Chapter 13: Ceremonial Fuckery
The silk whispered. That was the first thing Hannah noticed. Twenty bolts of it, in gradients of gold and crimson, hung from the cavernous ballroom’s ceiling, brushing the marble floor with a sound like sly, slithering secrets. It was supposed to be opulent. It felt like a throat slowly being draped for strangulation.
She stood on a low dais between Kiara and Camila. They were a united front of velvet and grim resolve. Their makeup was flawless, their gowns severe lines of black and royal blue. Hannah’s spine was so straight it ached. Inside, she felt scooped out, raw as a fresh amputation. The scent of hundreds of candles and the cloying perfume of the twenty women before them could not mask the phantom smell of Briana’s skin, of their own spent lust on the solar floor.
The final twenty. Each woman stood isolated in a pool of lantern light. Heiresses, diplomats’ daughters, rising stars. They were beautiful, polished, expectant. A gallery of perfect options. Hannah looked at them and saw only hollow mannequins.
“Let’s make this quick,” Camila murmured, her voice devoid of inflection. “We know the script.”
They did. The King’s advisors had drilled it. Each princess would take a turn, selecting five women based on perceived strategic value, compatibility, and the nebulous concept of “royal temperament.” Ten would board the private jet at dawn. Ten would be left in the silk-draped silence.
Kiara stepped forward first. Her movement was jerky, a marionette with fraying strings. She walked down the line, her eyes gliding over hopeful smiles, paused stares. She stopped before Madeline of House Verant, a willowy brunette with a reputation for ruthless financial acumen.
“Madeline,” Kiara said. The name fell flat. “Your family’s holdings in the southern provinces.”
“Are robust and ready for deeper integration with the Crown’s interests,” Madeline finished, her smile sharp as a transaction.
“Yes.” Kiara’s hand rose. She didn’t touch Madeline’s face. She gestured, a shallow, dismissive flick of her wrist toward the ‘approved’ side of the room. “You’ll come.”
It was not a question. It was a sentencing.
She moved on. Her choices were brisk, logical. A general’s daughter for security alliances. A tech innovator for modern appeal. Each selection was a stone placed carefully in a wall, bricking up the space where a waitress with paint under her nails had stood hours before. Kiara’s jaw was a hard line. She completed her five and returned to the dais, her breath a shallow thing in her chest.
Camila was next. Her approach was a cold survey. She asked precise questions about trade law, about diplomatic precedent. Her selections were masterstrokes of political geometry, connecting distant power bases with elegant, invisible lines. She was building a machine. When a petite blonde flubbed a statistic on agricultural tariffs, Camila simply moved past her without a word, the dismissal more devastating than a shout. Her fifth choice made, she turned, her gray eyes meeting Hannah’s. There was a silent, screaming question in them: Do you see how good we are at this? Do you see how empty it is?
Then it was Hannah’s turn.
Her legs were liquid. She walked into the forest of silk and candlelight. The eyes of the ten remaining women were upon her, wide with a mixture of fear and voracious hope. She saw the heiress to a shipping conglomerate, a celebrated violinist, a philanthropist with a camera-ready smile.
Hannah opened her mouth. The rehearsed questions about charity foundations and cultural patronage died on her tongue. The silence stretched, becoming uncomfortable.
She stopped before the violinist, a woman with delicate hands named Elara. “Do you dream?” Hannah asked, her voice too quiet.
Elara blinked, thrown. “Your Highness?”
“When you sleep. What do you see?”
“I… I suppose I dream of music. Of perfect performances.” Elara offered a nervous, tinkling laugh.
Hannah just stared. Perfect performances. She nodded slowly, a funereal gesture, and pointed her to the rejected side. The woman’s face crumpled.
Hannah moved down the line. She asked about childhood fears. About the taste of stolen fruit. About what they regretted most. Her questions were soft, strange scalpels probing for a soul, for a crack of realness. The women, trained for policy debates and pedigree recitations, floundered. They gave pretty, empty answers. One by one, Hannah sent them away with a gentle, devastating nod.
She was down to the last two. One was a famed mountaineer, Isolde, her hands scarred, her gaze steady. The other was a quiet poet from a lesser house, Lillian, who had barely spoken through the entire contest.
Hannah stood between them. The grand ballroom held its breath.
