"You belong to me, now. Your fate is what I choose for you. You have no choice in what happens to you. None. Everything that happens to you is by my choice alone."

"It's still rape."

He crossed the room in three angry strides and backhanded her, knocking her sprawling. He pulled her up by the hair and heaved her at the bed. The world spun as Kahlan tumbled through the air. She only missed the wooden post by inches.

"Of course it's rape! That's what I want it to be! That's what you have coming!"

He charged to the bed like an enraged bull. His black eyes were filled with wild storms of shapes. Before she knew it, he was above her. Kahlan had it all planned out. She wasn't going to try to stop him, to give him the satisfaction of having to use force to have her. But with him right there, on top of her, straddling her hips, those thoughts were lost in the sudden panic of events that she desperately didn't want to happen. She forgot all her plans and desperately tried to push his hands away, but in such a mood there was no stopping him. She had no strength to begin to match him. He didn't even bother to slap her to make her stop resisting. With one yank, he ripped her shirt open.

Kahlan went still as he stopped, her chest heaving from the effort. He stared down at her breasts.

She used the sudden quiet to school herself. She had just killed four brutes. She could do this. This was nothing compared with having a collar around her neck, having her memory stripped away from her, losing her identity, losing who she was, becoming the helpless slave to Sisters of the Dark and an emperor of a mob of thugs.

This was nothing. She was better than to fight him in such a foolish manner, like a schoolgirl trying to slap away the hands of a bully. She didn't fight like that. She wouldn't. She knew better. Yes, she was terrified, but she didn't have to surrender to panic. She was afraid when she'd killed those four men, but she had controlled her fear and acted.

She was better than he was. He was only stronger. He could only have her by force. That knowledge gave her a thread of power over him, and he knew it. He could never have her willingly because she was better than he was, and she deserved better by far. He could never have a woman like her except by force because he was weak and worthless as a man.

"Is your prize of prizes satisfactory, Excellency?" she mocked.

"Oh, yes." Jagang's wicked smile widened. "Now take off those traveling pants."

When she made no move to comply, he did it for her, opening the buttons one at time as if opening something valuable. She lay with her hands at her sides. He hooked his fingers over the waist of her pants, drew them down her legs, and pulled them inside out getting them off over her feet. He threw them aside as he paused to take in the length of her nearly bare body.

Kahlan silently bit the inside of her cheek to keep from pushing his hand away in a panic as he glided his hand up her leg, feeling the softness of her thigh. Kahlan fought back her tears. She would have given anything not to be there, to be anywhere else but at the mercy of this monster.

"Now, the rest of it," he said in a thick whisper. "Take off those underthings."

She could tell that pulling her clothes off had only excited him even more, so she did as he told her to do, trying to make it look anything but seductive as she did so.

As he watched her following his orders, he sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his boots. He dropped his pants and kicked them off. As sickened as she was terrified by the sight of him naked, Kahlan gave in to weakness and turned her eyes away from him.

She wondered how she would ever be able to fall in love and let a man touch her after this. She reproached herself. She was never going to have the chance to fall in love. She was fretting over a problem she would never have.

The bed moved under his weight as he climbed up beside her and lay down. He paused to stare at her, to run his hand over her belly. She'd expected it to be a rough touch, a harsh grabbing of her, but instead it was a furtive touch, a slow, measured evaluation of something quite valuable. She didn't expect his gentle approach to last much longer.

"You really are quite extraordinary," he said in a husky voice, almost more to himself than to her. "Perceiving you through the eyes of others just wasn't the same — I can see that now."

His tone had changed. The anger had melted away under the heat of his desire for her. He was on the brink of surrendering to uninhibited lust.

"It's not at all the same… I always knew you were exceptional, but now that I see you, like this… you are a remarkable creature. Just… remarkable."

Kahlan wondered what he meant when he'd said that he had perceived her through the eyes of others. She wondered if he meant that he had watched her through the eyes of the Sisters. She was struck by an unexpected thought that rattled her: it was the thought of him having watched her undressing when she had thought that only a Sister was there. It filled her with an icy rage at such a violation.

He had been there, then, watching her, planning this. But at the same time she got the feeling that he was talking about something else, too. There was more to his words, more meaning in them, something hidden. Something in the way he'd said it made her think that he was talking about something in her life before the Sisters, back before she had lost who she was. She was angry thinking about him watching her through the Sisters, but thinking about him seeing her before, in her life that she couldn't remember, rattled her.

He abruptly rolled over onto her. "You can't imagine how long I've waited to do this to you."

Her breathing, and her heartbeat, had only just started to settle down. Now, it was happening too fast. Her heart was again thumping against her ribs. She wanted to slow him down, to give herself time to think of a way to prevent him from doing this to her. At the feel of his flesh against hers, though, her mind went blank. She couldn't think of any way to stop him. She could only fixate on how badly she didn't want him to do this.

She reminded herself of the promises she had made to herself. She was better than him; she should act like it.

She said nothing. She stared past him up at the roof of the tent illuminated softly in the lamplight.

"You can't imagine how much I've wanted to do this to you," he said in a suddenly menacing voice. "You can't imagine how much you have this coming to you."

She shifted her gaze to meet his nightmare eyes. "No, I can't. So just get on with it and spare me a speech that means nothing to me, since I have no idea what you're talking about."

She turned her eyes away to stare off once more. She wanted to show him only indifference. She freed her mind to wander. It wasn't easy with him pressing against her, about to have his way with her, but she did her best to ignore him, to think about other things. She didn't want to give him the satisfaction of a struggle she would only lose. She thought about the Ja'La game, not because it was something she wished to think about, but because it was fresh enough in her mind to be easy to recall in detail.

He abruptly hooked his arms behind her knees and pulled her legs up almost to her chest. It was hard to breathe. It hurt her hip joints to be bent like that, with her legs spread that way, but she swallowed back the scream and tried to ignore the way he was trying to control her, to dominate her as he took her.

"If he knew… this would kill him."

Kahlan's eyes turned to him. She could only pull in half a breath against the weight of him. "Who are you talking about?"

She thought that maybe it was her father — a father she didn't remember. Perhaps she had a father who was a commander in the army, and that was why she seemed to know how to fight with a knife. She couldn't imagine who else he could be talking about.