Chapter 11

As the days past and still no food, the gentle curves that had covered Christine's delicate bones flattened and disappeared. Soon, I could count the ribs shaping her chest. Her cheeks hollowed and her eyes became sunken. I viewed these changes with mixed feelings.

"Show me your hands," I ordered one day, letting go of her bosoms and lifting her wrists. Her nails were broken and there were hard calluses upon each of her fingers. "Excellent," I muttered loudly, turning her hands so as to look at the backs. They were scratched and bruised, bleeding in several places. "Very good. Yes, that's first-rate."

"Monsieur?"

My heart was pounding and bleeding with emotion. Fear and worry were eating me up. I examined her hair next, checking it thoroughly for the presence of lice, and of course, I found an infestation. Despite all the washing, her hair had become dull, lifeless and unsatisfyingly straggly.

"When are you going to eat me?" she asked me later that day, chewing at her nails while watching me crawling around, hunting for rodents. She was standing as I'd ordered her to stand, with her hands high above her head, her legs a few inches apart, and standing like that, she was watching me work. "Please. You have to eat me soon or I'll be too thin, and I'm so, so hungry! Why won't you give me any meat?"

I replied to her coldly, glancing up from my hole. "Because I don't have any, that's why. If you want meat, then bang at the door and call for the soldiers. Ask them for corpses. Suggest to them that they execute some more pretty young aristocrats. Of course, when you ask them, they may have their own ideas. They may take you outside for a while and then bring you back in here as meat."

She cried then because of the pain in her arms, and while I did feel sorry for her, I couldn't relax. I had to find meat. Her breasts were half the weight and size they'd originally been, and their shape was changing. They sagged, whereas before they hadn't, and it seemed to me that Christine was shriveling up from inside, both physically and mentally.

"I can escape," she insisted later that day, or was it the next? Because one day elides with another when there's no light or darkness, no sun by which to count out the hours.

She sucked in her breath because I was rolling her teats between my fingers, squeezing them hard. "Don't think that I can't!" she yelped. "I don't have to endure this torture!"

"Oh yes? How? How will you escape?"

"There are ways out. There have to be. The soldiers carry corpses in here so there must be an entrance."

"There is a door," I offered helpfully, pointing to it.

She glanced hopefully in that direction. "Is that it? Is that how they come in?"

I shook my head and began chewing on an old discarded toenail, whose it was I have no idea. I had two. I gave the other one to Christine. "No one enters here through the door," I said. "And no one goes out that way either."

"There has to be a way out," she insisted violently. "I won't give up until I find it."

It was bravado, of course. She was being eaten alive through lack of food. Her fat was gone and now her body was chumping its way through her muscle and this was doing peculiar things to her mind, clouding her judgment. So I made her stand by the wall with her hands above her head, just a shadow of the attractive young lady that she'd been. Her face was pale and skeletal, angular and tortured. Her frame was malnourished, her stomach and thighs nonexistent. Her skin was blotchy.

She was a mess.

Only the mysterious female triangle hadn't changed, except that it had now grown luxurious, for her hair had grown and the surrounding flesh had atrophied.

I made her stand there by the wall while I jerked myself off and I wiped my cum across her body because she was mine and I owned her for better or worse, and I wanted her to know it.

"Soon," I whispered compassionately, rubbing it into her skin. "It won't be long now. The end is nigh. Just a little more patience. Be patient, my dear. Do you have faith?"

"Oui, monsieur," she sobbed. "I have faith."