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Isaiah Carter, they called him, though he’d once had a name that tasted of riverwater and drums and something older than this country’s lies. His shoulders were wide as a barn door. His arms were roped with muscle built from years of lifting sacks that would make three men curse. Even the overseer, a lean man with a snake’s grin, looked at Isaiah like he was a tool that could turn dangerous if handled wrong.
The colonel’s voice cut through the yard like a whip crack.
“Take her,” Whitcomb said, loud enough for every field hand and house servant and hired man to hear. “She’s yours now. Do what you like. But get her away from my house. I’m finished carrying my own embarrassment.”
A few heads lifted. A few eyes flickered. Nobody spoke. Silence was what Whitcomb sold in bulk, same as cotton.
Lillian’s fingers curled slightly, the only sign of tremor. She didn’t move away from her father’s grip because she knew what happened when she did.
Isaiah didn’t move right away either.
He only looked at her, a long, steady look that didn’t crawl over her body the way other men’s eyes sometimes did. His gaze went straight to her face, to the corners of her mouth where words had been punished into hiding, to the thin pulse in her throat that still kept time.