She looked over at a corner table and stopped. There was one man seated at the table, lean, dark-haired, goateed and watchful, with penetrating dark eyes. He wore a loose-fitting jacket and loose-fitting pants that looked as if they were made of deerskin. Under the jacket he wore a plain gray shirt. He was leaning back in his chair, taking occasional sips from a shotglass half-full of some dark amber liquid that he held in his gnarled right hand. It was what he gripped with his left hand that drew Alexa's attention, though. She was kneeling on the sawdust-strewn floor, naked, her arms bound behind her at the wrists and elbows with a white cloth gag covering the whole lower part of her face. She was small and slender and the man had a tight grip on her disheveled pale blonde hair as he held
