The corridor was longer than it had looked from the warm doorway of the dining room. Arjun's hand stayed closed around her upper arm, the grip of a man who had carried many sacks of grain and knew the weight of a thing before he lifted it, and his thumb pressed into the soft muscle above her elbow with every step. The blue door came toward them out of the dark — a color she could only just make out, the blue of a thing kept out of the sun. He stopped in front of it, opened it with his free hand, and pushed her through.

"Sleep," he said. Not to her, particularly. To the room.

The door closed. The bolt went across with a scrape of iron on iron, and then his footsteps went back down the corridor the way they had come, unhurried, and somewhere beyond the wall a chair scraped and a man's voice said something too low to make out, and then nothing. She stood in the middle of a small square room with a charpai against one wall and a single barred window high up, and the moon laid a thin pale rectangle across the floor, and she could not see her own hands in front of her face, and she did not lie down for a long time. When she did, she kept her sari on. She kept her eyes open. The wetness on her thigh had dried to a stiff patch on the cotton, and she pressed her palm flat against it in the dark, and she did not know why she did that, and she stopped.

She woke to a fist on the door and a voice she did not recognize telling her the sahib wanted her. Not the blue room, not the corridor — a smaller door off the back of the house that led to a bathroom with a tap and a bucket, and she washed herself the way she had been told to wash herself, quickly, and she rebraided her hair at the nape of her neck with fingers that shook, and she put the sari back on even though it was yesterday's sari and smelled of the dining room, and she went where she was told to go. The house in daylight was a different animal. Long, low, whitewashed, the courtyard swept clean, a servant woman glancing at her once and away. The room at the end of the corridor — not the blue room, the other one, the one with the carved bedpost — had its door standing open.

"Come," he said, from inside. "Close it behind you."

She closed it. The room smelled of old books and men — the same smell as the first night, but stronger in the daylight, unwashed sheets and lamp oil and the ghost of incense. Vikram sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, in a white kurta, his salt-and-pepper beard combed, his black eyes moving over her the way a man's eyes move over a field he already owns. He was not angry. That was the thing she was learning about him. He was never angry. He simply expected, and the world arranged itself.

"You slept."

"Yes," she said.

"Good." He reached to the table beside the bed and picked up something small, and held it up between two fingers so she could see it. Black. Smooth. Flared at one end like a small bell. "Do you know what this is?"

She looked at it. She understood, in the way a girl from a small town understands things she has never been told, and her face went hot, and she shook her head anyway, because she did not know what answer was safe.

"It goes inside you," he said. "In your back passage. It stays there. It opens you." He turned it in the light, unhurried, the way a man turns a good tool. "Your father's debt is two hundred thousand. He paid forty. You are the rest. A debt is not paid by lying still. It is paid by being useful. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to.

"Then take off your clothes. All of it. Fold it. On the chair."

She did it slowly, because her hands did not want to move, and because he did not tell her to hurry, and because she had learned on the first night that he watched her hands. The sari came off first, then the blouse, then the petticoat, and she folded each piece and laid it on the chair by the door, and she stood in the middle of the room with her arms at her sides because he had not told her to cover herself, and the morning light through the high window fell across her stomach and her thighs and made her feel more naked than the dark had. Her nipples tightened in the cool air. She could feel them, and she could feel him looking at them, and she kept her eyes on the floor between his feet.

"Turn," he said. "Bend over the bed."

She turned. She bent. Her palms went flat on the rumpled sheet — still damp in places, still smelling of the first night — and her knees found the edge of the mattress, and her back was to him, and she could not see him, and that was worse, and then she heard him stand. His weight came off the bed and the floorboards took it, and his footsteps crossed to her, and his hand landed flat on the small of her back, warm and broad and calloused, and pushed her down a little further until her cheek was against the sheet.

"Spread," he said. His knee nudged the inside of her thigh. "Wider."

She spread. The air moved over the wet seam of her — she was wet, she hated that she was wet, her body had gone wet the moment his hand landed on her back and she had no say in it — and then his thumb pressed against her there, at the tight ring of muscle, slick with something cold from the little jar she had not seen him open, and she flinched, and his other hand closed on her hip and held her still.

"Breathe out," he said. "Push against me. Not away."

She tried. He pressed. The tip of it went in and her whole body tried to close, and his hand on her hip tightened until she stopped fighting it, and he worked it in slowly, a little at a time, twisting, and she made a sound into the sheet that was not a word, and the widest part of it passed and then it settled, flared base against her, full, strange, a pressure she could feel in her belly and behind her eyes. Her thighs were shaking. His thumb stroked once down the seam of her cunt, through the wet, and she heard him breathe in through his nose like a man tasting wine.

"There," he said. "You'll wear it today. You'll eat with it in. You'll walk with it in. By tonight your body will have learned the shape of it." He stepped back. "Now. On your knees. Front of me."

