The bathroom was two doors down, tiled in the same pale green as the corridor walls, and the water came out cold before it came out warm. Meera stood under it with her hands braced on either side of the tap and let it run down her back and between her legs, and she did not put her fingers inside herself to check, because she had been told to keep everything in. She washed her face. She washed her feet, one then the other, lifting them carefully because the plug had settled low and heavy and every step reminded her of it. There was a bar of yellow soap on the ledge and she used it on her arms, her neck, the underside of her jaw where Vikram's beard had scraped her. It did not come off. The smell of him did not come off either, or the smell of the other two, or the smell of the room she had been used in. She braided her hair wet, tight at the crown, the way her mother had taught her — pull, cross, pull, cross, until the tail ran neat down her spine — and when she looked at herself in the small mirror above the basin her face was the same face it had always been. That was the part she could not understand. The same face. The same dark eyes. The same mouth. She dried herself with a towel that smelled of nothing and wrapped it around her chest and went to find the kitchen.

The kitchen was at the back of the house, past a courtyard with a Tulsi plant in a clay pot, and it was full of women. Three of them. An old one at the stove with her sari pulled over her head, a middle one kneading dough on a stone, and a young one, maybe twenty, chopping onions with her back to the door. None of them looked up when Meera came in. The old one ladled something into a steel bowl and set it on the floor by the wall, next to a glass of water, and pointed with her chin. Not a word. Meera sat on the floor with her back to the wall and ate what was in the bowl — dal, two rotis, a piece of pickle — and the young one at the stone stopped chopping for a second, just long enough to look at Meera's braid and then at her bare feet and then back at the onions, and went on chopping. The dal was good. Meera ate all of it. She had not eaten since the morning before she was brought here, and her body wanted food even if the rest of her did not know what it wanted. When she was done she washed the bowl herself at the tap in the corner and set it upside down on the rack with the others, and the old woman at the stove watched her do it and said nothing, and Meera went back down the corridor to the blue room and lay on the bed with the damp sheet and stared at the ceiling until the light went grey.

She did not sleep. She lay with her knees drawn up and listened to the house — footsteps, a door, water running somewhere, the television in the front room going on and off and on again. The plug sat inside her like a fist that would not open. Sometime after dark she heard heavy feet in the corridor and sat up fast, her heart in her throat, but the feet went past her door and stopped somewhere further down, and a man's voice said something low and another man laughed, and the television got louder. She lay back down. Her hand found the braid at her shoulder and held it, the way she used to hold it as a child when the power went out and the house went dark and her mother was in the other room.

The knock came at the door so hard she felt it in the frame. "Get up." Arjun. "Wear the sari. Come."

She had been given one sari, folded on the chair, a plain cotton thing in dull green with a thin gold border. She had never worn a sari in her life without her mother's help, and she stood in the dark room with the fabric and could not make it work — the pleats would not hold, the pallu slid off her shoulder, the blouse was too tight across the chest. She managed it. Badly. She opened the door with the pallu pinned at her shoulder by a safety pin she had found on the windowsill, and Arjun looked at her from head to foot and did not bother to hide what he thought of it.

"You look like a servant," he said. "Come on."

The dining room was at the front of the house, long and low-ceilinged, with a heavy oak table down the middle of it that had been polished so hard it threw the lamplight back at the ceiling. Vikram sat at the head of it with a glass of something amber in his hand and a plate of half-eaten food in front of him. Veer sat on his left, barefoot, one ankle crossed over the other knee, and he watched Meera come in with his head tilted, the way a boy watches a kite he intends to bring down. Rohan was not there. There was a chair at the foot of the table, pushed out, and Arjun pointed at it and Meera sat in it, and the oak was so cold under her thighs through the thin cotton that her whole body tightened.

"Eat," Vikram said, without looking up.

There was a plate in front of her. Rice, a piece of chicken, a curl of onion. She had eaten in the kitchen already and her stomach turned over at the smell, but she picked up the spoon and ate, small bites, her eyes on the plate, and the room was quiet except for the ice in Vikram's glass and the sound of Veer's foot tapping the leg of his chair. Cigar smoke lay over everything, old and thick, so that the food tasted of it. Arjun sat down at Vikram's right and pulled his plate toward him and ate with his elbows on the table, watching her the whole time, and Meera ate and did not look at any of them and felt every one of them looking at her. She got halfway through the rice. Her spoon scraped the plate. She set it down.

"Finish it."

"I'm—" she started.

"Finish it."

She finished it. Every grain. Her throat kept trying to close and she made it swallow anyway, and when the plate was clean she set the spoon across it and put her hands in her lap, and Vikram set his glass down on the oak with a click that went through the whole room, and pushed his chair back.

"Come here," he said.

Meera stood up. Her legs were not steady but they held. She walked the length of the table toward him, and Veer turned in his chair to watch her pass, and she felt his eyes on her hip, on the hem of the sari, on the wet braid hanging down her back. She stopped beside Vikram's chair. He did not tell her what to do. He simply reached up and closed his hand around her wrist — his palm dry, calloused, hot — and pulled her down onto his lap and turned her so she faced the table, her back against his chest, her legs hanging on either side of his thigh. His beard scraped her shoulder. His breath was whiskey and smoke. His hand stayed on her wrist, and his other hand went to her knee and pushed the sari up, slowly, in no hurry, until it was bunched at her hip and the inside of her thigh was bare to the lamplight and to Arjun and Veer at the other end of the table.

