Chapter 6

The man who had promised to watch the door was gone.

Dusk pressed through the mill’s broken roof. I had missed the bread, the lamps, the evening roll call. By now, someone would be waiting at the kitchen door.

I pushed his coat aside.

“Easy,” said the man on the step. Rhys. “He sent me to take you home.”

“Did he tell you what happens when I come home late?”

Rhys stood. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“What happens?”

I looked past him at the darkening path.

“Last time, they flogged me in the smokehouse and made the other girls watch.”

He stepped away from the doorway.

“Elowen. Tell me exactly who did that.”

“Luna gives the order,” I said. “Petra carries it out. In the smokehouse, at first light, the guests are still asleep. Twenty, usually. Fifty, when I was new.” I heard my own voice saying it, flat and tidy, like a line in a ledger. “The other girls stand along the wall. It’s meant to teach them something.”

Rhys did