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You kiss the girl in an alley until she’s breathless and then say the magic spell. “Come home with me.”
She gasps against your jaw, beyond words, but she nods. You can feel her pulse thrumming like a frightened bird. She’s told you her name. You’ve forgotten it. It isn’t really relevant.
You tempt her with every lovely thing you can think of as you lead her through the dark. You’d sized her up early in the night — a sweet merchant’s daughter, wealthy enough to have the plump edge of a ripe peach, well-fed and perfumed and rosy, but not so wealthy that her disappearance would cause inconvenience for your master. She is decked with jewels, but not diamonds or pearls. She likes sparkling things, then, and you saw her order cider after cider. So you guide her through the streets and promise her sweet wine and strings of pearls and more of your kisses, and she follows, giggling, cooing, swaying anytime you let go of her hand. You can’t let her flee. You will only make that mistake once. The old mausoleum is hungry for you.
By the time you are home, she is a little less drunk, but she does not recognize the palace in the dark, and so she follows you hungrily through the door. It shuts behind you and a different set of rules now applies. You release her hand. You cannot be punished again. If he puts you in that tomb again you will break for good.
“You ought to meet my master,” you tell her, and even you can hear the change in your voice, subdued and quiet even in the echoing halls. Someone watches you from a darkened doorway — one of your brothers, you can’t tell which. Leon, maybe.
“Is he nice?” drawls the girl, trying to catch your hand again. She still does not comprehend her danger.
“Very,” you lie, because he may be listening, and you slip effortlessly beyond her reach. She is Cazador’s now and you are not permitted to touch Cazador’s things. You will obey him. Do not put me in the dark again.
“There’s a pretty thing,” your master calls from the staircase. He is regal and beautiful and flush with blood. “My, young lady, aren’t you lovely? Do come and dine with me, won’t you?”
The girl blushes and curtsies and introduces herself. Her name passes through you unheard again.
“Lovely.” Your master smiles with teeth. “Astarion, will you be joining us?”
You keep your eyes on the floor but you have been addressed and you will answer. There is only one answer. “I would be honored. Thank you, Master.”
The dining room is opulent and the girl, magpie that she is, is too occupied with the sparkling things to notice you take your customary place, knelt by Cazador’s seat, hands clenched into fists in your lap. Cazador offers her wine and she accepts it.
Dalyria brings it. She also brings you a rat and sets it on the shining silver dish before you. It isn’t even fresh — it reeks of putrescence. One of the ones caught in the kitchen traps, you suspect, and kept to rot just for you. You can smell the decomposing contents of its stomach. More rat flesh. Cazador’s kitchens are woefully bare of anything for rats to eat except each other, at least until he has a social obligation. Rats eating rats.
You know better than to let your revulsion show. You take the dead rat in your hands and delicately nip through its throat. Its blood slides out, congealed into sludge. You imagine it is your master, his regal face twisted in fear.
The girl has noticed you and the rat, and the first flickering of horror has crept across her pretty face. Her earrings catch the candlelight. (Topaz. Common but pretty.) You don’t know how old she is. You’ve stopped asking. The answer is never a number you want to hear.
Cazador watches you, his face locked in that same regal and beautiful smile. “Is it to your liking?” he asks.
“Yes.” You refuse to let a drop of rotting ratblood spill. You are hungry. You are always hungry. He likes you weak. You dream that someday you will be strong enough to tear him apart. “Thank you, Master.”
Cazador rises and stalks to the girl’s chair. You don’t watch. You are not permitted to. You keep your eyes on the oozing corpse in your hands, lapping the sludge from its throat and hating how it soothes the thirst, just a little. You hold your breath so you will not catch the scent of the girl’s blood and even incidentally draw pleasure from your master’s feeding. (The girl’s blood will smell like cider and iron and sparkling things, like a harvest festival in a village barn, like light and love and last kisses, like a lover from before wartime running across a field singing your name.) She makes a guttural choking noise, her fine boots kicking the table leg, and then she goes limp, and the only sound is the wet sucking.
It’s never over quickly. You try to focus on the dead rat in your hands, but some sort of wet chunk slides into your mouth and makes you gag.
You have done your job and this is your reward, to catch a breath of blood so sweet your eyes roll back, but given nothing but rotting vermin. But the alternative is worse.
In the year you spent in the mausoleum, in your solitary confinement, you went so mad with thirst that you wished for maggots and their putrid green-brown haemolymph — not quite blood but not quite not-blood — but you were left there to desiccate. You clawed your hands to raw meat on the stone and screamed for your brothers and sisters, knowing they couldn’t — wouldn’t — help you. Begging your master’s forgiveness. Screaming so sweetly, just the way he likes best. You would grovel at his feet for a rotten rat, for a breath of air that didn’t hang heavy and warm with how many times you’ve breathed it already. No one is worth this, you tell yourself, curled fetal on the floor, sobbing dry, too dehydrated to cry. No disobedience is worth this price. You will be good. You will. If he will only let you out.
No, you will not be put in solitary again. You will not be alone again. (Lonely – of course. But not alone in your loneliness.) You will bring him any pretty thing he likes.
Cazador takes his time with the girl. The sun is dawning before you are dismissed.