"You kept it in," he said, low, in her ear. His fingers slid up the inside of her thigh and found the base of the plug where it sat between her cheeks, and pressed it, just once, and Meera's whole body jerked and her hand came down hard on the edge of the table and she made a sound she did not mean to make. "Good girl."

"Papa." Arjun's voice, from the far end. Flat. "You said we'd share."

"I said she's the house's," Vikram said. "She is. But she's on my lap tonight." He shifted under her, and Meera felt it through the cotton of his kurta and the thin cotton of her own sari — the hard length of him against the small of her back, already thick, already up. He had been sitting at that table with that under his kurta the whole meal. "Stand up," he told her. "And take this off."

The sari. She stood and unwound it, and the cotton came away in her hands and she folded it once, out of habit, and laid it on the corner of the table, and stood there in the blouse and the petticoat with the lamp on her and three men looking at her. Her skin went hot and then cold and then hot again. Vikram watched her from his chair with his glass in his hand and did not hurry her and did not help her. He let the silence do it. Then he set the glass down and said one word.

"Here."

He had opened his kurta. His cock stood up out of his lap, thick and dark, the head wet, and Meera looked at it and looked away and looked back, because looking away did not make it go. Her mouth was dry. Her cunt was not — she could feel it, the slick of herself between her legs, and she hated that she could feel it, and she stepped between his knees anyway because there was nowhere else in the room to step.

"Straddle me," he said. "Take it in your hand. Put it in."

Her hand shook. She reached down and closed her fingers around him and he was hotter than she expected, and harder, and the skin moved over the shaft when she pulled, and the wet head slid against the inside of her wrist. Vikram sat back in his chair with his hands on the arms of it and watched her face while she fitted him to her cunt, and when she had him at the opening he said, "Now," and she lowered herself onto him.

It went in slow. He was thick and she was tight and the stretch of him opened her by inches, and she had to stop halfway with her hands on his shoulders and breathe, and Vikram did not move, did not push up into her, just sat there with his black eyes on her face and let her feel every bit of it. The plug was still in her ass, and with him in her cunt the two of them pressed against each other through the thin wall of her body and there was no room in her for anything else. She took the last of him and sat down on his lap and he filled her to the root, and she made a small sound and bit it off.

"Ride it," he said.

She rode it. Slow at first, one hand braced on the back of his chair, the other on his shoulder, lifting and settling, and every time she came down the base of the plug ground against him and she felt it in her spine. The oak was behind her and the lamp was above her and the two brothers were at the far end of the table, and she could hear Veer's chair creak as he leaned forward and she could hear Arjun breathing through his nose, and she did not look at either of them. Vikram's hands were on her hips now, guiding her, thumbs digging into the soft of her belly, and he watched her face the whole time with the patience of a man who had paid for exactly this and intended to take his time with it.

"Faster," he said. "You've done this before. Today. Do it like you mean it."

She went faster. Her thighs burned and her breath came short and the wet sound of it carried in the quiet room, and her braid had come loose at the nape and swung against her back with every stroke, and Vikram's thumb found her clit and pressed it flat and circled it, and Meera's rhythm broke — she jerked and gasped and her hips took over from her legs, grinding down onto him, chasing the thumb, and she heard herself moan and could not stop it. Arjun said something under his breath at the far end of the table. Vikram did not look at him.

"There," he said. "That's it. Keep going. Don't stop until I tell you."

She did not stop. She rode him until her thighs were shaking and her cunt was swollen around him and she was wet down to the inside of her knees, and Vikram's jaw was tight and his breath had gone rough, and he let her work for it, let her take herself almost there and then took his thumb away, twice, and both times she made a sound that was closer to a sob than anything else, and both times he put it back and said, "Again." The third time he let her have it. Her cunt clenched around him and she came with her mouth open and her eyes shut and her hands locked on the back of his chair, and she felt it pull all the way up through her belly and into her throat, and she heard herself say something that was not a word.

Vikram came inside her. She felt it — the throb, the heat, the way he emptied into her in pulses with his hands hard on her hips and his teeth set, and he held her down on him through all of it so that nothing could spill, and when he was done he let his head fall back against the chair and breathed. Then he lifted her off him with both hands under her arms, like a child, and set her on her feet beside the table, and the wet sound as he came out of her was loud in the room, and his cum ran down the inside of her thigh, and he looked at it and then at Arjun.

"Clean her up," he said. "Then take your turn."

Arjun was up out of his chair before the words were finished. He crossed the room in four steps, unbuckling his belt as he came, and he did not bend her over the table gently. He took her by the back of the neck and pushed her down onto it, cheek to the cold oak, her hands skidding on the polish, and he kicked her feet apart with his boot and knelt between them. He pushed two fingers into her cunt first — no warning, no preamble — and pulled them out wet with his father's cum and held them up where she could see them, and then put them in her mouth.

