If he’d looked closely, his sister’s mark had been beneath his fingertips where he pinched her. It rose on her flesh, a tiny scar, in such a way that it might have been the harbinger of his nails or at the behest of them. Really, even Iris would not have been able to explain which it was. If Kedrick had noticed, it would have been whatever he said. She wondered if it would please him to mark her. She did not get to ask, because the jacket fell back in place and he made a face as though he’d already forgotten her body.<br/><br/>She didn’t understand him. “Forgive you?” she asked. It was not possible to forgive somebody who could not do wrong. Iris inclined her head, the one antler still producing a thin trickle of bloodlike sap where she’d torn away the twig. She was small on her feet, the antler branches giving her extra inches that did little to enhance her height. Not that it meant much. Iris could be any size, as it suited her Master.<br/><br/>Iris wrapped her hands around the bases of her wooden spires. “Will you take them?” she asked, concerned. She worried he would not. If he was imagining various cruelties, soul spurred by the thing that had been crafted to appease him, there was that worst offense still hanging between them. To turn away from her, leave her unclaimed and without purpose—Iris took a small step toward him, bowing her head in hopes of encouragement. “Please take them. Cut them, or break them free. They, and I, are yours, Master.” She urged.<br/><br/>He said he didn’t want to hurt her, and it made her jerk her chin upward so that she was staring at the top of his head. The sentiment conflicted deeply with the surging of his blood in her vine-threading veins. Nothing about her genesis, the fluids she’d been nurtured with, suggested this was true. She was brilliantly breakable, a sapling, precisely because his heart had been moved to break something. Iris would not have grown this way, she would not have been Iris, were it not the case. “You don’t?” she asked. “…But you can…” she said, uncertain. “You can do whatever you like.” As if he’d not heard her the first time. “You paid to have me made for you.” She reminded him. “So you can take anything, or everything. I will provide you with everything I am.” Iris said. It was the most confident string of words to leave her mouth after she’d given him her name. Her purpose, laid out again in her own tongue.<br/><br/>“Please allow me to serve.” She said. This creature had no agency. At least, none she seemed to desire. The wide, abyssal eyes stared at him without blinking. “You may want to hurt me however you wish.”