She looked at them with her constantly moving eyes, and then she spoke.
"I am not a dumb bitch," she said, with the specific conversational directness of someone who wants to establish the foundational premise before proceeding further.
"And I need you to listen very carefully because I am only going to say this once."
Her voice carried the chatty warmth of her ordinary register underneath the Absolute Luxuria's sharpened cadence, the two qualities coexisting in the specific way of a being who has become more without ceasing to be what she was.
"I know that to have my dream, to have Sir Osmont's big hands wrapped tightly around me...holding me tenderly, I have to be more than just a variable in his equation."