"Taste that," he said. "That's what you're for."

She tasted it. Salt and musk and the slick of her own body, and Arjun's fingers on her tongue, and she did not bite him, though the thought came and went in half a second and she let it go. He pulled his fingers out and wiped them on her cheek and pushed into her in one stroke, hard, and the table edge dug into her belly and her palms slid on the oak and she had to brace her toes on the floor to keep from being shoved across it. He fucked her like a man settling a debt — fast, deep, no rhythm to it, his hands on her hips pulling her back onto him every stroke, and his stubble scraped the back of her neck and his breath was tobacco and the whiskey he had been drinking, and he said one thing, over and over, low and even.

"Mine. Mine. Mine."

"She's not yours," Vikram said from his chair. He had not moved. He sat with his kurta open and his cock still wet and softening in his lap and his glass in his hand, watching his eldest son fuck the girl he had bought. "She's the house's. Get that straight."

Arjun did not answer. He just went harder, and Meera's cheek ground against the oak with every stroke and her braid came fully loose and her hair spread across the table beside her plate, and she kept her eyes open because she had learned today that closing them did not make it stop, and from the corner of her eye she could see Veer at the far end, still in his chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on where his brother's cock went into her, and he was smiling.

Arjun came with a grunt and his nails in her hips, and pulled out and let it land across her lower back, hot and wet, and stepped away without looking at her, tucking himself in as he went back to his chair. Meera stayed bent over the table. Her legs were trembling. Cum was running down her back and down the inside of her thigh and she could feel the plug still sitting in her ass, patient, and she did not know if she was allowed to stand up yet, so she did not.

"My turn," Veer said.

"Not her cunt," Vikram said. "She's had enough in there for one night. Use the other one."

Veer got up. He was slower about it than Arjun had been, and that was worse — he came around the table and stood behind her and put one hand flat on her back, between her shoulder blades, and held her down, and with the other he took hold of the base of the plug and worked it out of her, slowly, twisting it, and Meera's whole body clenched around the loss of it and she heard herself whimper into the wood.

"Look at that," Veer said. "She's open already. Papa, look how open she is."

"I see it."

He spat. She felt it land, wet and warm, and then his fingers, two of them, pushing the spit in and working her open, and Meera's hands closed into fists on the table and she made herself breathe. It did not hurt the way she had braced for. That was the thing she could not get her head around — the plug had been in her for hours and her body had gone soft around it, and now that it was out there was an emptiness there that her body did not like, and Veer's fingers felt like an answer to a question she had not asked. He pushed in a third. He crooked them and found something inside her that made her hips jerk back against his hand, and he laughed, low, delighted.

"There it is," he said. "She likes it. Papa, she likes it."

"Then give it to her."

He gave it to her. He pulled his fingers out and pushed the head of his cock against her ass and went in slow, and Meera's mouth came open on the table and no sound came out of it, and she felt herself stretch around him in a way she had not known she could stretch, and Veer stopped halfway and held there, breathing hard, and then pushed the rest of the way in with one long stroke that put her forehead against the oak. He was not as thick as his father but he was longer, and he went deeper than the plug ever had, and for a moment she was sure her body would simply refuse him and he would have to stop. It did not refuse him. It took him. It went slick and hot around him and pulled him in, and Veer groaned and said, "Fuck," and started to move.

"You feel that," he said, in her ear, his chest on her back, his breath on her neck. "You feel how your ass takes me. That's what you're for. That's what your father sold you for." He fucked her slow and deep and steady, and every stroke dragged a sound out of her that she could not keep behind her teeth, and his hand came around her front and found her clit and worked it in time with his hips, and Meera's legs gave out at the knees and she ended up flat on the table with her arms out and her cheek on the wood and her cunt clenching on nothing, wet and empty and aching, while her ass was filled over and over.

She came again. She had not known she could, not like that, not from there, and it took her by surprise and it was bigger than the first one and it went on longer, and she heard the sound she made and did not recognaroundize it as hers. Veer felt it — felt her clench him — and it broke his rhythm, and he drove into her three more times, hard, and pulled out and came across her back and her ass and the small of her spine, and then he stood there breathing over her for a moment with one hand still on her hip, and then he let go and went back to his chair.

The room was quiet. Meera lay on the table with her cheek on the oak and three men's cum drying on her back and her cunt still empty and wet and her legs hanging off the edge, and the lamp above her was too bright, and she could hear the ice settle in Vikram's glass. Nobody told her to get up. So she lay there, and she listened to her own breathing slow down, and she thought, very clearly, that she had not been asked a single question all night that she had been allowed to answer with anything but her body.

Vikram stood. His chair scraped back on the stone floor and he came around the table and stood over her where she lay, and he looked at her for a long moment — at the braid completely undone and spread across the oak, at the marks on her hips, at the mess on her back — and then he put his hand flat between her shoulder blades, the way Veer had, and held her there for a second, and then took it away.

"Get her cleaned and bring her to my room," he said, to the room, to his sons, to no one in particular. "She sleeps in my room from tonight."