KES SUMMONED DESTA to her room. The slave rushed in, excited about her mistress’s return. “We didn’t know you were back, Domna,” she enthused. “It’s so good to—”
“Silence.” Kes bit the word off. The girl obeyed, her stance shifting into a submissive pose in response to Kes’s sharp-edged tone. Compliant, at her bidding. Waiting.
Kes put her on her knees with a gesture. Desta knew better than to question or lose discipline and look about, trying to figure out what Kes wanted. She had only to do as she was told. Any uncertainty she felt was not evident in her demeanor. She was there to serve, completely at Kes’s disposal.
The uncertainty Kes felt was another matter entirely.
She clenched her jaw on it. The awareness came home in a way it never had before: this woman was hers, to do with as she pleased. And what she pleased to do was not pretty. It was beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior in the consent-based sadomasochistic world of Tryst—or any world of erotic dominance and submission that she’d known. The visions that flitted through her mind as she regarded the beautiful, passive woman before her were not erotic at all. Nor even simply sadistic.
They were murderous. They were things the Beast inside her would do, if she let it slip the leash: things she could have done to Helda in her rage, if doing so would not have threatened her plans with Janus. But a slave was different, in theory. Maybe even in fact.
She’d never pushed that boundary. Never wanted to. But wouldn’t it feel … gratifying, right now, to see some blood spattered on the wall? Streaking her skin. Tearing cries from a whimpering body—
She took a slow step to one side. Then another, and another, until she was circling Desta sideways. Studying.
Stalking.
She regarded her own thoughts dispassionately. It was not anger that drove her, and not passion, either, she noted. Not even a normal sadistic desire to hurt in carefully calculated ways.…
She touched the edges of that feeling, frowning.
Twisted erotic sexuality was only ever the merest appetizer to her. Her real thrill came from the exercise of power with a willing partner. Real dominance was a heady drug, incomparable when someone gave themselves up to her completely, their devotion and surrender plain to see in their eyes. Their suffering was a sweet offering born of that submission. Even slaves like Desta had a choice of duties in the House; if they chose to be in intimate service to a domina like Kes, it was because they welcomed the psychosexual journey that was likely to attend that service. They, and others who chose to submit to her, did so willing to go wherever it might lead.
To persons wired in that way, whether in her personal circuit, or even clients, Kes offered a crucible, the only entrance to which was profound submission or transporting pain. She watched her partners throw themselves willingly into that cauldron, to be swept up by the currents there, buffeted by the storm that she orchestrated, only to be poured out at the end, purified and refined, exhausted, sobbing with the overwhelming primal force of it all. Tears and intensity and sometimes erotic pleasure bound into one, a transport of ecstasies.
But now that resonance was simply—gone. It was a memory, not a visceral feeling, not a thing she could tap into and let electrify her in this very moment. The urge to hurt was still there, but no desire for the intricacies of control, of power. The prospect of crafting a journey for the one surrendered left her cold.
No matter that she saw submission in the slave’s eyes. That was shadowed now by something darker, as Desta responded to the domina’s tense prowling.
She can see, Kes realized. She can see that I’m different, somehow. And she’s afraid.
She came to a halt and made herself take a step back from the kneeling girl. In her mind’s eye, she knelt closer, licked the delicate shell of Desta’s ear, nibbled it between her teeth, then bit through it with a yanking tear—
She turned her back on her property and spoke into the air.
“Leave me.”
With the wisdom of the service-born, Desta knew not to reply with words. A moment later Kes heard the door screen slide shut behind her.
She let out her breath in a long controlled exhalation, and stood rooted in the center of her room, buffeted by currents not of her own making. She looked about the space, unsettled, seeing her surroundings as if they were new, and she a stranger amidst them. On the table were the crystal flowers sent to her by Janus months ago, pristine and unchanging. There was her bed, a cozy haven, looking ready for someone to fall into it for a nap or wild sex, whichever came first. There, her closet, tidy and tended by Desta, who’d dutifully watered the plants in the corner and fed Frebo all the while she’d been gone.
She stepped to the closet, to the nest of her chameloid pet there. Frebo purred at her touch and she lifted his fluffy length from his box atop a clothes chest. Sitting cross-legged on her low bed, she wrapped his boa-like body around her wrist and forearm, a cream-white bracelet of feathers with a slender, wiry body underneath. She stroked him with one finger as his purring strengthened, and threw herself back on her bed to think things over.
