"I guess I'd say that I tried to change the slaves from property to pets. And a gentleman has to love a s...o...b..ring pet more than he loves a piece of available meat." She smiled. "The slaves were happy to demean themselves more than they ever had before. It was fun for me to see, too."

Lord Snow screwed his mouth into a wry smile. "Maybe the slaves felt that the guests were rewarding them, but they must have felt that you were punishing them by depriving them of food for two days. Especially when they hadn't done anything wrong."

Irene shrugged. "They don't like me much right now. That's for sure. They're going to be disappointed that you fed me. They were really looking forward to seeing me suffer a more wretched hunger than I'd made them endure."

"Don't tell them that I fed you. Let them think that you're still suffering."

"I won't tell them, but they're going to figure it out pretty quick. They're not stupid. They're going to notice that I smell of food and that I'm not looking quite so keenly at any crumbs left on the table after dinner."

"It's h.e.l.l to be in charge," Lord Snow said.

"I'll live with it." Irene smiled.

"Okay. Breakfast is over. Send Nickel in."

Half an hour later, when Irene was sitting at the table with the other slaves, listening to Nickel service Lord Snow, she was thinking desperately about ways to entertain twenty-one gentlemen, less than a week from now.

If Lord Snow borrowed three, then she'd have nine slaves to work with. She should be able to come up with something interesting.

The other slaves at the table had nothing to say to her. They only glared at her while they listened to Lord Snow use and abuse Nickel in the adjoining room.

Irene wondered how she was going to work the whiphand into the entertainment without getting her own c.u.n.t tenderized on some trumped-up accusation.

On Tuesday morning, Irene found Tamarind alone in the kitchen.

"Not up at the manor?"

"No, ma'am. Lord and Lady Snow are hosting a dinner tonight, so there's not much for the slaves to do. The others offered to work in the garden. They like getting some air."

Since her promotion to director of entertainments, the other slaves had started calling her ma'am. Irene knew that they meant it ironically, even disrespectfully, but she thought it best not to make a point of it.

"How did you become a slave?" Irene was curious about the history of all the other slaves in the kennel.

"The usual way," Tamarind said. "I was adjudicated." Punished by the court when she was convicted of a crime.

"What did you do wrong?"

"I got caught."

Irene was annoyed by her evasiveness. "What were you doing when you got caught?"

"Running. Running as fast and as far as I could."

"Running from what?"

"The police, of course."

Irene sighed. "If you don't want to tell me, you don't have to."

"Okay."

There was a strained silence for a minute.

"I heard that you're going to organize another entertainment on Sat.u.r.day," Tamarind said.

"Yes."

"Are you going to starve us again?"

"No. We already did that. Every entertainment has to be different. We won't be starving again." Irene was careful to use the inclusive p.r.o.noun. She wanted the slaves to remember that she had starved just as much as any of them. In fact, a little more. She didn't get any canapes during the entertainment.

"What are you going to do to us this time?"

"I don't know, yet. I still have to think of something good."

She smiled at Tamarind but didn't get a smile in return.

"You got any ideas?" Irene asked after a moment.

"No. You're the director of entertainment."

"So I better think of something good before Sat.u.r.day, or I'll be in the soup. We're going to borrow a few more slaves because there'll be twenty-one guests and I like to keep the ratio under three-to-one. I don't like to see the gentlemen waiting. If they get cranky, it'll be bad for all of us."

Tamarind nodded at that. She'd seen cranky gentlemen before and she didn't like it.

There were a couple minutes of silence while Irene thought about her problem. Designing a run-of-the-mill entertainment a buffet of slaves would be easy, but she'd already set a high bar and was going to have to clear it every time or Lord Snow would be disappointed.

"I stole a car," Tamarind said.

Irene looked up at her in surprise.

"That's why I was adjudicated into slavery. I stole a car."

Irene frowned. "Was that your first offense?"

"Yes."