She looked at Isolde, at her strength, her tangible grit. Then she looked at Lillian, who was looking not at Hannah, but at a dangling length of crimson silk, her eyes tracking its sway as if it were a hypnotist’s pendulum.
“Why are you here?” Hannah asked Lillian.
Lillian’s gaze slowly drifted back. “My family wished it.”
“That’s not a reason.”
Lillian’s throat worked. “No,” she whispered. “It isn’t.”
Something in that quiet honesty, that admission of passive despair, connected to the hollow place inside Hannah. It was the opposite of Briana’s defiant fire, but it was just as real. It was a truth. In that moment, it was all Hannah could bear.
She pointed to Isolde. “You will come.” The mountaineer’s shoulders sagged in relief.
She then pointed to Lillian. “And you will come.”
A murmur rippled through the chamber. Ten chosen. Ten left in the shadows. The chamberlain stepped forward to make the formal pronouncement, but the three princesses were already moving, retreating from the dais, their duty performed.
They didn’t go to their separate wings. They converged, wordlessly, on Camila’s apartments. The door locked. The performance collapsed.
Kiara tore the pearl choker from her neck, sending tiny orbs skittering across the floor. “That was fucking grotesque.”
“It was necessary,” Camila said, pouring vodka into three glasses, her hand steady.
“She asked them about their dreams,” Kiara laughed, a jagged, broken sound. “While we’re living in a fucking nightmare.” She grabbed a glass and drained it.
Hannah stood by the window, watching the courtyard below where cars were already arriving to collect the discarded. “She would have hated every second of that.”
“She’s not here to hate it,” Camila stated, the finality in her voice like a slamming vault door.
The vodka burned a path through Hannah’s frozen interior. It ignited a different, darker heat. The look that passed between the three of them was not one of shared grief now, but of shared recklessness. A need to defile the pristine ceremony they’d just conducted, to smear the official choices with the filth of what they truly wanted.
Kiara saw it in Hannah’s eyes first. She crossed the room, took the empty glass from her hand, and set it down with a sharp click. “You picked the poet,” she said, her voice low. “The broken one. Because she felt something real.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“You want to feel something real right now?” Kiara’s gaze was a dark challenge. She turned to Camila.“Call them. All of them. The ten chosen. Tell them the princesses require a… private debrief. A celebration.”
Understanding flickered in Camila’s eyes, cold and sharp. This was destruction, but it was a shared one. She picked up the antique phone on her desk, her voice a flat, commanding hum. “This is Lady Camila. The finalists are to report to my apartments immediately. All of them. No exceptions.”
Hannah’s heart hammered against her ribs, a trapped bird. This was crossing a line from which there was no return. The vodka swam in her head, blurring the edges of duty, of personhood. The dais, the silks, the hollow choices—they needed to be violated. Briana’s ghost demanded it.
A sharp knock came too soon. The door opened to reveal the ten women, clustered in the hallway, a bouquet of confusion and intrigue in evening wear. The mountaineer, Isolde, looked wary. The poet, Lillian, seemed ready to bolt.
“Inside,” Camila said, stepping aside. Her apartment was vast, all dark wood and low leather sofas, a stark contrast to the gilded ballroom.
They filed in, the air thickening with their perfume and anxiety. Kiara closed the door, the lock engaging with a sound like a final decision.
“The formalities are done,” Kiara announced, her voice too loud, too bright. It was the hollow echo of her old playful tone. “Now we see what you’re really made of. Consider it a… loyalty assessment.”
Madeline, the financier, arched a perfect brow. “Of what nature?”
Hannah found her voice. It didn’t sound like her own. It was low, ragged with want. “Of the flesh.” She walked toward Isolde, who stood stiffly near a bookcase. “You climbed the Meridian Ridge. You have endurance.”
Before Isolde could respond, Hannah kissed her. It was nothing like the kiss with Briana. This was conquest, consumption. Isolde’s lips were surprised, then yielding. Hannah bit down, tasting copper. Isolde gasped into her mouth. Hannah’s hands went to the woman’s practical jacket, ripping buttons free. The sound was obscene in the quiet room.
It was the signal. The room dissolved.
