Celia looked up at his face.
At the jaw she had drawn.
At the eyes that had looked at her in the yacht cabin and said, "If she wakes up, I'll fuck her too," while she lay three feet away with her hand between her thighs, deciding to be still.
'Battleground,' she thought. 'He said battleground.'
And something below her mind — the thing that had probability in it, the bloodline thing that her sister Avriana had in full and that Celia had in the trace amounts of a woman who hadn't yet had it activated — that thing recognized the word. Knew the shape of it. The future-resonant weight of a word that meant something was coming that was larger than a beach.
She looked at him and did not look away.
He looked down at them for another moment.
Then:
"Spread Celia's legs."
The sentence landed with the flat, declarative tone of a man issuing an instruction he expected to be followed.
"I want to deflower her. Now."
Celia's breath left her body.
