Maria awoke once more with a start, though the room she woke up in was not the one in which she had fallen into a deep slumber after her first meeting with the men of House Marcellus. The first thing she noticed was that the voice which had awoken her was different – far deeper, its swelling tones reverberating through her very bones, sending chills of excitement through her. As she lay in her bedsheets, the sharpness of her thoughts muzzled with sleep, her mind seemed to shy away from her memory; it was as though she did not truly wish to know who it was who had awakened her, lest she be unable to contain the dreadful implications of the knowledge. The owner of the voice had no such compunctions. After seeing her stir, he spoke again.
"Good evening, Maria. Welcome to the House of Marcellus. I am Gaius, master of the house," said he, smiling from the doorway. The only part of him she could see was his smile, gleaming in the moonlight – from its sardonic cut she could see that here was the father of the two young men she could now only think of as boys. Maria did not speak, preferring instead to savor the images flitting across her mind's eye, as she felt again that simultaneous need and fear. She noticed, as though in a dream, that her body was now clothed in fine material, recognizable as the same House tunic she had spurned earlier that day.
"Well? Will you not greet your new master in a manner befitting your status?" he asked after only moments, the levity of his words cut short with a snarl of frustration. After a moment of indecision, Maria opened her mouth to speak, but evidently she had tried his patience far enough. Gaius turned away from her, his face instantly concealed by shadow. Maria felt the first beginnings of panic, as the menace of the man before her began to overcome her imagined longing for him. She realized how little she truly knew of him, and how unprepared she was for her utter powerlessness in this Roman world.
"Take her."
A pair of men entered the room, their faces expressionless. Maria, having seen her father's enforcers in the village of her birth, recognized the same dynamic in this situation. She struggled as they laid hands upon her, the tunic she wore hardly disguising their iron grips. She felt as though the claws of some colossal eagle were biting into her flesh; the shooting pain caused her body to become limb and pliable, though she screamed inside for escape.
Gaius motioned, and with the oiled precision of long training and subservience they began dragging her through the darkened corridors of the villa. Through the glaze of the – this time – true fear closing her vision and stoppering up her cries of terror she felt again the shameful and far more potent heat of arousal slipping down her legs from the jewel nestled between them.
After what seemed like an age of her form being scraped hard along the flagstones, their cold robbing her of warmth and leaving her with only the growing desire for Gauis, she had become only a withdrawn bundle of sensations. The cold of the floor and her own heat from the fierce roughness of motion, combined with the sweetly liquid heat of her, made up her world of touch, her arms becoming numb from their entrapment by Gaius' male slaves. Her ears heard only the harsh breath of them and the unthinkably loud beat of her heart, whose pace had not slowed since her rude awakening.
