CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JAI
Though I tried to pretend otherwise, my heart was pounding as I finished my shower and dressed in some of my new clothes. The clothes my master had bought for me.
But he hadn’t chosen the clothes, I reminded myself, trying to maintain a grasp on my anger. He’d delegated that responsibility to his other dimari. His first dimari. The one he loved and protected and wasn’t going to abandon the instant he became too inconvenient.
But angry or not, I had the sense to realise that I was in serious trouble.
There was no way out of my current situation.
Aiden Hill was my master. He owned me. He could order me to do anything and I would be compelled to obey him.
And he would continue to own me for the rest of my life, however long that ended up being.
After he got out of the shower, my master disappeared into his own bedroom.
I went into the spare bedroom with a towel wrapped around my waist and selected some clothes I thought might be appropriate – simple shorts and a t-shirt, given that I wasn’t aware of any plans to go anywhere else this evening.
I didn’t know anything about Alliance fashion at the moment, but that was my best guess.
A part of me was annoyed and disappointed with the fact that I wasn’t deliberately choosing something inappropriate to wear.
It would have been an easy way to continue annoying my master.
But the reality was that I’d run out of fight for the day.
Defying my master was both exhausting and terrifying, and I couldn’t keep it up twenty-four hours a day.
Dry and dressed, I hung the towel up in the bathroom, then slunk back to the living room.
Kade was sitting on the sofa, in clothes as casual as mine, reading a document on his comm.
He looked up as I came into the room, and for a brief moment, his expression lit with warmth. He seemed glad to see me.
But the moment passed, and not even a second later, his eyes moved to look over my right shoulder, and his expression dimmed. I glanced back, to find my master coming down the hallway behind me. I stepped aside to let him past, and lowered my gaze to the floor as I did so.
“Take a seat, Jai,” my master said, gesturing to the other end of the sofa from where Kade was sitting.
I sat, but then jumped up in consternation as my master fetched a chair from the dining room.
There was only one sofa in the room and it wouldn’t be practical for us all to squeeze onto it and still have a meaningful conversation.
“Would you like me to sit on the dining chair, sir?” I asked, falling into rote patterns of obedience and appeasement. I hated my master, but a dimari’s habits were deeply ingrained. And I was currently terrified of the consequences my previous actions would attract.
“No, I would like you to sit on that seat, right there,” my master said, pointing once more to the end of the sofa. I sat, while he took a seat on the dining chair.
He looked me over intently, while I sat and tried to control my shaking.
Why was I so intent on disobeying my master, anyway?
I’d known right from the start that this would be the result; discipline, and possibly punishment, and in the end, the same disregard and abandonment, no matter what point I tried to make.
Now that I had my master’s full attention, I had to stop and wonder what I wanted to come of these flagrant displays of disobedience. What was I trying to achieve?
“Jai?” my master began, and I noted that his tone was cool and stern.
I glanced up and saw that Kade was sitting neatly upright at the other end of the sofa, somehow managing to find an appropriate halfway point between tense and relaxed – attentive, but not stiff as a board.
He was doing a marvellous job of filling the role of the good dimari.
The obedient dimari. And certainly the favourite dimari – not because of anything I had done, but because that had been my destiny right from the start.
“Yes, sir,” I said, reminding myself that disobedience was only going to make my life worse in the long run. Were there worse places to be than hell? An ill-fitting sense of self-preservation said I should avoid trying to find out.
“I’d like to talk about your training. Specifically why you were chosen to have two specialties, instead of just one.”
His words landed in my brain… but it took me a long moment to process them.
He wanted to talk about what? I’d been expecting a lecture about a dimari’s duty to serve his master.
Or a list of punishments I was to endure, in an effort to turn me into a more obedient slave.
I looked up, then glanced from my master to Kade.
“I don’t understand, sir,” I said, quite honestly.
I also wondered what Kade’s role in all of this was.
There hadn’t been time between getting out of the shower and coming into the living room for my master to have told Kade what had happened in the bathroom.
But at the same time, a good dimari was taught to be acutely aware of their master’s moods at all times, and the disappointment was rolling off my master in almost tangible waves.
My master nodded, seeming to take my confusion at face value.
“Every other dimari I’ve ever encountered has only been trained in one specialty.
Kade is a combat specialist. But he told me at one point that his trainers had tried to teach him a couple of more advanced sexual techniques, but they’d had to give up on that plan because it would have taken too much time away from his combat training.
So I want to know why you were chosen to be trained in two skills. ”
At his explanation, my mood blackened again. “I was trained in two specialties because you requested it,” I said simply. Then I belatedly added, “Sir.”
My master didn’t seem to know what to say to that.
Had he forgotten that he was the one who’d asked for me to be trained in the first place?
But then he shook his head. “That’s not quite what I mean.
What I’m asking is why you in particular were chosen as the dimari to be trained this way.
Dimari are trained based on early indications of an interest in a particular vocation, or on specific personality traits.
A domestic companion, for example, is necessarily an outgoing person who enjoys social interaction.
So my question is what particular traits did your trainers see in you that they thought were suitable for the role you were trained in? ”
The question stung, and I forced myself to think back to my early teenage years, when I’d been so confident, and so reckless, and so eager to please.
“My trainers noticed that I was academically gifted. And that I had a way of…” I paused as I tried to find the right words.
I expected my master to scold me for taking too long, but he said nothing, waiting with surprising patience.
“…of thinking in ways that were different from other people. I could rewire circuits in unique ways. I could reconfigure systems to achieve things that they didn’t expect.
I had a way of recognising patterns. When we played games of stealth or strategy, I invariably won, because I could predict what the other team was going to do before they did it.
They saw potential in that for being useful in combat.
“I was also adventurous. When I was young, I took a lot of risks without always thinking through the consequences. As I got older, I learned more about what the dangers really were, but I also still enjoyed the excitement of taking risks.” That side of my personality had been beaten out of me, somewhere along the way.
I now knew far too much about what the consequences of failure would be, and I had no desire to experience them in person.
My master nodded, considering my answer in silence for a few moments. “And the sexual side of things?” he prompted me next.
I shrugged, not meaning to be as dismissive as I had been earlier, but in this case, the answer was oddly straight forward.
“I had already completed my combat training at the age of eighteen. So when they received the request to have a dimari trained in two skills, they saw they had an extra couple of years to make use of before I was old enough to be shipped to my master.”
“I was always told that the Eumadians don’t keep accurate records of how old the dimari are. They’re sold when they’re roughly twenty, but they never know exactly how old they are.”
“That’s not true,” I said, aware that many masters frowned on their dimari contradicting them.
But in this case, I genuinely believed my master was seeking factual information, not blithe agreement.
“They know exactly when each child is brought to them, and how many years it takes to train them. They simply don’t make that information available to the dimari themselves. ”
My master’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that, then?”
“When I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old, my trainers asked me to help them with some of the record keeping. I was good at that sort of thing. I learned a lot about their systems in the process.”
My master nodded slowly. “So what was it about you that made them think you’d be suitable to be an erotic companion?”
I stared at my master, rage and confusion warring for space in my head. “I have no idea,” I said, once more being completely honest about it. “All dimari are trained in basic sexual services, and I suppose I performed well enough at that. To be chosen as a specialist, though… I don’t know.”