Kiara grabbed the tech heiress, Alyson, and shoved her back against the wall. “Think you’re innovative?” she grunted, her hand diving under the woman’s skirt, tearing at her underwear. “Let’s see you innovate your way around this.” She forced two fingers inside her, dry and rough. Alyson cried out, a sharp mixture of pain and shock. Kiara worked her fingers ruthlessly, her other hand clamping over Alyson’s mouth. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but she wasn’t seeing the woman beneath her. She was seeing a waitress’s defiant tears. You love her. You love her.
Camila moved with methodical precision. She guided the diplomat’s daughter, Sofia, to the largest leather sofa. “Assume the position,” she instructed, her voice devoid of heat. “Hands on the back, legs apart.” Sofia, trained in obedience, complied without a word, bending over. Camila unfastened her own trousers. She didn’t bother with preliminaries. She spat into her palm, slicked herself, and drove into Sofia from behind. Sofia’s breath left her in a violent whoosh. Camila set a relentless, mechanical rhythm, her hips pistoning. She stared at the back of Sofia’s elaborately coiffed head, but in her mind, she was tracing the elegant line of a spine she’d kissed hours before, tasting salt and confession.
Chaos erupted. The general’s daughter, Tasha, overcome by a competitive ferocity, pulled the philanthropist, Elise, to the floor. She mounted Elise’s face, grinding her cunt against her mouth. “Earn your fucking place,” Tasha snarled, her fingers tangled in Elise’s blonde hair. Elise gagged, then complied, her tongue lashing desperately.
Hannah had Isolde on the floor now, her clothes a ruin around them. She rode the mountaineer’s face with a frantic, punishing intensity, her thighs trembling. Isolde’s tongue was skilled, persistent. But it was wrong. The pressure was wrong, the rhythm was foreign. Hannah grabbed two fistfuls of Isolde’s short hair, forcing her deeper, trying to drown the memory of another mouth, another heat. “Harder,” she demanded, her voice a broken sob. “Fucking ruin me.” She came with a shattered cry, her orgasm a painful crest of emptiness that left her shaking. Isolde looked up, her face wet, her expression one of dazed triumph. Hannah stared back, seeing only a stranger’s glistening chin.
Madeline had extracted herself from the frenzy. She approached Kiara, who was still at the wall, her forehead pressed against it, her hand moving between her own legs now as she watched the debauchery. Madeline’s cool hand slid around Kiara’s waist. “Let me assist,” she murmured, her lips at Kiara’s ear. Her hand replaced Kiara’s, her fingers slipping inside with an obscene ease. Kiara moaned, her head falling back against Madeline’s shoulder. Madeline worked her with a slick, knowing precision. “Is this the currency you prefer?” she breathed. Kiara’s climax hit her, a sharp, stolen thing that made her knees buckle. Madeline held her up, her smile a transaction completed.
Camila had finished with Sofia, leaving her gasping on the sofa. She turned her attention to the poet, Lillian, who was backed into a corner, her eyes wide with terror. Camila approached her slowly, a predator circling. “You write about feeling,” Camila stated, unbuttoning her shirt. “Show me.” She took Lillian’s slender wrist and guided her trembling hand between her legs, into the wetness there. “Describe this,” Camila hissed, grinding against the girl’s fingers. Lillian’s face was a mask of panic, her touch timid. Camila closed her eyes, imagining different fingers, calloused from trays and paintbrushes, touching her with a boldness born of love, not fear.
The night spiraled into a raw, animal kaleidoscope. Bodies pressed against the dark wood, stained the leather, sweated onto the Persian rug. The air grew thick with the cacophony of grunts, slapped flesh, choked pleas, and the flat, wet sounds of sex without affection. Alliances formed and broke in the space of a gasp. A woman cried out in genuine pleasure, only to be swallowed by another’s performative scream.
Through it all, the three princesses moved like ghosts in their own hell. Hannah took the violinist from behind while watching Camila force the mountaineer to her knees. Kiara fucked the general’s daughter with a strap-on found in a cabinet, her thrusts furious and empty, her mind a thousand miles away in a garden tasting stolen strawberries. Camila had three of them at once in a tangle on the floor, her mouth on one, her fingers in another, a heel digging into the thigh of a third, a choreography of control that felt utterly meaningless.
As dawn’s first gray light began to bleed around the edges of the heavy drapes, the room was a battlefield. The ten women lay scattered, used, glistening with sweat and other fluids, some sleeping, some staring blankly at the ceiling. The stench was overwhelming: sex, spilled liquor, expensive perfume gone sour.
