Abducted By The Warrior Prince

by Roxie Ray

  I hung my head as she led me down the hall. I probably looked as pathetic as I felt. At least, I hoped I did.

  What I was really doing was counting the doorways as we passed them. Three on the side opposite my room, two on my side. I didn’t know if it would be useful information, but if I wanted to escape this place, I had to take in everything I could.

  As she waved her hand and two elevator doors shimmered into existence, an awful thought hit me.

  Five more doors. Did that mean that here inside this ship, there were five other women awaiting the same fate I was? Even thinking about it made me want to throw up whatever was left in my stomach from lunch.

  The woman led me into the elevator. Somehow, despite the fact that she hadn’t done anything to prompt it to move, we began to travel downward. There wasn’t anything in the elevator to look at, so I let myself stare at my latest alien captor instead.

  She’d stared at me the whole time I’d showered. As far as I was concerned, it was tit for tat.

  The woman—if it was even right to call her that—didn’t seem to like being stared at either. After a few awkward moments, a deep growl emanated from her throat.

  “You can ask me questions, if you must. I cannot promise I can answer all of them, but if it will stop you from gawking…”

  As far as olive branches went, it wasn’t much of one, but I’d take it.

  “Okay. Um.” I wracked my brain for something that was actually worth asking. When I’d questioned the general before, I hadn’t really gotten anything useful out of him. I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. “Where am I?”

  “I believe the human word for it is elle-vader.” For the first time since she’d stepped into my room, the woman’s mouth curled in a smirk. “We call it a lift.”

  “Oh, ha-ha,” I monotoned. Elevator. Hilarious. “Very funny. I mean…more generally. Where is this?”

  “You are aboard the slave ship Avant Lupinia, en route to the planet Lunaria. Is that satisfactory?”

  I don’t know what came over me, but I laughed. I actually laughed.

  Oh, no. I was beginning to crack.

  “Is this a joke? Have we all been…brainwashed, or something? Am I dreaming? Is any of this even real?” If she’d told me I’d actually fallen asleep at the wheel somewhere along the road to Sector Three, hit my head and sent myself into a coma, I wouldn’t have even been surprised. Heck, I would have taken her orange, high-cheekboned face in my hands and laid a kiss of glee on the flattened tip of her nose. A dream, a coma—that would have made sense. “Oh, my gosh. I actually am dreaming, aren’t I? That would explain…wow, all of this.”

  In response, the woman only gave me a look like she thought maybe I was starting to go a little insane too.

  Then, suddenly, she waved her hand along the wall at her side and the elevator began to slow to a stop. She kept her eyes on me the entire time as she did it.

  No answer, though.

  Still hoping for one, I followed her out into a new hallway.

  Immediately, my senses were overwhelmed. The walls of this hall weren’t walls at all—they were windows. If it hadn’t been for the cold, gray metal walkway beneath my feet, I would’ve been completely sure I’d stepped right out into outer space.

  That was what it looked like. Outer space. Stars streamed past us like flurries of snow caught in headlights at night. I squinted, trying to see beyond them. In the distance, I could see a bright swirl of white in the darkness. It looked like cream splashed in a dark, rich espresso.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to it. I hoped our little game of twenty questions wasn’t over quite yet.

  Again, the woman smirked. “You would not know it by the name my people have for it. Yours, on the other hand…I believe yours call it the Milky Way.” She sniffed. “A silly name. You humans are such fanciful—wait, no! Do not—”

  I could feel her reach for me, but it was too late. At those words, Milky Way, all the blood in my head rushed right out of it. My knees buckled involuntarily. A bright white light overtook my vision as I felt myself crumple to the floor. When the light faded out again, there were no stars to speak of anymore.

  Just black.

  5

  Kloran

  When I received the call on my communicator from Leonix, something told me that it was going to be bad news.