The purf’s rumble was subliminal, more felt than heard, but already she could feel the soothing effect of the empathic creature’s vibrations. Kes breathed a sigh of relief. She had an endless reserve of pent-up hostility ever since those imperial bastards had fucked with her at that research station. It was good to know there was more than one way to take the edge off it. Frebo was a great soother, a balancer of human moods in one psionically empathic bundle of love. That was the thing about purfs—they didn’t care about a person’s foibles, they just radiated acceptance and contentment. Not a bad thing, when a body had so many reasons to feel discontent.
She cracked an eye open to watch Frebo change colors—then sat up in surprise, both eyes wide. The chameleoid had changed already, taking on the hue of Kes’s aura. She looked at her arm in dismay.
Frebo was a brilliant scarlet standing out starkly against the background of her white sleeve. Darker crimson shaded his underbelly; here and there were streaks of orange and yellow and—yes, some darker flecks verging on black. As she watched, some of the red leached away, to be replaced by orange, dissolving into acid yellow and brown. Worry, thinkishness, concern, the surface of her emotions picked up as overlay, the rest an analog for the sullen tension coiled in her guts like a dull ache.
“Dammit.”
She stood, stripped the purf off her wrist, and returned him to the closet, dropping him more carelessly than usual back into his nest.
She stood for a moment in indecision. She was not accustomed to feeling overwhelmed, but she’d been on an emotional roller coaster for quite a while now. It was time to just let things go. And if she didn’t trust herself to play right now—and she didn’t—there was still a great physical distraction that fit the bill: sex.
And speaking of which, where was Morya, anyway? Their reunion was long overdue; and more importantly, Morya knew her. Loved her. Surely she would connect with Kes, with those parts of Kes that were present, but deadened somehow. Help her feel centered and properly alive again.
That’s what I need, she thought, the rightness of it resonating through her. The right connection, with the right person. Someone who’ll ground me, remind me who I am.
Morya.
As she pictured her lover, something else disturbed her. Kes loved her girl; she knew that, and rolled that thought over in her mind, tasted it—and felt the dissonance of it.
For that notion, too, felt only half alive inside her. She’d avoided thinking about Morya while she was away from home: there was too much hope wrapped up there, too many plans that threatened to run away from her. If she had thought of her lover and their forced separation, she would have been even more disheartened in that terrible research station than she was. But now …
Love. It nearly made her giddy once, when she’d realized she could afford to buy her girl’s contract, utterly change their circumstances together. The anticipation of asking her to marry …
Now the giddiness was gone, and the anticipation, too. It was just a fact, one she finally dared to look at again now that she was back home. She’d walled off her feelings while she was gone, or tried to, and this secret part of her heart she had kept the most fortified of all. This was her private life, her innermost self, this relationship with Morya she kept compartmentalized and safe. It was too fragile, too fraught a thing to dwell on in that harsh place she’d been detained in. But now …
Now she could look behind that wall again and consider what was there.
She loved Morya, only now the starry-eyed romance was gone, burned away, perhaps, by her ordeal, and just the core of it remained. They would be partnered because it was right and because they loved each other. They belonged together.
She stood for a moment in quiet self-assessment. The feeling didn’t budge. It didn’t ease her and it didn’t add to her stress, as she’d thought it might. It didn’t do much of anything.
Good, she thought. That makes it tolerable. At least I won’t hare off like some lovesick puppy and do something stupid.
She was glad for this strange buffer zone she felt around her feelings. How long this bubble would last, she didn’t know, but it made some things easier, maybe.
Things like seeing Morya again.
She glanced at her closet, then thought better of it. First, a shower. Then the right look. She smiled to herself.
I’ve been gone too long. Professionally and personally. She grinned. Now it’s time to do it right.
SERVANTS BANISHED, DOOR locked, Kes sat before the mirror of her dressing room table. Alone, she put herself together with the same care she used when recording verts for her Winter Goddess spots. It took longer this way, but the meticulous ritual brought her back to herself and moved her beyond, to a place where she felt more than ordinary power gathering to her.