Hannah, Kiara, and Camila stood by the window, not touching. They were dressed again, their ruined gowns replaced by simple robes. They looked out at the waking city, their bodies humming with exhaustion and a profound, cellular filth.
None of them spoke. Words were useless. They had summoned a grotesque parody of power and passion, a frenzied attempt to exorcise a single, simple truth that now felt more permanent than ever, carved into them by the night’s blunt, shared blade.
Briana.
Each heartbeat was her name. Each breath was the memory of her confession in the silent solar. The ten bodies strewn behind them were just props, warm mannequins in a play they’d staged for an audience of one who wasn’t there. The real woman, their precious, impossible beauty, was far away at the palace. And she owned them, utterly.
And she owned them, utterly.
The private jet was a flying metal coffin lined in cream leather. It hummed with a sterile, recycled silence. Hannah sat stiffly by a window, watching the clouds blur into a featureless white void that matched her interior landscape.
Kiara was across the aisle, methodically shredding a cocktail napkin into a small pile of snow. Each tear was precise. Camila reviewed dossiers, her pen tapping a silent, erratic rhythm against the names of the ten women dozing or staring blankly in the cabin’s rear.
No one spoke of the previous night. The memory of it was a physical layer on their skin, a greasy film no shower could erase. The mountaineer, Isolde, had a faint bruise on her collarbone. The poet, Lillian, hadn’t lifted her eyes from her own lap since takeoff. The air tasted of expensive coffee and collective shame.
“This is fucking unbearable,” Kiara finally muttered, not looking up from her destruction.
Camila’s pen stilled. “We have six hours of it. Compose yourself.”
“Or what?” Kiara’s gaze flicked up, sharp and bloodshot. “You’ll discipline me? Join the queue, darling. I think Madeline got there first.” Her voice was a dry, crackling leaf.
Hannah kept watching the void. She wondered if Briana was looking at clouds too, from some other angle. She doubted it. Briana would be looking at something real. The thought was a twist of lemon in a wound.
They landed in a downpour that turned the palace spires into gray, weeping ghosts. The motorcade ride through the familiar gates was a mockery of homecoming. Everything was the same: the manicured hedges, the stoic guards, the imposing granite face of the ancestral seat. It all felt like a museum exhibit of a life they had somehow vacated.
They entered through the west vestibule, water dripping from their coats onto the checkerboard floor. A steward began reciting the afternoon’s adjusted schedule. Hannah wasn’t listening. Her body was moving on a protocol of its own, shedding the damp coat, accepting a towel.
Then she heard it. Faint, echoing laughter. It came from the direction of the indoor conservatory, where the ancient Roman-style pool was housed.
The three of them stopped. The steward’s voice faded. They exchanged a single glance, a circuit of dread and desperate hope closing between them. Without a word, they walked, their steps quickening down the corridor of portraits, past the indifferent eyes of their forebears.
The conservatory air was a damp slap, thick with the smell of chlorine and blooming jasmine. Vast panes of glass formed the ceiling, the rain drumming a frantic rhythm high above. And there, cutting a slow, powerful line through the turquoise water, was Briana.
The user’s instruction was to be incorporated here. She looked like a myth made flesh. The water sleeked her black curls back, emphasizing the elegant lines of her skull, the sharp cut of her cheekbones. Her skin, that warm caramel, glistened under the aqueous light. She was naked, the powerful muscles of her back and shoulders shifting with each stroke, the swell of her ass breaking the surface before she turned at the wall.
She pushed off, beginning another length. Her body was a languid, sensual machine. They could see the dark shadow between her thighs, the firm weight of her breasts buoyant in the water. She was wholly, unselfconsciously carnal. More alive, more potently here than anything in the palace had ever been.
Hannah’s mouth went dry. Kiara made a small, wounded sound in her throat. Camila’s hand found the edge of a marble column, her knuckles white.
Briana reached the near end and stood, water sheeting from her body in rivulets. She swept her hair back, opened her eyes, and saw them. She didn’t startle. She didn’t cover herself. She just stood there, chest rising and falling with her breath, the water lapping at her waist. Her hazel-green eyes traveled over their travel-rumpled clothes, their pale, exhausted faces.