  “She’s fainted,” Leonix snapped into her own communicator. Around her I could hear the ship’s medical staff shuffling about along with the beeping of a heart rate monitor. “As such, we cannot proceed with the testing. Her blood pressure is simply too high.”

  “Who?” I snarled back into the communicator.

  “You know who, Kloran. Who else?”

  Leonix was right. I knew exactly who she was talking about. The human woman. The one I had been obsessively monitoring scans of for the last four days. It had made my heart miss beats, the first time I looked at her bio-scans and saw her condition improving. Yes, we had five other potential candidates aboard the ship, some of whom had already begun the testing process. If we were lucky, perhaps one of them would prove herself to be a viable candidate. But the human female—there was something about her that tugged at my innermost being.

  I was not a soft-hearted man. Not by the standards of my species, and especially, as it was apparent, by the standards of hers. But there was something that moved me about seeing her nutrient levels rise and the soft pink blush returning to her pale cheeks.

  Of course it had made me happy to see her vital signs evening out. I was responsible for this female. It was my purchase of her that had dragged her across the galaxies against her will. My urging, too, that had convinced her to eat. Being joyful at her improvement was like finding an injured chickling and feeling the pleasure of giving care when one nursed it back to health.

  But her health was not all that it had appeared on the bio-scans, it would seem.

  “What happened?” I barked. I had not missed the way Leonix had failed to call me by my rank, and I was not pleased to discover that my female’s status had deteriorated while she was in Leonix’s care. “She was fine when you took her from the bio-cell. We have been feeding her nutritional shakes all day to ensure that she would be in perfect condition.”

  “And now, she is not. These humans are frail, fickle creatures, Kloran. I do not know what more there is to say.”

  Leonix’s tone irked me, almost as much as her refusal to call me “General” did. It was natural that she would feel some level of annoyance at my new position. Leonix was my cousin on my father’s side. She had trained me for the fighting pits herself when I was a cub. But that did not entitle her to insubordination. Nor did it give her permission to pretend that I was still of lesser rank.

  “Leonix. Tell me what happened.”

  “I showed her the viewing room. That is all.”

  “Leonix!” I could have crushed my communicator in my fist out of fury. “You were supposed to take her to the medical bay so our specialists could request her permission for testing. Why—”

  “She believed she was dreaming, Kloran. She did not think any of this was real.” There was a pause. “I thought it best that she saw for herself how far from home she was. It was my opinion that if your theory is correct and she did not enter herself into the slave trade of her own will, then she should at least understand the reality of her situation before she gave her consent.”

  “And now, she is unwell again! Because of your poor judgment, your refusal to follow orders, and your blatant inability to recall your own rank aboard this ship!” It took every measure of inner strength I possessed to stop myself from throwing my communicator against the wall. “The human is at the peak of her cycle. This was the best time to prepare her for breeding. We will have to wait at least another lunar cycle before she is ready again. Do you wish for our species to die out, Lieutenant?”

  There was another pause. This time, when Leonix spoke, her tone had shifted.

  “I
do not, General. I apologize. I made…a poor judgment, and I take full responsibility for putting the human through additional duress.” She almost sounded sincere, but over the communicator, it was impossible to truly tell. “Nonetheless, I stand by what I did. We could not have pushed her to agree to testing when she did not believe doing so would have real-world consequences. Now, she has been stripped of that delusion.”

  “At the expense of her own hard-earned health!”

  “Yes. And for that, as I have said, I am sorry. But please accept that I made my decision with the human’s best interests in mind. And yours as well, General.”

  Curse Leonix—but even through my rage, I had to admit that she had a point. If the human believed herself to be dreaming, even a little, she could not have made an honest decision for herself. The ramifications of attempting to breed a would-be slave who had not fully consented to the procedure were too horrible to fathom.

  We were not Rutharians. We Lunarians were civilized people. If we were forced to wait another lunar cycle…then I supposed we had no choice.