Hair, finger-combed only with gloss-gel, shaken out until her perfect cut fell in perfect, voluminous waves of white and shadow to just below mid-back. Makeup, applied to give her her stunning trademark appearance, her fair skin transformed to a lucent near white, eyes set off by kohl-rimmed lids and dramatic darkling eye shadow, bloodred lips another splash of color on her refined features.
The process faltered briefly once. Her fingers brushed the corner of her jaw, and she paused. The small scar she’d had there since she was a child was gone.
She froze where she sat, one hand holding the foundation-powder applicator hovering near her skin. Not using it, while she leaned in to her makeup mirror and let her eyes rove critically over her face. Yes. Minor differences. Maybe things a person wouldn’t even notice, if they didn’t pay painstaking attention to their grooming as Kes had to. Lines gone from eye and mouth corners. Minor blemishes gone, or in different places than she expected to find them. I look younger, she thought. The lack of lines did it.
“Enhanced,” Ilanya had told her. Did “enhancement” include minor cosmetic changes?
She made the observation, filed it away. Ilanya had way overstepped her bounds, but that was a fight for another day. One thing at a time. That was all she could handle right now, and right now the routine of transformation called to her.
“DOMNA, YOU BETTER come see this.”
Pol’s message pulled Helda out of her room where she’d retreated in self-pity. In the control room that was the hidden nerve center of House operations, her personal slave and house tech master pointed to a monitor showing a view of Kes’s private dressing room. By Helda’s own order it was always off, since she preferred no spying eyes when she had the occasional intimate encounter with Kes in that very room. She looked askance at Pol before she studied the image on the screen.
“Kes sent the makeup assistants packing when they came to wait on her and locked the door behind them. They were worried and told Desta. She told me. She sounds worried, too.”
“Hm,” Helda murmured noncommittally. “What’s she doing?”
“Just that.” Pol pointed. “The full do. Does she have clients today?”
Helda repressed a sharp remark and just shook her head. Lips thinned, she watched Kes. Hair. Makeup. Careful scrutiny in the mirror mid-application.
She eased into her seat, glancing over to her slave. “You did right, Pol. Leave it awhile.” She turned back to the screen. “I want to watch.”
MAKEUP, DONE. THEN the body spray, a long-wearing permeable stage cosmetic that brought all Kes’s exposed skin to the same pallid hue as her face. A glimpse in the mirror at her naked body: already she had morphed into someone different, a ghostly, statuesque woman from out of ancient tales. She regarded herself, unsmiling, for the Winter Goddess did not smile unless it was in cruel mirth. She nodded to her reflection; the woman in the mirror nodded back, cool, aloof. Powerful.
A few diamond microstuds along the curve of her left ear, and one in the lobe. One in the other lobe for asymmetric balance. Another, larger one in the platinum jewelry that adorned her navel. Nano-paint on the nails that left them a shimmering, glossy, enameled scarlet a few heartbeats later. The lingerie, all white: thong, midriff-cut bustier, the classic spider-weave sheer stockings that were lost on her legs, white on white, but whose lace-woven tops accented that delicate gap high on her leg, above the thigh-high boots she would soon pull on and the edge of her thong.
Draw the eye. Accent the desirable—and unattainable. Let the onlookers be enthralled with a glance, and not know why.…
Stiletto-heeled boots to add to her height and the suggestive imagery. A narrow V-shaped white leather belt snug around her hips, the divot accented with platinum studding, drawing the eye to her abdomen below the bejeweled navel, above the curve of her mound. Robe of sheer white shimmer-silk over it all, narrow at the waist, flowing skirts playing hide-and-seek with her legs and lower body, the open-cut torso tempting the eye with the obscured curve of her breasts. Diaphanous cloak, sheer, a hint of substance revealing more than it concealed but adding to the layers, to the depth, to the mystery.
The last touch, a finger-dab of pheromones from two separate bottles, one formulated to spark lust in men, the other in women. She set the last bottle down and stood back from the mirror.
She did not recognize herself. The metamorphosis was complete.
And now the Winter Goddess smiled. That wasn’t Hinano Kesada in the mirror. It was Lovianis, the ancient goddess of pain and ice, the chilling beauty who tormented men’s souls. She had been gone a long time from this place. Too long.
It was time to make her presence known.