"Someone told me that people don't get adjudicated on their first offense. That it wasn't until their third conviction that they were considered incorrigible." That made sense to Irene. Slavery was a severe punishment. It not only deprived a person of their freedom, but it condemned them to an early death.

"It depends on the crime," Tamarind said. "If it's serious enough, a person is adjudicated on her first offense."

"You didn't injure anyone, did you? When you stole the car?"

"No. I didn't have to do anything violent. The doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. I hopped in and started driving. I just wanted a little fun. I took a drive up along the beach. Waved at my friends. Had a good time. Until the cops started chasing me. Then I drove down the freeway. I got as far as Seagate before I ran out of gas."

"So running from the police was why you were adjudicated?"

"No. I was adjudicated because it was an earl's car. A crime against an aristocrat merits adjudication even if it's a first offense. I should have known. A commoner would never leave his keys in the ignition. Aristocrats figure that no one would dare steal their cars so they're careless about things like that. I wasn't thinking. I should have known. It's my own fault that I got adjudicated."

"How old were you?"

"Fifteen. The judge could have shown leniency. Adjudication is automatic for an adult who commits a crime against an aristocrat but judges have discretion about adjudication for minors. Judge McCray used his discretion to make me a slave. He said that he wanted to send a message so he put me on the block." She smiled. "I got the message. If the aristocrat had been only a knight, the judge would have let me go. But he was an earl. Worse, he took the trouble to come and watch the trial. That's who the message was for. The judge was telling the earl that he was so important that I had to pay for inconveniencing him by being enslaved even though I was only fifteen."

"That's terrible."

She shrugged. "I thought so. But it doesn't matter what a slave thinks, so I stopped worrying about it a long time ago."

"So you've been a slave since you were fifteen?"

"For almost half my life. I'm twenty-nine now. I know that because I was sold three months ago. Slaves don't get birthday parties, but they get to hear how old they are every time they're put on the block. I've heard my age announced twenty-three times since I was first sold."

It was a grim way to count the years toward the day when she would be considered too old to be a pleasure slave and be sent to a labor auction.

Tamarind noted the unhappy look on Irene's face. "Hey, don't let me get you down. It's not so bad. Most of my owners have been good men. I've never been sold to the professor, so that's lucky."

"The professor?"

"Don't you know about the professor? I thought everyone knew about him. He's a s.a.d.i.s.t. Proud of it. He tortures his slaves. That's how he amuses himself. Non-stop torture. You don't ever want to get sold to the professor." She leaned close and said, in a low voice, "If you make your owner unhappy, if he wants to really punish you, he'll sell you to the professor. It's worse than getting sold to a brothel and you don't want that, either."

Tamarind leaned back in her chair. "Anyway, I guess my owners liked me well enough. Not well enough to keep me for a long time, but well enough that they never sold me to the professor. Or to a brothel."

"What's the longest that an owner has kept you?"

"Almost two years. I was nineteen when Sir Goulfkik bought me and I was twenty-one when he sold me. It was winter when he bought me and winter when he sold me, so I know that it was nearly two years."

"My first owner only kept me for a short while. I think it was about three months." Irene wasn't certain but she had tried to keep a rough count of the weeks. "He didn't sell me. He traded me to Lord Snow in return for a promise of knighthood."

"A lot of owners turn over slaves pretty fast. It doesn't take a gentleman long to get bored with a slave when there are new ones available at auction every month."

Irene knew that her ex-husband seldom kept a slave for more than a few months. She wondered how long Lord Snow would keep her. "I guess Lord Snow will sell me when I can't think up any more amusing entertainments."

"I guess." Tamarind was quiet for a moment. "I... We... Me and the other slaves... We understand that Lord Snow doesn't... Doesn't use you like the rest of us."

"You mean that he doesn't use my s.e.xual services?"

She nodded.

"No. He doesn't. d.a.m.n him. I used to be the wife of his best friend and I think that bothers him. He'd feel like he was betraying James if he used me."

