Birth of a King

by Kaitlyn O’Connor

  Doctor’s office?

  What was she doing in a …?

  She broke the thought off as something horrible moved to the side of the gurney.

  It was almost bug-like, except it was at least as tall as she was, with huge black pits for eyes that took up most of the face, two holes where a nose should have been and a tiny slit where the mouth should be.

  It looked like a silly putty figure, stretched abnormally, so skinny it looked like a hard wind would blow it away, with arms longer than normal—for humans—and creepy long fingers.

  Three of them.

  She inhaled a shocked breath, but she couldn’t scream as the thing reached for her face and pried her jaws open, examining the cavern of her mouth. Then it shoved the tip of her nose up and looked up her nostrils and finally pried her eyelids up and stared at her eyeballs.

  It wasn’t pleasant—at all—but it began to seem so much like a normal physical that she felt some of her terror dissipate.

  That lasted until she discovered she was surrounded by the things and all of them wanted a look.

  Then the first began to examine her breasts and belly.

  The tension built the lower the thing got.

  It spoke.

  Not to her, but she had no idea who it was speaking to.

  She didn’t understand what it was saying for that matter, but it took her a little bit to figure out that it wasn’t speaking a language she understood.

  Someone answered or responded, she thought.

  The voice sounded … familiar even though the words didn’t.

  She began to struggle to see who had spoken, which was when she discovered she’d been bound to the table so tightly she could barely move.

  She couldn’t see the owner of the voice, but it had sounded like Hauk.

  Or maybe Kadin?

  But would either of them be in the same room?

  Why would they be present?

  She was so distracted the pain—like fire in her belly—caught her completely off guard.

  She screamed at the intensity of it and kept screaming until she fell, thankfully, into the black pit again.

  When she woke the next time, she wasn’t in the box of before.

  She knew that immediately because there was a faint light coming from somewhere instead of nothing but pitch blackness. She thought she was alone until she managed to push herself upright.

  There was a giant alien man squatted in the shadows of the corner across from the platform where she’d lain unconscious.

  Her heart seemed to stop in her chest for a minor eternity and then leap to life again and run away. She pressed a hand to it, unconsciously trying to slow it.

  Which is when she discovered she was as naked as the day she was born.

  She felt her eyes pop wide open in shocked dismay and whipped a sharp look at her companion again. This time, he was looking directly at her.

  Her thundering heart skipped several beats and then hurried to catch up. “Kadin?” she asked a little hoarsely.

  “Yes,” he responded, shoving to his feet and striding purposefully toward her.

  She thought she was relieved, but, my god! He was as naked as she was!

  What the hell? “What happened?” she asked in a voice that cracked from dryness.

  He grasped her shoulders as he reached her, yanked her to him and covered her mouth with his while she was still gasping with stunned surprise. The shock gave way to something she’d never experienced before.

  Well, only once, when Hauk had kissed her, but still different.

  It was almost like instantaneous inebriation. Almost the very instant she felt the heat of his hard mouth as it connected to hers, absorbed his scent and taste, her head swam and shock gave way to pleasure.

  And confusion.

  There was a tiny flutter of reluctance, but he ripped that away as he stroked his tongue along hers, bore her down onto the hard platform and covered her nakedness with his sheer massiveness. Her will to resist—if it had reared its head at all—went with it.

  She wasn’t numb, or too dizzy to grasp what was happening to her. She felt absolutely every nuance of every touch, every friction point and faintest pressure and all of it sent wave after wave of intense pleasure through her until it almost felt as if he was bringing her blood to a slow boil.

  “Do not hate me for this, Emma,” he murmured huskily when he broke from her lips and began to spread kisses along her throat and upper chest. “We would both pay dearly if I did not. I want to spare you as much of their cruelty as I can.”

  Emma’s sluggish brain function was so slow to translate the words into meaning that he had advanced well past kisses, pushed his hips between her thighs, and begun struggling to make a connection between his body and her own before she untangled it and that completely diverted her from the task.

  She thought it was his knee he had pressed against her sex at first.

  But his knee was bigger and maybe harder and not as rounded.

  And she was convinced he couldn’t have wedged that into the mouth of her sex as he managed with the thing he’d been battering her with.

  And once he had managed that, there was no stopping or slowing his progression because his kisses had so thoroughly lubricated her passage even clamping her muscles against the intrusion was useless.

  In any case, she had no desire to stop him once it was born in upon her that it actually fit instead of ripping her in two. His thick, turgid flesh felt so amazing it threw Kadin’s intoxicating kiss into the shade. Her entire body seemed to vibrate with the mounting tension and jolts of escalating pleasure and she felt his flesh scrub back and forth along the vibrating walls of her channel.

  And her climax still caught her off guard.

  Because, she realized, she’d never actually experienced a climax before in her life.

  She thought she had. This was too soul shattering to allow room for confusion.

  She came again when she felt his body expel his seed, gasping so hard she felt the threat of darkness close in around her.

