The courtyard stones burn through the soles of her feet. Meera has been standing in the same spot since the truck left, since the dust of its wheels settled back onto the road and her father's face disappeared behind it, and the sun has climbed high enough now that the shadows have shrunk to nothing beneath the men who watch her.

There are three of them on the veranda. She counts them the way she counts everything — the way she counted the turns of the road, the way she counted the coins her mother sewed into the hem of her blouse, the way she counted the days since the men in white came to their door with papers. The eldest sits on a low chair with his knees apart, a glass of something amber sweating in his fist. The one beside him stands with his arms crossed, lean and restless, his jaw working like he's chewing something that won't soften. The third leans against a pillar, taller than the others, and he is the one she cannot look at directly — the one whose eyes keep sliding away from her when she catches them, as if he is the one who should be ashamed.

No one speaks. The only sound is a pigeon somewhere in the rafters and the distant lowing of a cow, and beneath it all, her own breathing, which she is trying to make quieter, smaller, the way you make yourself small in a house that is not yours.

She has not been told to sit. She has not been told anything at all since the truck stopped and the driver pointed at the gate and said, Here.

"Come."

The word comes from the man in the chair, and it is not loud, but the courtyard seems to tilt toward it. Vikram Singh Rathore sets his glass on the armrest and rises, and now she understands why the men on either side of him hold themselves the way they do — because he is the center of this place, the way the sun is the center of the courtyard, and everything else arranges itself around him without being asked.

He crosses the stones. He is older than her father, she thinks — the salt in his beard, the deep lines at his eyes — but there is nothing slow about him. His chest is broad under a white kurta, his forearms thick and dark, and when he stops in front of her, close enough that she can smell the sandalwood and the sweat and something older beneath both, she has to tilt her head back to keep her eyes on his face.

His hand closes around her wrist.

His fingers are calloused — she feels the rough pads of them against the thin skin where her pulse runs — and they do not fumble. They do not ask. They circle her wrist the way a man circles the handle of a tool he has owned for years, and he turns her without a word and walks her toward the house.

She has to hurry to keep up. Her bare feet slap against the hot stones, and she catches a glimpse of the two men on the veranda as she passes — the lean one watching her with his jaw still working, the tall one with his eyes on the ground — and then she is through the doorway and the sun is gone.

The corridor is dim and long, and the marble under her feet is cold, so cold that it sends a shock up through her ankles after the heat of the courtyard. The air inside is thick with incense, sandalwood again, and under it the smell of old wood and old cloth and something she cannot name. Their footsteps echo — his measured, hers quick and stumbling — and her braid swings heavy against her back, the way her mother used to braid it every morning before the sun came up.

Keep it neat, her mother would say, her hands quick and sure. A girl who keeps her hair neat is a girl who will be kept.

Meera had not understood what she meant. She understands now, or she is beginning to, and the understanding sits in her stomach like a stone.

He stops at a door at the end of the corridor. He does not knock — it is his door, she realizes, this is his house, every door in it is his — and he pushes it open and draws her through.

The room is larger than her family's entire house. The ceiling is dark wood, carved, and it traps the heat so that the air sits heavy and still against her skin. A bed stands against the far wall, wide and low, its posts carved with figures she does not look at too closely. There is a window, but the shutters are closed, and the light that comes through the slats falls in thin stripes across the marble floor. On a low table near the bed, incense smolders in a brass holder, and the smoke rises in a slow ribbon and hangs there, unmoving.

He releases her wrist.

She stands where he left her, her hands at her sides, and she does not know what to do with her eyes. She settles on the floor — the marble, the thin stripes of light, the dark grain of the wood — and she waits.

He moves behind her. She hears the latch, and then the sound of the door settling into its frame, and something in her chest pulls tight.

"Turn around."

She turns. He is standing by the bed, and he is looking at her the way her father used to look at the land before he sold it — measuring, weighing, deciding what it was worth and what it would yield. His eyes are black, and they do not move from her face.

"What did they tell you?" he asks.

