Tender Mercies - By Kitty Thomas Page 0,11
no big deal. Just business as usual. Just how one treated a slave. She didn’t make another sound as the tears rolled down her face, so as not to call his attention again. Though she tried very hard not to, she couldn’t help looking to the doorway one more time. But the man was gone.
Three
Asher sat quietly in his study, a glass of scotch in one hand. He’d been staring at the fireplace flames for a solid hour since he’d gotten back from the showing. There had been several slaves on offer this season, and although he hadn’t spoken with any of the owners, he’d hung back on the edges, observing.
It had been almost a year since he lost Darcy. Since I killed her, he corrected himself. It may not have been his hand that landed the fatal blow, but it was still his fault. His fault for not taking her complaints seriously and getting her help. Nothing would ever change that.
He hadn’t spoken to James since they’d buried the body together. As the dirt had covered her, his friend had made some offhand remark about going to live with the natives. Asher thought he’d been kidding, but then he didn’t return to his home.
Though they’d been best friends since college, doing everything together––including getting rich and coming to Eleu––after Darcy was in the ground, the cord was severed. Asher hadn’t been able to bring himself to turn his friend in, but he couldn’t look in his eyes or hear his voice again, either. It seemed James felt the same way.
For months Asher had stayed in, not receiving visitors. Gradually his need to possess a woman, the same need that had brought both he and James to the island, started to reassert itself. Now he was bargaining, making a list of rules and safeties so he could trust himself with another life.
He could own another woman. No, she wouldn’t be his Darcy. She’d be whoever she was. Maybe he’d love her and maybe he wouldn’t, but he still had needs, and right now the most powerful need he had was to move on. Perhaps atone.
One side of his mouth quirked wryly at the idea of atonement. As if anything could pay for what he’d done. The only thing that moved him forward was knowing that what happened with Darcy would never happen again because he wouldn’t leave his slave unmonitored after punishment, and he would mete out all punishments himself. He would take the responsibility, as he should have to begin with.
He shut his eyes against the memory of Darcy dying in his arms. The tight feeling he got in his chest when that memory came forward had dulled only slightly in the intervening time.
Asher set the scotch on the table beside his chair and got up to pace. Sitting still was impossible when he was on the cusp of bringing a pet into the house. He’d seen the one he wanted: Lucas Stone’s slave.
He’d watched from a distance, growing increasingly agitated at the way Lucas treated her and all the men who walked by to paw at her. Of course, nothing they were doing was illegal. Many had argued for anti-cruelty laws, but the policy changes always got shot down. After all, one slave’s cruelty was another’s happy existence. They had chosen this life after all. They’d known the risks. They were all questioned and psychologically assessed before being allowed to stay in Eleu, as were the men.
Lawmakers had argued that with cruelty laws, a slave would be able suddenly to appeal to someone to rescue her from this or that. Many would work the system to their advantage and end up the ones with all the control and power. Masters would fear punishing a slave as he saw fit because she might tell the authorities that she’d been cruelly tortured. And wasn’t that the world in which they’d already lived? A world of choices and freedoms submissives had wanted to hand over and dominants had wanted to take? Wasn’t this the utopia they’d always dreamed of, where they could each follow their own perversions without anybody else’s nose in them?
He didn’t entirely disagree with the current policies, but even so, there were slaves who had fallen through cracks, who were being brutalized in ways they’d never genuinely signed on for, who’d been victimized by monsters who had slipped through the psychological screenings at the gate. Lucas Stone’s slave was one of those victims. Asher had seen it in