Property. No, not even that.
She was a trinket. Something he’d thrown into his demands. So insignificant that Ilva and Crowther had looked at her and seen no reason to refuse.
He could talk all he wanted about how her education was to leverage her, how the Holdfasts were to blame. But he was the one who’d turned her into a w***e.
Sometimes she wished she’d died in the hospital with her father, to be remembered and mourned for her possibilities, rather than live day by day growing ever lesser. Now it didn’t matter if she’d been an alchemist, or a healer, or anything else. To anyone who ever learned of it, she would only be that one thing. Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.
But worse still was knowing all that and still craving those rare moments in whi