Her voice comes out smaller than she wants it to. "That I was to come here. That my father —"

"Your father borrowed money." He says it without heat, the way a man reads a ledger. "Two hundred thousand rupees, over four years. He paid back forty. The rest is you."

She knew this. She has known it since the night the men in white came, since she watched her mother cry into her own hands and her father sit with his back to the wall and his eyes empty. She knew it, and still the words land in her chest like a second stone.

"Yes," she says.

"Come here."

Her feet carry her before her mind decides. The marble is cold, and then it is not — she is close enough now that she can feel the heat coming off him, the smell of him, sandalwood and sweat and the faint sourness of the amber drink. He reaches out and takes her braid, and he does not pull it, only weighs it in his hand, the way he weighed her.

"You will keep this neat," he says. "You will keep yourself clean. You will do as you are told, when you are told, without being told twice. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Say it properly."

She swallows. "Yes —" and she does not know what to call him, and the pause stretches, and his thumb presses against her braid, a warning. "Yes, sir."

Something moves across his face. Not a smile. Something older and more satisfied, the look of a man who has confirmed a thing he already knew.

"Good."

He turns her by the shoulder — his hand is heavy, and it does not hurt, but it does not leave room for anything but turning — and walks her the two steps to the bed. The carved post rises in front of her, dark wood worn smooth in places by hands that came before hers, and she has just enough time to see the grain of it before his palm presses flat between her shoulder blades.

"Palms on the post."

She puts her palms on the wood. It is warm from the room, and the grain presses into her skin, and she can feel the ridge of a carved figure under her left hand, a curve she does not look at.

Behind her, cloth moves. His kurta, she thinks, and then the softer sound of something being loosened, and her heart is beating so hard she can feel it in her throat. She has never — there was a boy once, at the well, who looked at her too long, and her mother had seen and pulled her away and said, Not yet. Not for you. She had thought that meant there would be a time. A wedding, a man she would come to know, a room she would enter willingly.

She had not thought it would be a debt.

His hands find her waist. They are warm through the cotton of her skirt, and they are sure, and they slide down over her hips to the hem, and then the cloth is lifting, the air of the room moving against the backs of her thighs, cooler than she expected, and the hem is rucked up over her hips and held there by one of his hands while the other —

The other settles on her. Flat, warm, the calluses dragging against the soft skin of her ass, and she jerks at the contact before she can stop herself, and his hand presses down, holding her still.

"Don't."

One word. She stops.

His thumb moves. It slides down between her legs, slow, unhurried, finding the seam of her, and she feels her own body flinch and then — and she does not understand this — she feels it answer. A heat that she did not ask for, that gathers where his thumb presses and spreads outward, and when he drags his thumb up through her she is wet, she can feel it, slick under his touch, and her face burns with shame at it.

"There," he says, and it is not praise, it is simply the sound of a man finding what he expected to find. "Good girl."

He steps closer. She feels him against her thigh — thick, hard, hotter than the rest of him — and her hands grip the post until her knuckles ache, and she does not look down, she does not look back, she fixes her eyes on the wood grain in front of her and she counts the lines of it the way she counts everything.

His beard scrapes her shoulder. Rough hair, the smell of him filling her nose, and his mouth is at her ear and his voice is low and certain.

"This is how you pay your father's debt."

And then he pushes into her.

She has never felt anything like it. The stretch of it, the wrongness of it, a burning fullness that goes deeper than she thought her body could hold, and her mouth opens and no sound comes out, and her whole body goes rigid against the post, and he does not stop. He does not pause to let her breathe. He drives forward with a slow, heavy weight, and she feels something inside her give — a sharp sting, a tear, and then he is seated in her to the root, and she can feel his hips against her ass, and she is shaking.

"Breathe," he says, and it is the first thing he has said to her that sounds almost kind, and it is not kind at all. "You'll get used to it."

He moves.

