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That happy little realization brought his eyes into proper focus and had him looking around.

All he saw, everywhere, was pale lavender, and he thought of Cormia coming through the closet in the office in her white robe with that rose in her hand. The rose was still there, he thought. She’d left it behind.

“You want something to drink?”

Phury turned back to his twin. Across the way, the guy looked like he felt, worn-out and empty.

“I’m tired,” Phury murmured.

Z stood and brought over a glass. “Lift your head up.”

Phury did what he was told, even though it made the water level in his tank shift and threaten to spill over. As Zsadist held the glass to his lips, he took one pull, then another, and then he was gulping with desperate thirst.

When it was gone, he let his head fall back down on the pillow. “Thank you.”

“More?”

“No.”

Zsadist put the glass back on the bedside table and then settled once more in the pale lavender chair, his arms crossing, chin resting almost on his chest.

He’d been losing weight, Phury thought. His cheeks were beginning to stand out again.

“I had no memory,” Z said softly.

“Of what?”

“You. Them. You know, where I came from before I was stolen, then bought.”

Whether it was the water or what Z had just said, one of the two brought Phury into full consciousness. “You wouldn’t have remembered our parents . . . our house. You were just an infant.”

“I recall the nursemaid. Well, I have one memory. It was of her putting jam on her thumb and letting me nurse on it. That’s about all I have. Next thing . . . I was up on the block with all these folks looking at me.” Z frowned. “I grew up as a kitchen boy. I washed a lot of dishes, cleaned a lot of vegetables, fetched ale for the soldiers. They were good to me. That part of it was . . . okay.” Z rubbed his eyes. “Tell me something. What was it like for you? The growing-up part.”

“Lonely.” Okay, that sounded selfish. “No, I mean—”

“I was lonely, too. I felt like I was missing something, but didn’t know what it was. I was half of a whole, except there was only me.”

“That’s how I felt. Except I knew what was missing.” The you went unsaid.

Z’s voice went utterly flat. “I don’t want to talk about what happened after I went through the change.”

“You don’t have to.”

Zsadist nodded and seemed to retreat into himself. In the silence that followed, Phury couldn’t even imagine what he was remembering. The pain and the degradation and the rage.

“Remember before we joined the Brotherhood,” Z murmured, “when I took off for three weeks? We were still in the Old Country and you had no idea where I’d gone?”

“Yeah.”

“I killed her. The Mistress.”

Phury blinked, surprised at the admission of what everyone had always guessed at. “So it wasn’t her husband.”

“Nope. Sure, he was violent, but I was the one who did it. See, she’d taken another blood slave in. Put him down in that cage. I . . .” Z’s voice wobbled, then became rock solid again. “I couldn’t let her do that to someone else. I went back there . . . found him . . . Shit, he was naked and in the same corner I used to . . .”

Phury held his breath, thinking this was everything he had wanted and feared knowing. Odd that they were having the conversation now.

“You used to what?”

“Sit. I used to sit in that corner when I wasn’t being . . . Yeah, I sat there, because at least I knew what was coming at me. The kid, he had his back to the wall and his knees up, too. Just exactly how I’d done it. He was young. So young, like just out of his transition. He had pale brown eyes . . . and they were terrified. He thought I was there for him. You know . . . like, there for him. As I came in, I couldn’t speak, and that scared him even worse. He shivered . . . he shivered until his teeth rattled, and I still remember what the knuckles of his hands looked like. He was holding on to his skinny calves, and the knuckles were nearly popping out of his skin.”

Phury clamped his teeth down, remembering when he’d gotten Zsadist out, recalling the sight of him chained naked to the bedding platform in the middle of