  “Have her returned to her bio-cell when she stabilizes, Lieutenant. Meanwhile, alert our insemination specialists that I will be in touch shortly to hear how our other breeders have fared.”

  “At your will, General.”

  The delay of my plans had already ruined my mood. By the time I finished debriefing with the insemination team, my feelings were even more grim. Of the three other breeders we had implanted with Lunarian seed, two had already failed to get pregnant, and things were not looking promising for the third.

  The growl that had been building in my vocal cords finally unleashed itself as I ended the call.

  For three years we had scoured the galaxies for breeding slaves whose wombs would be hospitable to Lunarian seed. For three years we had failed. In those years I had not seen home once. With each fresh hold full of breeders, we always set course for Lunaria and hoped for the best. Each time we had been forced to halt our course to resell and restock. Females of nearly every known species in the galaxies had been aboard the Avant Lupinia during my time as general and captain.

  Not one of them had been a viable match. Three years, hundreds of potential breeders—and we had not found so much as one with whom we could mix our genes, so that our two species might become one.

  On the worst days—days like today—I feared that we would never find what we were searching for. I feared for my people, that we were alone in the galaxies with no salvation in sight.

  I feared for myself, that all I had promised the high council and all of Lunaria as well, would never come to be.

  And if that was true…

  Then I would never return home at all.

  I could smell the bitter scent of sadness on myself, mixed with the green scent of stress and there, beneath it all, the ever-present spice of rage.

  What I needed now was relaxation. Relief. But I didn’t dare touch any of our slaves—not for that.

  Breeding slaves were meant for breeding. They had willingly submitted themselves for it. They had been specially trained, expertly prepared for that task and that task alone. The slave trade did not deal in slaves of a sexual nature. Even if it had, I would never have dreamed of forcing one to attend to me in the way I needed right now.

  And beyond the morality of it all, I could not have gone through with it no matter what.

  My betrothed, among others, would have had a problem with that.

  In the same way that Leonix herself would be called upon to return to Lunaria someday, when my mission was complete, I had a female of my own waiting for me there. Luckily, she was not of age yet—only eighteen. I had no desire or need to claim her until she turned twenty-one and was of age to begin producing eggs. Even then, perhaps she would be like Leonix. There was a chance she would not be reproductively capable until even later in life.

  But when the time came, it was imperative that I had completed my mission. Then I would be free to return home and honor not only the agreement between our houses, but my duty to my people as well. I would father two cubs with her, the maximum that any Lunarian woman was able to produce.

  It was my warriors that I truly felt pity for. Our species tended to produce more sons than it did daughters, and those daughters had been too few to sustain our species for far too long. Most warriors who served beneath me would never have females to call their own. Most would father no cubs at all.

  Still, it was difficult to trouble myself overmuch with the well-being of my warriors when I had my own pent-up frustrations to attend to.

  As soon as I reached my quarters, I began to strip. My coat, bearing the sigil of House Dyoval over one breast, I hung on a hook on the wall with care, but my breeches and shirt, I all but tore away from my body and left on the floor.

  My cock was already swelling with readiness as I strode into my ensuite and turned the shower on. Immediately, steaming hot water poured down from overhead. I stepped in and let the water ease the tension in my shoulders, my cock clenched in my fists.

  Lunarians ran hot, and we liked to bathe even hotter. It reminded me of my private baths on Lunaria itself, natural hot springs heated by the planet’s core. There, I would have had servants to attend to me—to massage the frustration from my back as I soaked and anoint me with oils when I was done. But even on Lunaria, I would not have a mate to call my own until my betrothed came of age. Even for those of us from the High Houses, women were truly that scarce.

  I had never mated before, no, but I could imagine how it would feel.

  I began to relax beneath the shower’s steam. My cock was as hard as the steel of any sword now, and twice as unyielding. Gradually, I worked my fist up its length, running my thumb over the row of pleasure mounds that rose and fell along the upper side of it. Someday, they would make my betrothed gasp and moan in delicious ecstasy as I entered her and I would growl and snarl in kind.