The first pull back is almost a relief — the slick drag of him leaving her, the easing of the stretch — and then he thrusts in again and the fullness is back, deeper this time, and she hears herself make a sound she has never made, a small broken thing that is not quite a cry. His hand leaves her hip and gathers her braid, and he wraps it once around his fist and tugs, just enough to lift her chin, and the pull on her scalp sends something sharp down her spine.

"Hold the post," he says. "You'll need to."

She holds it. He fucks her.

It is not fast. It is steady and deep and relentless, each thrust driving her forward into the wood, the carved figure pressing hard into her palm, her feet slipping on the cold marble, and she has to brace to keep from falling. The wet sound of it fills the room — she can hear herself, hear what he is doing to her, and the shame of it burns hotter than the stretch — and under the shame, under the sting, there is something else building. A pressure low in her belly that she does not want. A heat that gathers where he is splitting her open and spreads out through her thighs, and she catches herself pushing back to meet him, just once, before she stops, horrified at her own body.

He feels it. Of course he feels it.

"That's it," he says, and his voice has gone rough. "Take it. This is what you were brought here for."

He speeds up. The slap of his hips against her ass is loud in the still room, and the incense smoke curls around them, and she can feel the sweat starting on her back, under her blouse, and his hand on her braid is pulling her head back so that she is looking up at the dark carved ceiling and the smoke rising toward it, and she cannot stop the sounds coming out of her now, small and high and broken, and she cannot tell anymore whether they are pain or something worse.

"Say it," he says. "Say what you are."

She does not know what he wants. She does not know the words. And so she says the only thing she can think of, the thing she has been told since she walked through the gate.

"I'm — I'm yours."

His breath catches. His grip on her braid tightens, and his other hand comes down hard on her ass, a slap that cracks through the room and sends a bright shock up her spine, and she cries out, and he does it again, and again, each one landing where his hips meet her, until her skin is hot and stinging under his palm.

"Again."

"I'm yours," she says, louder. "I'm yours, sir —"

He groans. It is the first sound he has made that he did not choose, and she feels it against her back, feels his rhythm break, feels him drive into her hard and deep and hold there, his hips pressed flush against her ass, and then he is coming inside her. She feels it — the throb of him, the pulse, the hot spill of it deep in her cunt, and he grinds into her once more, twice, emptying himself into her body while his hand stays tight on her braid and his breath comes rough against her shoulder.

And then he stops.

For a long moment neither of them moves. She is bent over the bed, her palms still flat on the post, her legs shaking, and she can feel him still inside her, softening, and she can feel the wetness of what he has left behind beginning to slide down the inside of her thigh. The incense smoke has thinned. The room is very quiet.

He pulls out.

She feels the loss of him — the sudden emptiness, the cool air against skin that was stretched around him — and then she feels the rest of it, the slow trickle, the evidence of him running down her leg and onto the marble floor. She does not move. She does not know if she is allowed to move.

Behind her, cloth rustles. He is straightening his kurta, she thinks, and she hears him cross the room, and then the sound of a glass being lifted and set down.

"You may stand up."

She straightens. Her legs are unsteady under her, and her skirt falls back into place, and she can feel the wet cotton of it clinging to her where he left his mark, and she keeps her eyes on the floor and her hands at her sides and she waits.

He is at the window, one shutter pushed open now, and the thin daylight falls across his face and the salt in his beard.

"There is a room at the end of the corridor," he says. "The one with the blue door. You will sleep there. You will wash, and you will eat what you are given, and when you are called, you will come."

"Yes, sir."

"My sons are outside." He says it without looking at her, the way a man mentions the weather. "You will meet them at dinner. They will want to see what their father has brought home."

She says nothing. There is nothing to say.

"Go," he says.

She goes. Her feet carry her across the cold marble, past the low table and the smoldering incense, and she does not look back at the bed, and she does not look back at him. At the door she pauses, her hand on the latch, and she can feel the wetness still moving down the inside of her thigh.

Outside, in the corridor, she can hear them — low voices, the lean one's laugh, the sound of a chair scraping stone. Waiting for her to come out. Waiting to see what their father has brought home.

She opens the door.