by Viki Storm
“Oh, I know the word,” he says, that puzzled look gone so fast I realize he was just screwing with me. “I was just confused because when I end up mating you, it will be you who’s begging me for it.”
“Just take off these damned bonds. You have my word that I will not attack you.”
“Attack me?” he says. “Are we talking about mating or fighting… or both? Because I think you’d be excellent at both.”
“Maybe you’d better keep this collar on,” I say, “because I might plunge a blade in the side of your neck if you let me out.”
“Female,” he says. “The only way you could manage to get a blade in me is if I was passed out in the deep slumber that only comes from the exhaustion from repeated mating… but even then, it might be worth it to sow my seed inside your fertile womb.”
I open my mouth to say something, but I am stunned into silence. His words are mocking, teasing—meant to keep me off-guard and unable to properly negotiate tactics. I know he has no actual plans to seduce me, right? This is all tactics. After all, that’s the first rule of negotiation—make sure you have leverage on the other party. Even though I know his dirty promises are empty and glib, they affect me deeply nevertheless.
The idea of being claimed by this warrior, lying underneath his huge, powerful body with my legs spread as he takes me over and over again, is stirring something inside me. Feelings I don’t want to deal with. Being compelled to take his seed—of being bred… I feel that same tingling between my thighs as earlier, when the manacles were briefly teasing my breasts.
There is a faint click, and I realize that the bonds around my wrists and ankles are retracting—but not the one around my neck.
The Rulmek stripped all the female captives of our clothes, held us in tiny cages, alone, so we could not conspire against them. Only sometimes were we bound, but we were always collared. At first, it was unbearable. I constantly clawed at the collar, trying desperately to figure out a way to get it off.
But you can get used to anything. Maybe that’s a human’s biggest blessing and curse.
It wasn’t long before I felt the collar as a normal part of me, the way a dog doesn’t chafe at his collar after he’s been wearing it for a while.
And now I’ve been shackled long enough by this Zalaryn bastard that I’ve almost gotten used to it. And it didn’t even take that long.
That’s the worst part—the resignation to your own dehumanization. I’ve fought hard for years to get my dignity back, and it takes this jerk all of ten minutes to wipe it away.
I feel the bonds around my arms and ankles release. The Zalaryn just sits there looking at me while I sit up and rub at my wrists. The Zalaryns are barely one step above Rulmek in my opinion. I know what they used to do. They demanded young, fertile females from Earth as tribute for saving the humans’ planet in a long-ago war. The Zalaryns auctioned off the women to the highest bidders, using them to breed and repopulate their race.
They have a lot in common with the Rulmek as far as I’m concerned.
“Now the collar,” I say.
“You must understand the severity of the situation,” he says. “And that I must take every reasonable measure to ensure you or your crew do not compromise my mission.”
“The fucking collar,” I repeat. “Now, or there’s no deal.”
“You can move freely,” he says. “But the collar offers some insurance if you try anything sneaky. I can reactivate it and put a coordinate lock on it, freezing you to the spot.” I know he doesn’t trust me to keep my word—and I don’t blame him. But ever since I heard the words ‘Lekyo Prime,’ I’ve been corralled into submission more thoroughly than any collar or bond could do. I’m not going to let him know that, however. I’ll be damned if I tell him about my past.
“The collar comes off, or I will not help you,” I say. “I’ll comm the Rulmek ship to tell them you’re coming just to spite you.” This last is a bluff, but I hope he can’t tell.
I start to look around the room for something to cut into this damned collar. It is not physically uncomfortable, just a small circlet of flexible metal alloy—but I imagine it growing, tightening and kneading the life from me one struggling breath at a time.
“Think of things from my perspective,” he says. “I can keep the collar on you. It’s my way of being sure that you won’t get any cute ideas. Or I can take it off and risk all manner of things going wrong with my mission—and from the murderous fury in your eyes, I would count my own personal safety the top of that list.”
