Claiming Crystal by Kayleen Knight Page A

questions. ‘My name is Davidson, son of Gregor. I have served our lord for my better decades.’
    ‘ Thank you,’ Crystal said flatly. ‘I will remember you.’
    ‘ Thank you, lady.’
    The dungeon was laid down with gravel just like the garden walkways. To continue the theme of devilishness within her silver spoon family, this unique innovation had been the idea of Crystal's mother. One of the reasons her mother loved her gardens so was because she believed the garden to be a place of exciting dangers; the thorns and the exotic cacti, the rose bushes and the harsher vines, and especially the carnivorous plants she had placed along the moat to dine on flies. She suggested the gravel so that the prisoners who were dragged down the halls might feel the scrapes on the soles of their bare feet, or a delightful shredding down the skin on their backs if they must be dragged by the legs because they were uncooperative. Crystal would have judged her mother for this immorality, but just last week she had slipped her old chastity chain into the pockets of one of the maids and blamed the maid for stealing the item. She had arranged the setup in such a way that she could be present for every discovery, first when one of the maid mothers went through the maid's clothes in the laundry room, and secondly when the guards came to apprehend the woman for her thievery.
    Crystal might have been anxious to see her down in these darker corridors, but the kingdom did not imprison women in the same dungeon as it did the men. Women were kept in a different kind of place, where they could be used in a different kind of way. At the lowest tiers of the kingdom awaited a kind of rutting – dirty, dark and decadent. Crystal did not doubt that her old maid was fucking the man soldiers who returned home from their scouting missions in the cheapest bordello on the farthest edges of the kingdom walls.
    She took a moment to wonder what might happen to this guard when she got him into trouble with her family. Perhaps he would be bent over to suck the cocks of the men side by side with the maid. The thought delighted her, although her delight had the same reservations as a younger and more inhibited thing that still feared the might of God, and still wondered if its darkest thoughts were truly sins that needed forgiveness.
    There were no windows underground; the shadows chased away with torchlight. The warmth of the dirt and the fires made the scene musty and sweaty with a summertime heat that livened the smells of un-showered and unwatered people slowly dying without a chance for food, or simply without a chance to live a better life. The sensation of entering into this dungeon was different than the other times she had convinced the guards to escort her. Now that her true womanhood had awoken, she saw everything with a new angle of maturity that offered fresher angles of perspective.
    She saw people who were bent and she saw people who were broken, and she noticed always the strange way that the jailers seemed excited to enact their torments.
    They were dressed in long black robes, and they moved quickly, hungrily. Whenever their eyes would slip out from the long hoods of their robes Crystal would find them dancing, as if they had made partners with their tortures, and the love affair was bathed in blood. The jailers moved with the same discipline of professional lovers; another stable of prostitutes who did not take men into beds, but took men over pillars and dunked their heads into buckets - who did not massage the bodies of their people, but whipped, scratched and bled bodies until men made sounds that were not ecstasy, but something approaching ecstasy's dark cousin. Crystal had even been told that several of the jailers were hired from the whorehouses in the city, where their sensibilities were out of place, and later relocated into this dungeon so that a more fitting match might be made between a sexual creature of domination and prisoners whose