I found my father by following the sound of terrified, girlish whimpers down a darkened corridor. As I approached, I made sure my footfalls were heavy, angry, and impossible to ignore.
“Please don’t, my King,” I heard a soft, trembling voice say. Followed by his disgusting chuckle.
“Father,” I snapped.
The girl emerged from the shadows first. She was young, really fucking young.
Her hair was mussed up; the neck of her dress hung off of her bare, bony shoulder. I met her terrified eyes with my stare, softening my gaze just enough that she didn’t panic when she saw me. I glanced at my shoulder to signal to her, and she adjusted her dress so she was decent again. She blinked at me once, as if saying a silent thank you. I tipped my head to the side to tell her to get the fuck out of there and quick. She didn’t lose a second and scurried off like a terrified mouse.
My father emerged from the shadows, adjusting his belt under his gut, his face flushed with whatever-the-fuck I had just interrupted. He repulsed me, to my very core. But wiser men than me have made it clear that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer…even if your enemy is your very own father.
What I really wanted to say to him was, How old was she? Did you hurt her? And what the fuck is wrong with you, you degenerate pig?
But what I said instead was, “You wanted to talk to me.”
“Damn right, son,” he said, all jovial and feeling his oats. He wasn’t always this way; when I was young, when my mother lived, he’d been a decent human being. A good man, even. But since she died, he’d become someone else entirely. Someone I didn’t like one fucking bit. “Time for another fleshmarket auction.” We walked together down the corridor. “Time to get some of these wretches and waifs out of this goddamned building. Time to clean the decks, son. Time to balance our books.”
I swallowed a groan. Among the many fucking inconveniences of being part of the royal family was that all the poor families in the region sent their unwanted children to the castle, hoping we would take them into our care.
A good king would have made provisions for those unwanted children—well run orphanages, workhouses. Something. But not my father. All he saw was profit. Profit and flesh, flesh and profit. His twin vices. So he’d come up with this atrocious goddamned idea of reviving the old fleshmarket auctions, which were even more awful than they sounded. They attracted the leches and perverts like flies to shit.
The older ones were bought to do hard labor. Indentured servitude, they called it. Just a fancy fucking way to say slavery. All of it was detestable, but the purchase of the younger girls and boys was impossible for me to ignore. They were the most vulnerable of all. Though I’d have liked to have helped them all, that was impossible.
So it was the youngest ones I watched out for—I bought them in secret, using ringers and stooges to place bids on my behalf so that nobody would have any suspicions, and then quietly placed them in good homes or entrusted orphanages in bordering kingdoms. Places I vetted and funded myself.
Little did my worthless piece of shit father know.
If he had any fucking clue that I was undercutting him, that I was the one buying up his most desirable and vulnerable flesh, he’d lose all trust in me. For him, degeneracy and indecency were like a secret handshake. And I’d learned over the years exactly how to keep my eye on him and his friends; I knew just how to stay close to their club of depravity without getting dirty myself.
“Good. I’m sick of all these fucking kids depleting our stores. I’ll set up the auction for some time in the next couple of weeks.”
My father inhaled proudly and gripped my shoulder. It was all I could do not to shove that motherfucker up against the stone wall and tell him exactly what I thought of him. One day, he’d be dead and I’d be king and I could set all this shit right. For now, I just had to bide my time.
He started to tell me about the girl he’d been groping, and I willfully tuned it out. Normally I could do it with just a simple thought of Anika—the way her hair fell across her forehead, the way she wrinkled up her nose when she laughed, the way her nipples puckered under her gowns—but this time, I didn’t even have to try that hard.
I saw her, up ahead of me, at the end of the corridor. She had changed back into the new dress that I’d had made for her. She stood in one of the big open vestibules, and a patch of sunshine illuminated her face and hair. I’d seen a lot of beautiful women in my life, and a lot of artwork of beautiful women too, but nothing came close to how stunning she was. Not even close.