“You come from Lekyo Prime?” I ask. I will need to tell him a little if I am to get him to take this damned collar off. Because he’s right: he has no reason to take it off and every reason to keep it on me.
“Yes,” he says. “The Zalaryn colony on the planet is thriving, and we’d like to keep it that way.”
Did he just say Zalaryn colony?
“What of the king?” I say. My father would be an old man by now, but I can’t see him ceding his planet to these aliens.
“King Vano is the one who authorized the mission,” he says.
“King Vano?” I ask. Maybe I don’t need to help this bastard. If Lekyo Prime has already fallen to the Zalaryns, if my sister and everyone else are already gone… then let the Zalaryns and Rulmek kill themselves. “A Zalaryn king rules the planet?”
“Yes,” he says impatiently, “alongside Queen Bryn. They have authorized this mission. If you would just—”
“Queen Bryn?” I shout. My voice fills up my small room. My sister is queen and a Zalaryn is king? I don’t want to give away more than I have to, but this shocks me into an outburst.
“Are you not listening to me?” he says. “The Rulmek are coming to the planet unless I can get close enough to their warship to reroute them.”
“Tell me,” I say. “How did it come to be that the planet’s queen is a human and the king is a Zalaryn? Are they co-sovereigns of different regions of the planet?”
“They are bonded mates,” he says.
Just when I thought this couldn’t get any worse.
My sister has married a Zalaryn? Made one the king of our planet? The idea fills me with rage. These Zalaryns invaded my home planet—and one of them has taken my sister’s crown. He must have forced her into a marriage—I know that there’s no way Bryn would have ever willingly taken one of these creatures as her husband or bonded mate or whatever Bantokk is calling it. This Vano asshole must have coerced her into the union.
I restrain the urge to ask more, not sure I want to know anything else.
Because I know all I need to.
Bryn is alive and on Lekyo Prime, and there’s no way I’m going to let the Rulmek get to her.
“I am originally from Lekyo Prime,” I admit to him. “I left a long time ago. There’s not much there on that planet, in case you haven’t noticed. Except cow shit and a lot of old men rambling about how the old ways are the right ways. But it is my home, and I will not see it overtaken by Rulmek.” That’s technically not a lie, and he doesn’t need to know more than that. I can’t let him know that Bryn is my sister, otherwise he’ll have too much leverage over me. “I said I’d help you before I knew the planet’s name, but now that I do, I pledge it double and triple. I will stand down and let you proceed with your mission. Even though I have confidence my crew could take out this fell host. They are a sluggish race, unskilled in battle with light spacecraft. But anything could go wrong in open battle with a warship of that size. It is a wager I’d have made with any other planet’s safety—but not Lekyo Prime.”
“I am glad to hear that,” he says, considering my words the way a shrewd merchant inspects a rare item for signs of forgery or damage. “Then I can remove the collar.”
He pushes a button and the collar opens, releasing me.
“Thank you,” I say, peeling the thing off of my neck and casting it to the floor. Let him pick it up.
“I will unlock your crew, too,” he says, “so you can expla
in the terms. Can you guarantee they will not go against you?”
“No one on my crew picks his nose without my orders,” I say. I think back to earlier this evening, how they questioned my judgement to bring a fight to the Rulmek.
“That is good to hear,” he says.
“Then I trust you’re leaving,” I say. “Good luck with your mission. Maybe you’ll get lucky and the Rulmek and the Kraxx really will destroy each other.
“Yes, I’m leaving. And soon,” he says. Thankfully. I don’t know how much longer I could stand having him on my ship.
He’s making me feel things I’d rather not deal with. I like my life simple, and his presence is threatening to complicate things. Since I’ve escaped captivity, my philosophy has been easy: aliens are definitely evil, and human men are probably evil until proven otherwise. Zalaryns? The race that looks down upon humans as primitive, the race who took women from Earth for breeding slaves? That makes him definitely evil.
This weird, undeniable attraction I feel toward him is confusing at best—and dangerous at worst.
