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‘Stop what you’re doing and gather round.’

Leyla’s command echoed across the dusty yard, startling several workers.

They visibly jumped, before swiftly abandoning their duties to hurry over, which brought a smile to Leyla’s blood-smeared face.

Despite Viyan’s wicked behaviour, her blatant challenge to Leyla’s authority, her co-workers seemed as obedient and pliant as ever.

If the treacherous Viyan had hoped to start a rebellion, she had surely failed.

‘Faster, faster, this is not an excuse for a break …’

Those closest to Leyla stepped up their pace, whilst beyond them, others emerged from the farmhouse, the accommodation block, driven in her direction by the angry shouts of Leyla’s associates.

The workers were clearly alarmed by this unexpected summons, fearful that it might presage some unforeseen punishment or misfortune, looking at their mistress with trepidation.

How pitiful they were – their spirits broken, their resolve crushed.

They were little more than automatons, with no sense of agency, courage or self-respect.

How did people get like this? The answer was obvious.

Weakness. Leyla had always despised those who couldn’t stand up for themselves, who let themselves be broken by life’s vicissitudes.

Her parents had been weak, allowing themselves to be driven from their homeland by the brutality of the Turkish authorities, only then to be exploited and abused in their adopted country, forced to clean toilets, sweep the streets, working for pennies whilst their employers grew rich.

Growing up in Southampton, Leyla had watched them work themselves into an early grave, leaving her in loco parentis to her three younger brothers.

That had been another sign of her parents’ weakness, a gross betrayal of their own flesh and blood, but as ever they’d blamed others for their misfortune, citing prejudice as the root cause of their misfortune.

Her father had often said that their community was persecuted the world over and Leyla had taken that to heart, but not as an excuse for failure, more as an opportunity for gain .

Having been born in the UK, Leyla knew how the system worked, how it functioned by perennially exploiting the weak and vulnerable.

Using this knowledge and her ties to the Kurdish community back in Turkey, she’d grown strong, rich, powerful.

She would not go meekly to an early grave as her parents had done and she would call no one master.

Thanks to her ingenuity, cunning and ruthlessness, she was the one in control.

The workers were now forming a circle around her.

In other circumstances, this might have alarmed Leyla, but they would be no trouble today, the assembled drones kept in line by the iron bars and snub-nosed revolvers that her brothers used to instil fear.

No, they would stand there, passive and blank, as Leyla showed them the price of disobedience.

They would say nothing as one of their own was reduced to ashes, her tortured screams the only sound in this isolated yard.

This was true weakness and Leyla despised them for it.

She, by contrast, would not waver. In normal circumstances, she would never let one of her workers be harmed, but this was different.

Viyan’s gross disrespect, her attempt to destroy her highly successful enterprise, could not go unpunished.

Leyla had offered Viyan the hand of friendship, the chance of a new life in a new country, but the ungrateful bitch had spat in her face.

She’d turned on the one person who’d tried to lift her out of poverty and disgrace and now she would pay for it.

In this camp, in Leyla’s universe, the price of ingratitude was death.