Debt Price by Dusk Peterson

[reviews_and_ramblings]

I admit, I was ready to dislike this novella as soon as I started it: a young man in prison for a nefarious crime (killing children) has to pay his debt becoming a whore, first raped by the prison guards, and then sold to the relatives of the children he killed. I wasn’t sure what was worst, the crime he committed or the punishment he was enduring. Because the young man was basically stupid, used by others as a mean for the crime, a crime he committed not understanding the implications.

But one of those relatives, a young lord whose brother was one of the children, the older of the children to be killed, the one who was trying to save them all and died in doing so, decides to “buy” the prisoner’s debt: now the young man is living on the lord’s estate, not understanding what the lord wants from him, how he is supposed to repay him. Living on the estate, the young man has the chance to see the true from the other side, to recollect who was the young lord’s brother, how unselfish and kind he was, what great crime he committed in killing him, basically killing the whole joy of the estate and its inhabitants. For a simple boy like him, a commoner, worse than a commoner now, a slave, it seems impossible to be able to replace such loss.

I arrive to deeply care for both the young man and the young lord; towards the end, it seemed almost a fairy tale, a tragedy turned in romance… but that wasn’t surprising, cause, for what I remember, the best fairy tales are indeed tragic love stories.

Publisher: Love in Dark Settings Press (June 21, 2012)
Amazon Kindle: Debt Price (Master/Other)

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