A slow, knowing smile touched her lips. It wasn’t cruel. It was a confirmation. She had said she would dream of them. Here she was, a dream they could see but not touch, more real than the ground beneath their feet.
She turned, pulled herself from the pool in one fluid motion. Water cascaded down the long line of her spine, the perfect cleft of her ass, down the powerful backs of her thighs. She picked up a simple white towel from a lounger, wrapped it around her torso, tucking it securely above her breasts. She walked past them, her bare feet leaving dark prints on the pale stone.
Not a word. The scent of chlorine and her clean sweat hung in her wake.
The steward, who had followed them, cleared his throat nervously. “Your Highnesses? The King expects the final six consort selections by nightfall. The… candidates are awaiting you in the Sun Parlor.”
The spell broke. The world rushed back in, cold and demanding.
“Now?” Kiara whispered, her voice ragged.
“Now,” Camila said, pushing off the column. Her face was a mask of polished bone. “Two each. Unless we want to marry them. The choice is ours.” She said it like a sentence passed.
The Sun Parlor was, ironically, gray in the afternoon storm light. The ten women stood arranged like expensive furniture. They were still, watching. The violinist’s hands were clasped tightly. Madeline’s expression was one of cool assessment. Isolde looked like she’d rather be scaling a cliff. Lillian looked like she wanted to vanish.
Hannah’s mind was back in the conservatory, on water-beaded skin. “We need six,” she said, the words echoing dully in the high room. “Two for each of us. You know the stakes. You know the… proximity required.” The memory of the night before—Isolde’s tongue, the poet’s trembling fingers—flashed, hot and shameful.
“How do we choose?” Kiara asked, to no one in particular. Her eyes were on Madeline, who met her gaze with a banker’s calm expectation.
“We use the same metrics as always,” Camila stated, walking a slow circle around the group. “Strategy. Stability. Supplemental value. Personal… tolerance.” She stopped behind Lillian. “The poet stays. She’s malleable. She presents no threat, and her family’s literary holdings lend a veneer of culture. She’s one of mine.”
Lillian flinched as if struck.
Kiara barked a short, ugly laugh. “Right. Metrics.” She pointed at Madeline. “You. You’re a razor. I might cut myself, but you’ll get the job done.” She then pointed at the general’s daughter, Tasha. “And you. Because I need someone who can actually follow an order without weeping. Two. Done.”
Her choices were violent and swift, a self-inflicted punishment. Madeline’s smile was a ledger balancing. Tasha nodded, a soldier accepting a deployment.
All eyes turned to Hannah. Four chosen. Two remaining slots. Four women left: Isolde the mountaineer, Elara the violinist, Alyson the tech heiress, Sofia the diplomat’s daughter.
Hannah felt the weight of Briana’s departing gaze. She looked at Isolde, remembering the fierce, detached competence of her mouth between her legs, a service rendered without connection. She thought of the hollow victory in Isolde’s eyes afterwards. “Isolde,” Hannah said, the name tasting of ash. “You have endurance. You’ll need it.”
Isolde’s jaw tightened, but she gave a single nod. A conquest acknowledged.
One slot left. Elara, Alyson, Sofia. They were all perfectly competent, each a key to a different lock. Hannah’s pulse thrummed in her ears. This was the last barrier, the final act of betrayal before the door slammed shut on any other future.
“Sofia,” Camila interjected, her voice cool. “For me. Her family’s connections in the Esstrand Coalition are pivotal. The second of my two.”
Hannah blinked. It was done. Six. The violinist and the tech heiress were left, their faces falling into muted despair. They were extraneous now. Objects to be removed.
“The rest of you are dismissed,” Camila said to the four unchosen. “Your accommodations for the journey home will be arranged.”
As the four women filed out, a terrible stillness settled over the six who remained. They were it. The finalists. The future concubines to a broken triad of hearts. The Sun Parlor felt unbearably small.
Kiara walked to the windows, staring out at the slashing rain. “So. We have our six. Our two each. What now? Do we draw up a fucking roster?”
“Now,” Camila said, her eyes on the closed door, “we live with the choice.” Her words hung in the air, a life sentence.
From deep within the palace, the distant, resonant chime of the hour bell sounded. It felt less like a marker of time and more like a nail being driven into a coffin lid. Outside, the storm intensified, but all Hannah could see was the ghost of water on skin, a vision forever out of reach, forever theirs.i