Siege (The Warrior Chronicles, #5) - K.F. Breene Page 0,66
city. She frowned. “Maybe this is an inn.”
“They need a name change if it is.” Maggie ran her finger in a decorative groove in the door. “Sure is nice for a brothel, though. Not that I have a lot of experience…”
In a sudden panic, Ruisa patted herself and looked around her feet. “Crap, what did we do with our sacks?”
Guilt passed over Maggie’s expression. She looked back the way they had come. “I have no idea. I forgot about it. Should I go check by the barrels?”
“We are terrible at this.” Ruisa blew her bangs up in irritation, trying to remember if they’d even had the sacks when they were at the barrels. A man passed, keeping his eyes on the ground. “If this turns out to be an inn, we’ll go back. If it’s a brothel, I doubt they’d want it anyway. C’mon, I think we need to hurry.”
Ruisa pushed open the door and was greeted with a lovely floral scent. A wide staircase curled around from the entrance with a finely turned wood banister. Just off the entryway stood what looked like a parlor, decked out in velvet chairs mostly occupied by lounging ladies wearing skimpy clothing or extravagant nightgowns revealing everything from nipples to their lady wares. One woman sat completely naked, scratching a small board across her manicured nails.
“Brothel,” Ruisa said.
Stiffer than a man with a hard-on, Ruisa continued forward to a tall, round table bearing a pink feather in a glass vase. A moment later a stocky woman with a pronounced bust sauntered through the doorway on the right. Her gaze swept Ruisa and then Maggie before shooting to the entryway beyond them. She stopped at the table and leaned a pudgy elbow against the surface.
The woman said something that Ruisa couldn’t comprehend. She shook her head. “Do you speak the trades?”
“We all full up. We don’t need no more girls,” the woman said with a bored expression.
Ruisa’s face started to burn. “We were just wondering if you would maybe trade for our clothes?” She plucked at her rags.
The woman’s brow creased.
“I paid,” Maggie said in the most hacked-up rendition of the language possible. It was all too clear that she’d just started to learn it.
“She said we can pay.” Ruisa prevented herself from tapping her sack of coins. That jingle would send the wrong message.
The woman’s gaze slid over Ruisa’s body, pausing on her arms and resting on her hands. “Where you from?”
Ruisa fisted her hands. The woman’s gaze flashed to her eyes, and then to Maggie, giving her the same scrutiny.
“We don’t want a job,” Ruisa rushed to say, feeling the urge to cover up her body. “Just clothes.”
“You once a pretty girl. What happened to you face, eh?” The woman leaned toward Maggie.
Behind them the door opened with a gust of foul-smelling air. Ruisa hadn’t noticed that the city smelled so bad until she’d stepped inside this parlor. A man stalked in with a stained shirt and dirty boots. His grizzled face held a sneer and his lustful stare was directed toward the parlor.
“You wait here, eh?” The woman walked around the table with a sway to her hips that denoted her trade. She spoke and caught the man’s attention.
“I wonder if she sizes everyone up like that,” Ruisa said, not sure if the stare had made her uncomfortable, or just added to how the establishment was making her feel.
The man stared into the parlor where giggling and sultry voices drifted out. He then glanced toward Maggie and Ruisa, surveying them.
“This was a bad idea,” Ruisa muttered.
He jerked his chin in their direction, followed by a point at Ruisa. Lust sparked in his eyes as he asked something that sounded like a question.
The woman glanced back, shook her head, and then placed a hand on his arm, trying to steer him toward the workingwomen. He shrugged her off, stalking toward Ruisa with fire burning in his gaze.
Cold tingles spread down her skin as that slimy gaze oozed over her body. Her hand jerked toward the sheathed knife hidden in her bosom. She half hoped the boys would burst in, because this felt more like an attack than anything she’d experienced before.
He stopped too close to her, his size dominating her small frame. His eyes dipped to her bust. He licked his lips and said something that seemed to be directed to the hostess.
“He thinks you new, eh?” the woman said, moving to his side. “You virgin?”