get up," she snarls, and he does, because he is her possession and he can do nothing but obey her.

"Come here."

He walks around her desk to stand before her, hands folded behind his back. His body aches and stings where she hit him, but he knows the angry red marks won't even last the whole night. She can't afford to damage her merchandise, after all.

"Your debt is doubled," she says, waving a hand. "Your stunt with the Madame Oaen cost me millions."

She's exaggerating, and it wasn't a stunt. Yemia needed him--Yemia would be dead if Den had ignored her message and went to his appointment with the Madame instead. He doesn't regret it, though the punishment bites and writhes inside him. He was so close to paying her off.

Forty-seven years he's been her slave, and he was finally getting close... Den doesn't know if he'll survive another four or five decades.

But he doesn't regret it.

"You're lucky I don't just toss you out on the streets," Iralaae says, gesturing at him in disgust. She often makes such comments, but Den knows she's lying, browbeating him into submission--or trying to. Next to Yemia, Den is the most sought after courtesan in Fleauria House. If Iralaae tosses him out, her competition will snatch him up and she really will lose millions.

Den wishes she would toss him out. If she did, he'd run and run and run until he reached the edge of the world, and then he'd throw himself off.

He knows there isn't anywhere he could hide.

"Well?" Iralaae demands, snapping her fingers. "Do you think I should throw you out, you worthless dog?"

Den very much wants to nod. But that will only get him beaten again, and he's sore enough.

So he does nothing except stand there, expressionless. Iralaae smirks.

"That's what I thought. Now prove to me that you deserve to stay."

Internally, Den forces away disgust and revulsion and a sense of powerless fear that he knows he'll never be rid of.

Externally, he bows once to his Mistress before stepping closer, climbing onto her lap. He places his mouth on her neck, scrapes her skin with his fangs. He contemplates ripping her throat out. He could do it so easily, with just one bite.

As he unbuttons her dress, he thinks about strangling her with it.

As he lays her across the desk, he wonders if her heavy stone paperweight would do a good enough job of crushing her skull.

As he uses the skills she taught him--skills that have long since surpassed her own--to make Iralaae scream his name loudly enough to wake the dead, Den thinks that it would be so, so easy to kill her.

But he stops himself. He disowned the Sondira family, gave up that name and that life--even if it wasn't entirely by choice. He is no longer a member of a house of killers.

He will not be like them.

He'll find a way to get free, a way to pay off his debts, and then he'll walk away from this place and never look back.

Someday he'll make Iralaae scream his name out the door as she begs him to come back. The thought of that makes him smile, and he doesn't mind that she thinks the smile is for her as he moves inside her body.

She can think whatever she wants.

Someday, Den will no longer be her possession--and he'll very much enjoy telling the goddess of lust to throw herself off a cliff for him, because that will be the only way he'll make her scream ever again.