  He moved off of her as soon as he withdrew his spent flesh from her throbbing body, climbed off of the platform and returned to the corner he’d occupied before. Instead of crouching as he had previously, however, he merely leaned against the wall, crossing his arms.

  Kadin did not know if he was more angry with her or with himself.

  He scrubbed his hands over his face, wrestling with his anger. It was not her fault that they had felt compelled to yield to save her and the baby.

  Nor the poor child’s for that matter, although they absolutely had been compelled to yield for his sake. They had taken a vow to give up their own lives to save him if it became necessary.

  In truth, Emma had probably saved Nye’s life by claiming him as her own and that obligated him even beyond what he owed her already for taking Nye in and taking care of him.

  At least for that moment.

  “We were overrun by the metal monsters of the Sheloni,” he muttered finally.

  The comment penetrated Emma’s ‘glow’ like a douse of icy water, but she discovered she was still having trouble gathering her ‘marbles’.

  If she understood, though, those things had actually been … like robots? Maybe autonomous? Maybe drones?

  She blinked at him, struggling to sort the puzzle for answers when she had too little information to put the pieces together.

  They’d taken Nye and they were obviously enemies of the … aliens she’d left Earth with. She wondered what the aliens looked like but, abruptly, a memory surfaced and she shuddered.

  “Those … bug-looking things?”

  He looked surprised, but she wasn’t certain why. He answered that question, at least, with his next comment. “Sooo … you remember?”

  She frowned, struggling to recall the ‘nightmare’. “Pieces,” she said finally.

  He nodded.

  Another vague memory surfaced. “I heard … a voice.”

 
He seemed to wrestle with something. “I was there.”

  She felt her face turning red. It was two parts embarrassment that he’d seen her spread out and naked and one part anger—although she wasn’t certain if it was directed at him or the Sheloni.

  She frowned. “I got the impression it was asking something.”

  Kadin’s discomfort rose, but he saw no benefit in lying. “They wanted to know what you were to us.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “To determine how … useful you might be.”

  “Oh,” she responded again, as if enlightened, but she didn’t have any idea what it meant.

  “I told them you were our sex slave.”

  Emma gaped at him with a mixture of horror and disbelief and dawning outrage, struggling not to think about what had just passed between them under that magnifying glass. “Your … all of your, sex slave?” she gasped, wondering if she was going to be treated to more delightful sessions of wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

  Except he hadn’t even said thanks.

  She’d been tempted to do a ‘thank you, sir’, though, and that made her feel worse.

  His lips tightened. “They are slavers. You are useful to them. Or they discard you—by flushing you from the airlock.” He shoved away from the wall abruptly. “If I had claimed you as my woman—or either of the others had—they would have tortured you to force us to bend to their will,” he growled. “It was imperative for your continued good health that I make sure they did not believe there was any emotional attachment they could use to control me—or the others.”

  If she’d been outraged before, she was shocked almost to fainting from that intelligence.

  As shockingly horrific as it was, she was too stunned to consider whether it was true or not, but even when it occurred to her to wonder she couldn’t think of a reason to doubt.

  They’d sent those robot things that had threatened to take her and the baby apart. Anybody/thing that could threaten a baby was as cold blooded as they came.

  She felt like throwing up. “What about the baby?” she asked faintly.

  He had been pacing the small space, but he turned to look at her at that. “We have hope that he is alright. They have no reason to harm him when they believe he is the offspring of a sex slave. You claimed him and we claimed you as our slave.”

  It actually made sense, and gave rise to a spark of hope, but she could see problems with it.

  “And … they decided to let you keep me?”

  He looked uncomfortable for the first time. “I am ordered to breed another like Nye on you. They have presumed that I sired him and I did not tell them different.”

  Emma felt her jaw sag in shock. She blinked at him, struggling to absorb words that suddenly sounded like gibberish.

  “If I can breed another on you, they will consider keeping you so that you can breed more slaves. If not, then they will sell you at the slave market.”

  Ok, so that explained why they were both stark naked and the bumping uglies session she had just experienced Emma thought with a spark of anger and a prickle of something she thought might be uneasiness.

  The lump that rose in her throat was something she resolutely refused to consider at all.

  Although it did flicker through her mind to wonder how something that had felt that Earth shatteringly wonderful had just been plain, old fashioned, completely anonymous fucking and why she should feel hurt when that should have been expected.

  He must have read some of the thoughts running through her mind in her expression. He made a sound of impatience. “I am a slave. You are a breeder. I know how difficult that is to grasp, but the sooner you accept that this is your new reality, the better your chances of surviving them. I want you to survive, Emma.” He hesitated for several long heartbeats. “Nye needs you to survive.”

  Kadin was relieved Emma had not noticed the effect the discussion was having upon him—particularly since she seemed appalled at the suggestion rather than delighted.

  Naturally, he was appalled at the situation that had compelled the intimacy himself and struggling with impotent rage, as well, that they had been forced at all, but he was drawn to Emma, had been from the beginning. And that being the case, he had not been able to dismiss a certain amount of enthusiasm for the task forced upon him.

