“Tião, for God’s sake, I can’t take it anymore. It’s too big, it’s too thick, you’re going to tear me in half.”

“Tião, for God’s sake, I can’t take it anymore. It’s too big, it’s too thick, you’re going to tear me in half.”

Maria Rosa’s scream cut through the funereal silence of the early morning, a silence heavy with despair that made the pantry walls vibrate.

“Yes, you can handle it, Rosa. Stop being so dramatic, you knew very well what you were getting yourself into.”

Tião’s voice emerged like a low thunderclap, firm and without a hint of hesitation.

“You spent months circling me, teasing me with those looks and that attitude of yours, like you own the world. Now that the moment has arrived, you will face the consequences until the end.”

“I beg you, Tião, to stop. I feel like it doesn’t fit. It hurts just to touch it. Please try somewhere else. Or wait, let me get the butter from the kitchen. We use it to make it easier to slide without hurting so much.”

“There’s no butter, there’s nowhere else to go, and there’s no waiting,” retorted the giant.

And the sound of something heavy hitting the wooden shelf echoed down the hallway.

“You wanted to play with fire, now you’re going to feel the heat. I’m not going to make it easy for you at all. You’re going to have to endure this right here and now to learn not to mess with what you don’t understand.”

The grandfather clock in the main room had just struck 2 a.m. when Siná Cícera Alencar woke up.

The manor house of the Alvorada farm, usually a bastion of authority and absolute silence, seemed to breathe differently that night. The air was heavy, dense, as if a storm were about to break on the clay roof. Cícera, a woman whose strictness was known throughout the backlands, sat up in bed with her heart racing.

At first she thought it was a nightmare, but the moans coming from the back wing were too real to ignore. It was the cries of her daughter Maria Rosa, the little flower of the Alencar family, who had just turned 18 and was the pride of the lineage. Without lighting any candles, driven by a maternal instinct mixed with a dark premonition, the matriarch wrapped herself in her silk robe and walked barefoot across the cold floor.

Each step was a torture of anticipation. Upon reaching the kitchen, the direction of the sounds became clear: the pantry. What Cícera heard through the heavy wooden door challenged all the morality she had constructed. The daughter’s pleas and the authoritative voice of Tião, the largest slave on the property, a man nearly 2 meters tall and of legendary strength, created a scene of horror and lust in Siná’s mind.

Cold sweat trickled down Cícera’s neck as she gripped the doorknob. The world she knew was about to crumble, and what her eyes would see when she opened that door would change her life and the history of that farm forever.