  But as I added my other hand to my cock, working the flared tip over in one fist while gripping the base with the other, it was not my betrothed that I thought of. Someday, I hoped, I would desire her the way a man should yearn for his mate, but in the two chaperoned meetings I had shared with her before I left for my mission, she had stirred nothing in me. Nothing at all.

  Instead, it was the human female whose image curled around my thoughts like so much steam. I had only seen her nude body in the hologram the auctioneer had pulled up for me. I could have spied on her, glimpsed that body again through the video feed of the observation deck when Leonix ordered her to shower herself—but I had not. It had felt inappropriate, especially now that I was all but certain that even the holographic scan of the human had been taken against her will.

  As soon as I had laid eyes on her hologram, though, I had known that I had to purchase her. Own her. Make her mine.

  It was a cruel desire, but in the intimacy of my own shower, I could allow myself to be a cruel man. The human belonged not to me, I reminded myself, but to my people. If she would agree to undergo testing—and that was a mighty big if—she was a part of our hope for a better future. If Lunarian seed took—an even mightier big if—she would be our collective joy.

  But I yearned for her still. The curves of her body, so perfect for bearing cubs. Her long, luscious hair, which was so enticing I had been imagining winding it around my fist and pulling her lips to mine ever since she had been brought aboard my ship. She had lower hair too, which intrigued me. Deep brown curls that covered her sex, hiding it from view. When the auctioneer had offered to have it permanently removed in the same manner her handler had removed the hair of her legs and underarms, I had told him to leave it.

  Perhaps I had worried that removing it would somehow hinder her ability to breed—or perhaps, selfishly, I had simply left it because I found it pleasing to the eye. I could imagine all too well how silken it would feel beneath my fingers as I cupped her sex, my fingers slipping past it to spread her lower lips so I might determine if she was ready to mate. Lord H
aelian bawdily had told me that humans became slick with lubricative juices when they were in heat. I could imagine too how she might taste, were I to spread her thighs and lap at her sex. My slick, forked tongue would be coated in those juices if I pressed it inside her. That, I imagined, would make her writhe so deliciously I would have no choice but to sink my cock into her instead. Take her. Breed her. The floral scent of our shared lust blossoming around us like a garden only we could inhabit.

  With my hands clenched tight around my manhood, I could admit it to myself in full. I wanted nothing more than to make the human female mine. My own, and mine alone.

  That was my fantasy. In a way, I supposed, it was my curse. She did not lust for me, I knew. She feared me. She feared us all. And I, promised to another, could never claim her in the way I could envision so clearly in my mind. But, reality be damned, in my fantasy she could see how well I would care for her. How perfectly I would fill her with my hot, virile seed over and over again, until her belly swelled with cub and her breasts became full of milk to nourish it with. Perhaps she would even allow me to taste her for myself, wrap my lips around her dark pink nipples and draw a mouthful of her milk onto my tongue.

  In my fantasy, she longed for me as I longed for her. And in my fantasy, I was promised to no one at all. Free to lay claim to her however I desired, to mold her sex to my cock and shape an entire world of her pleasure to my will.

  When my orgasm came, it was explosive. Stronger than anything I had ever felt. My seed rose up over my knuckles, splashing against the tiled wall of the shower and spurting down into the waters that swirled around the drain at my feet.

  It should have been pumped into her womb instead. My shoulders drew back at the mere thought of it, my shoulder blades arching together so hard my entire body seized up and I was forced to brace myself against the shower wall.

  But even that, I knew, was too much to dream of. A pleasurable, albeit baffling, fantasy when I was in need of spending myself in private. But not anything that could ever be pulled into reality. Even if she agreed to undergo testing for my people, the seed she would be inseminated with would be of a mixed sample from Lunarian princes of all the High Houses to avoid any one man knowing whose cub she bore.