  Not that he had been thinking in those terms at the time he had told the Sheloni that she was their sex slave, although he had to admit to himself that it could not be dismissed that his attraction to her had had some bearing on the idea that had presented itself so promptly. Primarily, however, was the consideration of what might make her most desirable to the Sheloni without endangering her more than she was already.

  He deeply regretted that he had had a part in the decision that had put her into so much danger.

  He had seen the logic of bringing her with them, despite the dangers he perceived. Her own people were a threat to her. They had clearly decided she was expendable or they would not have ambushed them when she was with them.

  In any case, there was little point in regretting that decision now. They were here now. They had to deal with the situation—very carefully—or none of them would survive.

  Emma retreated into her own thoughts when she saw that Kadin had.

  They weren’t pleasant, mostly revolving around the fact that she had been so impressed with Kadin—attracted to him physically—and the episode had left her feelings trampled.

  It was a shame she couldn’t dismiss the unpleasant thoughts with the reflection that he was a self-centered prick as so many ‘pretty’ males tended to be in her opinion.

  He had come a very long way, and put his life on the line, to rescue baby Nye, however, and that indicated a strength of character far beyond any male she knew.

  She didn’t want to admire him on that count—or any—but she did.

  Reluctantly, she faced the fact that, if anyone was behaving shallowly, it was her.

  They were in a disastrous situation, life or death, freedom or slavery.

  What did it matter whether he cared anything about her at all?

  It occurred to her fairly quickly that it mattered to her because she knew, instinctively, that it could increase his devotion to her survival.

  And she was completely out of her depth.

  He at least seemed to have some idea of what the ‘rules’ of survival were in this situation whereas she had no notion, couldn’t even wrap her mind around it sufficiently to take it seriously.

  It grew more solidly threatening, though, as her stomach rumbled and it was born in upon her that there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about hunger—or anything else.

  “I don’t suppose they’ll worry about feeding us?” she finally asked when the hunger, instead of passing, became more demanding, her stomach threatened to start snarling like a caged lion.

  Kadin stared at her blankly for several moments.

  Emma felt her face slowly heat with discomfort. But, really, was it inappropriate to think about eating when it was a matter of survival? Not just entertainment or discomfort?

  “They will not worry, no. You should not expect much or often. It is not likely they will allow us to starve to death, however. We would be useless to them then.”

  “That’s so comforting!” Emma said, trying not to start squalling. “Don’t spare me! Just tell it like it is!”

  His expression was not without sympathy. “I know this is not something you have ever experienced and that you are scared and confused. Perhaps even disbelieving at the change in your fortunes.”

  That was an understatement.

  He dragged in a ragged breath. “I am not trying to frighten you, not being pessimistic. Your chances for survival are higher if you take this very seriously—now—and act accordingly. Later might be too late.”

  Emma nodded shakily, chewed her lip, and finally decided that it was time to discard her squeamishness—the best she could manage, at any rate. “I’m on birth control. I can’t get
pregnant,” she said baldly.

  Kadin scrubbed a hand over his face. “You are not.”

  “No. Really! I’m not making it up. I’m scared shitless, but … there isn’t much point in the … uh … screwing when I’m on birth control. You can’t breed me. Should I … uh … tell them?”

  He shook his head. Before Emma could utter a sigh of relief, however, he elaborated.

  “The examination was not just to see how healthy you were. They removed the device. And they gave you something to increase your fertility.”

  Emma felt her jaw slide to half mast. “You are kidding!” she gasped, too outraged for several moments to think beyond the fact that they had done that without even consulting her.

  Apparently, he understood. “You are a slave,” he said, not ungently. “Your body is no longer yours and you have no say in anything that they decide to do to you or with you.”

  Chapter Nine

  An unswallowable knot formed in Emma’s throat, but it would’ve been hard to say whether the emotion that conjured it was fear, self-pity, or rage. She actually ran the gamut of emotions while she stared at Kadin, struggling with the urge to punch him for being so fucking calm about the situation—about the fact that her life was laying in tatters.

  On one level, she knew it certainly wasn’t his fault in any way, but she didn’t want to accept that this was the direct result of a choice she’d made herself, and she certainly couldn’t, wouldn’t, place the blame on her darling baby. He’d enriched her life, made it happy when before she’d merely been—mostly—no more than relatively content.

  It was grossly, disgustingly unfair that the decision, which damned sure shouldn’t have included anything like this, had had such a horrible result.

  There should be someone to blame … that she could actually punish for it.

  Unfortunately, it seemed the Sheloni were to be blamed and she couldn’t punish them.

  She railed silently for some time. She had no idea how long, but eventually she wore herself out and, once she had, she came to realize that it was counterproductive. Especially since she didn’t dare vent out loud. Railing silently just built a toxic cloud in her mind that was going to prevent her from saving herself and her precious baby, Nye, made her feel physically ill. Very likely, if she’d dared to vent aloud it would have been the same. She wouldn’t feel one bit better, but rather the opposite.