"That must be nice. Not having to service anyone."

Irene shook her head ruefully. "You think that chast.i.ty is nice? It's awful. I want to get f.u.c.ked so bad, I can taste it."

Tamarind looked at her with wide eyes. "You can't mean that."

"Of course I mean it. When I was a lady, I didn't get f.u.c.ked often enough so I sold myself into slavery. Now, it turns out, I'm the only slave in the world who never gets f.u.c.ked at all. If I'd known that this would happen, I would have stayed a lady."

"I'd rather never get f.u.c.ked than get f.u.c.ked a dozen times in a night, every couple of nights."

Irene smiled. "That's because you've never had chast.i.ty forced on you. It might not be nice to get f.u.c.ked too much, but I'd take that over never getting any. What's the longest that you've ever gone without getting f.u.c.ked?"

Tamarind thought for a minute. "Four or five days, I guess. My owner got the flu once and he didn't use me or lend me out until he got better."

"So, since the age of fifteen, you've never had to go for longer than five days without s.e.x. Look at me. How long has it been since Lord Snow bought me? A couple of months, at least. That feels like a long drought. The big question is how long is he going to keep me. For all I know, I might not get f.u.c.ked again for the rest of my life. He might well keep me until I'm too old and then sell me directly into labor. I'm twenty-eight. That's much too young to be left high and dry for the rest of my life."

"Well, if you ever want to trade places with me, just let me know."

"I wish I could. You don't know how badly I wish I could."

Irene set a small box on the kitchen table in front of each of the slaves, Nickel included.

The slaves looked at them but didn't open them. Slaves seldom took the initiative. They were trained to wait until they received an order.

She stood and addressed them. "You've all had s.e.x with a lot of men in a lot of different ways. But I want you to be better at it. It's not enough that you are more available to gentlemen than their own wives. You should also be much better at s.e.x. Especially when he's f.u.c.king your c.u.n.t in the same way that he f.u.c.ks his wife. The more that your owners value you, the safer you are. And the most valuable thing that you can do for a gentleman is to be the best s.e.x partner that he's ever had."

"We're pretty d.a.m.ned good," Peach said. "You think you got some trick that all the ladies know that we don't?"

"No. That's why you can stand head and shoulders above them."

"When we're lying on our backs?"

"Especially then."

Nickel opened her box. She was not surprised by what she found inside. "Shut up and listen," she told Peach. Her hand brushed the handle of the strap hanging by her bust.

Peach shut up.

"This is a trick that I learned as a slave. I learned it because I asked a kennelman what I could do to be a better s.e.x partner. You know what he told me?"

The slaves shook their heads in answer to her rhetorical question. Slaves tend to take things literally.

"He told me that I needed to have a stronger c.u.n.t. You've got muscles down there but you never exercise them. If they're strong enough and if you have good control over them, then you can do things to a c.o.c.k that gentlemen and their wives never dreamed possible. Things that will make a man practically faint with delight. Things that will make your owner want to keep you forever."

Peach snorted in derision, but the rest of the slaves were listening.

"You will find a set of small weights in the boxes that I have given you."

The slaves looked at her.

"Go ahead, open your boxes and take a look at them." Irene sometimes found slaves' compliance to be annoying. She wondered if gentlemen found the same thing. Maybe gentlemen would be amused by slaves who were not automatically compliant. She was still looking for a way to entertain the gentlemen on Sat.u.r.day night and made a mental note to explore this idea a little.

"Okay, pick up the thing that looks like a little anchor with a double cone on one end. The part that is narrow and gets wide and then narrow again is like a little d.i.l.d.o. The anchor part at the end keeps it from sliding too far inside. If you insert it, you'll find that you have to squeeze hard to keep it from slipping out because it won't go in far enough to stay by itself. Stand up, now and try inserting it into your c.u.n.ts."

Two of the weights fell to the floor. The other four slaves kept their hands close enough to catch them when they squirted back out.