Chapter 10: Favoritism

Late the next evening Damian left the house again to settle a dispute among the hired hands. The child was already asleep. The fire burned low.

Chel sat on the edge of the pallet, sewing a tear in one of the work shifts. Tyra lay on her back a short distance away, one arm across her lower belly as if she could still feel the weight of what had been forced into her. For a long time neither spoke. Then Chel set the sewing down.

“It will take,” she said quietly.

Tyra’s eyes opened. She stared at the ceiling.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. He kept me on my back the same way. It took. Yours will too.”

Tyra’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t ask for your wisdom.”

Chel’s voice stayed even, almost detached. “I’m not offering wisdom. I’m telling you what happens next. The sickness comes first if it sticks. Then the swelling. He’ll keep using you through most of it. When the child is born he’ll decide whether you nurse it or I do. After that the days look the same as they do now—cooking, cleaning, mornings on your knees, nights when he wants you. The only difference is another child in the house.”

Tyra turned her head and looked at her fully for the first time in days. “And you’re fine with that.”

“I’m alive,” Chel answered. “My son is alive. That’s the part I care about. The rest is just what is.”

She picked up the sewing again. Tyra said nothing more. The silence that settled between them was heavier than before—no longer only cold distance, but the shared, unspoken knowledge of two women who now both belonged to the same future under the same man.

Weeks passed.

The breeding of Tyra continued with the same deliberate frequency until her courses failed to come and the first signs of sickness confirmed what Damian had intended. He noted it without ceremony and simply continued using her as he chose. The household absorbed the fact the way it absorbed everything else.

Then, gradually, something shifted—but only toward Chel.

It began with small things. Damian returned from the trading post with a length of soft blue wool and told Chel it was for a new dress. A week later he brought a carved wooden comb and a small pot of scented fat for her hair. He ordered a better cradle built for their son and had a second window cut into the side room so the light was cleaner when she nursed. He began to speak to her differently in the evenings—asking whether the boy had eaten well, whether she needed anything for the house, whether the work was too heavy.

In bed the change was clearer still.

Where he had once taken her with the same blunt ownership he used on Tyra, he now slowed. He still used her mouth every morning, but the grip in her hair was lighter. At night he sometimes pulled her into the main bed instead of leaving her on the pallet. He touched her with more care—hands lingering on her breasts, her hips, the soft place between her legs—before he pushed inside. He let her finish more often. On some nights he even held her afterward for a short time, one arm across her waist, before telling her to return to the foot of the bed.

Tyra watched all of it in silence.

Chel’s reaction was quiet and complicated.

She accepted the gifts without visible emotion, folded the wool carefully, used the comb, wore the new dress when he told her to. She answered his questions about the child and the household with the same practical brevity she had always used. When he softened in bed she did not pull away, nor did she lean into the tenderness as if it were safety. She simply met it the way she met every other change in the house: by adjusting, by surviving, by keeping her son fed and herself useful.

Inside, something more careful moved.

Part of her remained wary—gifts could be withdrawn, softer hands could turn hard again, and she had lived too long under his roof to trust the shift completely. Another part of her, the part that had carried his child and learned the cost of open resistance, felt a thin, reluctant ease. The mornings hurt less. The nights were no longer only endurance. She could look at her son and know that the man who owned them both was, for now, choosing to treat the mother of his firstborn with a measure of preference.

She did not thank him.

She did not smile when he brought the next small gift—a pair of better shoes for the colder months. She only tried them on, nodded once, and returned to her work. When Tyra’s eyes followed the exchange with hard, measuring silence, Chel met the look without apology and without alliance. The distance between the two women remained. If anything it had grown more precise: Chel was the one receiving the softer treatment; Tyra was the one still carrying the newer, less-favored pregnancy.

Damian noticed Chel’s restrained acceptance and seemed content with it. He continued the pattern—small kindnesses, milder use, occasional questions that almost resembled concern—while Tyra remained under the older, harder rules.

The house settled into the new imbalance.