And I don’t mean attraction in the sense that I think he’s good-looking, though he certainly is in a rugged, powerful and otherworldly way. It’s attraction in a more primal way. The way bits of dust and rocks swirl around the universe, coalescing to form a planet.
I’m just a bit of dust, helpless to resist the pull of his gravity.
“I will prepare a traveling meal for you to take,” I say. “Send me a comm if you can, let me know how it all works out. I’m curious to see if you can pull this thing off.”
“Oh no,” he says. “I’m leaving soon—tonight if possible—but there’s one thing that’s nonnegotiable.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“You’re coming with me.”
BANTOKK
I follow the female into the common area of the ship. I’m not letting her out of my sight until I hear the insectile screams as the Rulmek and the Kraxx kill each other. She’s sneaky, that much is obvious. You can’t trust these rebels to do anything except double-cross you.
Her rump twitches perkily in the close-fitting suit she wears. She is experiencing her fertile days right now, and there is a delectable scent that rolls off her in warm, sweet waves.
It’s making me forget how much I hate her.
The Three-Star Rebels are all the same: cocky, violent and stupid. Regrettably, I’ve had to deal with them before. It didn’t turn out good.
She keys the code on the lock for the crew’s chambers. I stand back, smiling, letting her. She steps back, expecting the doors to slide open, but they do not. I overrode the locks and set a new code when I boarded the ship.
“What the fuck?” she says under her breath and rekeys the old code. The door still does not open.
“Need help?” I say.
“No,” she huffs, then tries the code again.
“Yes you do,” I say. “I reprogrammed the locks. And I doubt you can guess the code. Your lock accepts codes from four to eight digits, and you have ten numerals in your number system. That’s…” I pause to pretend to calculate, when in truth I already calculated it earlier… “About 111,110,000 possibilities. You might possess the skills to write an algorithm that would guess the code, but I’m assuming that you do not. You seem like the sort of human who would prefer to blast it open with an explosive charge.”
“You’re right about that,” she says. I can see the anger flaring in her eyes, but she is holding it in. “Would you care to tell me the code, or you want to stand there like an idiot while I go through each of the however-many combinations?”
“Here,” I say, gently pushing her aside. “I will enter the code.”
“You need to tell me,” she says. “I’m captain of this ship, and I need to know the lock codes.” She stares me down, challenging me. Her face is severe, nothing but sharp angles and bones—but it’s not unpleasant. It’s the face of a warrior, battle-hardened and strong. For a human female, she might be strong-willed and used to getting her way. But she’s trying to go toe-to-toe with a Zalaryn conqueror. She doesn’t have a chance.
“It might be necessary to lock up any one of your crew members before my mission is complete. I would rather not have to reprogram the locks again. It’s quite tedious.”
“You are not locking any of us up,” she snaps. Her hands are on her hips, and I imagine my own hands caressing those curves. Gripping them as she bends over for me, pulling her hips towards me as I impale her with my cock over and over again.
Void take me, I need to get a hold of myself. But her scent. It’s doing something to me. It’s making everything else seem so… inconsequential when compared to the vital and pleasurable task of reproduction.
“I might,” I say. I lock eyes with this female, pushing aside the lust and desire to put her in her place. To climb on top of her and spread her open, to have her begging me for more, all the rebel pretense gone and replaced with nothing but desire. “But only if you make me.”
I key in the code, making sure to block her line of sight by turning away from her and covering the keypad with my hand. The door bursts open and she runs inside, calling the names of her crew.
There’s a table and chairs in the common area, probably the place where they eat, and I take a seat, waiting for them to come out. We need to talk, all of us. I need to be absolutely sure that her crew will follow the orders. She says that they will, if she gives the orders.
Too bad she doesn’t realize that she’s not giving the orders anymore. I am.
The footsteps come, then the shouting. Lia leads the way, followed by four men. One of them is holding a bloody rag to his nose—that must be the fellow who tried to stop me when I first boarded the ship.
“How’s the nose?” I ask him as he approaches the table.