She turned and slid down off the bed onto the floor, and the stone was cold under her knees, and the thing inside her shifted with the movement and she had to put a hand on the floor to steady herself. He stood over her and untied his kurta and let it fall open, and beneath it he was already hard, the head of his cock wet and dark against his stomach, and he took himself in his hand and brought it to her mouth without ceremony, and she opened for him because he had told her to, and he fed it in.

"Tongue flat," he said. "Don't scrape with your teeth. Take it deeper than you want to."

She took it. It filled her mouth and then her throat, and her eyes watered, and she breathed through her nose the way she had figured out on the first night, and his hand came to the back of her head and held her there, not pushing, just holding, and she worked her tongue along the underside of him and felt the thick vein that ran there and the pulse under the skin, and he made a low sound in his chest that she felt through the roof of her mouth. She got a rhythm. Her hand came up to the base of him, because her jaw was aching, and he let her, and she sucked him with her cheeks hollowed and her eyes closed, and the thing inside her ass moved with every bob of her head, and her own cunt was dripping onto her thighs, and she did not touch it because he had not told her to.

"Look at me," he said. "Not at the floor."

She looked up at him. His black eyes were on her, calm, taking inventory, and something in the flatness of that look made her suck him harder, made her want to be good at this, and she hated that too, and she did it anyway. He let her work for a long time. Long enough that her knees went numb on the stone and her jaw ached and spit ran down her chin and onto her chest, and then his grip on her head changed and he pulled her off him with a wet sound and stroked himself fast over her, and she understood and closed her eyes and stayed where she was, mouth open, and he came across her face and her chest in thick hot pulses, and she felt each one land, one across her cheek, one on her lips, one down onto her breast, and she did not wipe it away.

"Don't clean it," he said. He was breathing harder. "Stay like that."

And then the door opened.

"You said morning," Arjun said from the doorway. He was in a vest, his hair wet, and he looked at her kneeling on the floor with his father's seed drying on her face the way a man looks at a plate set down in front of him. Veer came in behind him, and Veer was smiling.

"I told you," Veer said. "I said I hadn't had my turn."

"Then take it," Vikram said. He stepped back and sat down on the edge of the bed, unhurried, and folded his arms, and watched. "She's the family's now. She knows it. Don't spoil her."

Arjun crossed the room and took her by the braid at the nape of her neck and pulled her head back, and looked down into her face, and used his thumb to smear his father's cum across her lips and into her mouth.

"Lick it off your hand and get up," he said. "On the bed. On your back."

She licked her palm clean and got up on legs that were not steady, and the plug shifted inside her with every step and made her walk carefully, and she lay back on the damp sheet with her knees up because that was what her body understood by now, and Arjun got on the bed over her and pushed into her cunt in one long stroke, no preamble, and she was so wet he slid in to the root and her back arched off the mattress on its own. He fucked her like a man settling a debt — hard, even, no wasted motion — and Veer came around the side of the bed and put his knee on the mattress by her head and took his cock out and pushed it against her mouth, and she opened for him too, and now she was full at both ends and could not breathe except through her nose, and the plug moved inside her with every one of Arjun's thrusts, filling her in a place that had never been filled, and the wet sound of it carried across the room to where Vikram sat watching with his arms folded.

"That's it," Veer said, low, his hand wrapped in her hair. "Take all of it. You're not a girl anymore, you're the house's hole. Say it."

She could not say it with her mouth full. He pulled out far enough to let her.

"I'm the house's," she said, and her voice cracked, and she did not know whether she meant it, and her cunt clenched around Arjun when she said it, and he grunted.

"Again."

"I'm the house's."

"Good girl." He pushed back into her throat and held it there until she gagged around him, and then let her breathe, and did it again.

Arjun came first, driving deep and holding, and she felt him pulse inside her, and he pulled out and looked down at the mess of her — his father's drying on her face, his own leaking out of her cunt, the black base of the plug still seated in her ass — and something crossed his face that was almost satisfaction.

"Don't push it out," he said. "Any of it. You keep what you're given." He got off the bed and went to the door and stood there, and Veer finished in her mouth and made her swallow, holding her chin until she did, and then Veer got up too and stretched like a cat and went to join his brother.

"Wash," Vikram said, standing. "In the bathroom. Then the kitchen — the women will feed you. You'll sleep in the blue room tonight. Tomorrow, same time." He pulled his kurta closed and tied it. "And Meera."

"Yes," she said, from the bed.

"You did well."

They left. The door closed behind the three of them, and their footsteps went down the corridor, and a man's voice said something and another laughed, and then the house settled, and she lay on the damp sheet in the empty room with her legs still open and everything they had put in her still inside her, drying on her skin and running slowly down between her thighs onto the bed, and the morning light moved across the wall, and she listened to her own breathing, and after a while she sat up, carefully, because of the plug, and went to find the bathroom.