“Close the door,” he directed calmly. “Step forward. Stand there.”
He pointed to a bare stretch of floorboards directly before the desk. Sarah closed the door until the latch clicked, stepping forward despite the tremor in her knees. She kept her eyes lowered, fixed on the floor two feet in front of her, holding the deferential posture drilled into her through years of servitude. Yet every instinct told her that this room was far more dangerous than anything she had known.
“Look at me,” Thornwood commanded.
Sarah lifted her eyes. Meeting a white man’s gaze directly broke every rule of survival, but it was an explicit order. His face was entirely devoid of warmth. He studied her as an anatomist might look at a specimen under glass—something to be probed, quantified, and dismantled to observe its mechanisms.
“Do you know why I bought you, Sarah?” he asked.
The sound of her real name startled her. Most masters never bothered to learn the names of new hands, substituting generic labels.
“No, sir,” she answered faintly.
“I bought you because you possess potential,” Thornwood remarked, his tone conversational, as though discussing the season’s yield. “Intelligence, resilience, a certain reserve that suggests you might prove interesting.” He paused, taking a slow sip from his glass. “I am undertaking an inquiry. You will serve as the subject. Over the coming months, we shall determine precisely how much of an individual’s interior self can be extracted before nothing remains but pure compliance.”