“Fuck you,” he says. His voice is altered by the mixture of blood and mucous that’s clogging his nasal passages. “If my captain hadn’t given me orders to stand down, I’d have my blaster down your throat turning your insides to oatmeal.”
I give an amused chuckle. “What’s oatmeal?” I say. I am not going to engage her crew in a pissing contest of who’s in charge. This human male is so far away from being in charge, it’s not worth it to remind him. “I’m sorry about the nose,” I say. “Nothing personal. Here.” I root around in my waist-pouch and find a salicylate tablet and hold it out to him. “Hold this under your tongue until it dissolves. It tastes like hot needles, but it will make the swelling go down so you can breathe again.”
He just looks at it like I’m offering him a crushed arachnoid.
“Go ahead, Sorren,” Lia says.
“It’s probably poison,” he says, sounding like a child making excuses why he can’t eat his vegetables.
“If he wanted to, he could have killed all of us already,” Lia says, and I’m grateful that I don’t have to remind the crew of this fact. Sorren looks at the tablet again, then swipes it from my hand, depositing it under his tongue with a grimace.
“What’s this all about?” another crewman asks. He’s got a name patch on his uniform, and it says Pior.
“The Rulmek,” I say. “We need to do something about the Rulmek. Rather, I am going to do something about the Rulmek while your little ship does absolutely nothing.”
The four crewmen look at each other, then at Lia. It’s hard to get a read on the situation. Earlier, she’d been insistent that if she told them not to engage the Rulmek that her crew would be obedient. But being around them now, I can sense something else between the crew and captain that’s not obedience.
They’re relieved.
They didn’t want to fight—and who could blame them? That’s why she was so sure of their compliance. Not because her leadership, but because they were probably a hair’s breadth away from mutiny. I guess I didn’t have to worry about them after all.
“At the risk of sounding the coward,” Pior says, “I will gladly stand down and let you deal with the gargantuan
Rulmek warship.” The other two crewmen nod, but Sorren is just sitting there looking angry. I can’t tell if it’s from the clout on the nose or the bitter-tasting salicylate tablet—or more likely he’s chafing at being told what to do.
“No one thinks you’re a coward for wanting to avoid a firefight,” I say. “I’m not engaging the Rulmek in combat, either.”
I explain to the crew my plan. They nod and ask a few questions but otherwise seem relieved at not having to charge into certain slaughter under the command of a revenge-bent Captain Lia.
“Sorren,” Lia says. “You’ll be in charge of the ship while I’m gone. Program the nav system to take you to Crene. We’ll meet up there, unload our cargo and pick up the next shipment.”
“Yes, Captain,” he says. “I’ll be glad to watch the ship while you’re out doing Zalaryn bidding.”
I feel a surge of anger at this petty man, but before I can say anything, Lia’s own anger flares. “I do no one’s bidding but my own,” she says haughtily.
“Sure,” he says, shrugging his shoulders dismissively. He does not wait to be excused; he spins on his heel and turns toward the crew quarters. Lia puts her hand on his shoulder, gripping him lightly.
“Wait a second,” she says. It’s obvious that she’s been hurt by his words, even though she fights to keep the icy tone of command in her voice. “You are not dismissed yet.”
He turns on her, gripping her hand and ripping it off his shoulder. I can see little red marks where his fingers dug into her flesh. His face is a mere inch from hers. “I gladly follow your orders,” he hisses. “But not his.” He cocks a thumb at me, illustrating his point.
I want to wrestle this male to the ground, grind my fist into his face until I turn his nose into an overripe, bursting tomato.
Why? Because he put hands on Lia? That’s foolish. She’s not my mate.
But part of you wants her to be, a sneaky voice inside me whispers. I try to clear my head. It’s just her fertile scent, I tell myself. I haven’t been in such close proximity to a fertile female in so long that it’s doing weird things to my body. Making me want to protect her, cradle her in my arms and pummel anyone who would dare lay a finger on her. It’s foolishness, my head knows that.