by Loki Renard
“You can kill me if you want,” he said, raising his hands so she would not fear him going for his own weapon. “Just hear me out first.”
The gun did not waver one little bit in her hand, and though he could not have said it, he was incredibly proud of her in that moment. She was stronger than anyone had given her credit for.
“I took you in revenge for what your father had done, and you suffered.”
She cocked the gun. She probably didn’t have any training in using it, but he knew it was more than effective enough to put a hole where he really didn’t want one to be.
“You suffered,” he said, picking up where the distinctive ‘click’ had made him leave off. “But you also had pleasure.”
“You are not helping yourself,” she said with a bitter laugh.
“You didn’t run because you hated being my pet,” he said, knowing that every word he spoke was dangerous. “You ran because I didn’t tell you something I should have.”
“And what is that?” Celeste sneered the question.
“…I love you.”
Celeste stared at him for a moment, then let out a laugh. That was not the reaction Alistair had been hoping for.
“Oh, you love me,” she said, shaking her head with disbelief. “You have a strange way of showing it. Taking me prisoner. Holding me naked in a cage. Making me eat from a bowl on the floor… having me on display to all your friends. I know what you’ve been doing, Alistair. You’ve been using me as a pawn since we met. At least you used to be honest about it. Don’t lie to me and tell me you love me now that I’m free of you. You’re not going to trick me into being your prisoner again.”
“If I’d wanted to take you prisoner, I would have sent a dozen ships to this place and had you surrounded by a hundred men,” he pointed out. “That shuttle you took is too slow and doesn’t have the range to get you out of my territory.”
He refrained from mentioning that it was also far too damaged to ever take off again. She’d marooned herself on the planetoid. The only way off it was going to be in his custody. But now wasn’t the time to rub that particular fact in.
As it turned out, that didn’t matter. Celeste had already taken offense.
“So what you’re really saying is that you coming here barely armed is meaningless anyway, because if I don’t do what you want me to do, you can hunt me down and catch me?”
“No…” He frowned. She was far too smart for her own good. “I’m saying that what I’m doing now is showing you some trust. You’ve got the power, Celeste. You can pull that trigger and that will be the end of me.”
He saw the end of the barrel waver and knew that he was starting to get through to her. She didn’t want to kill him. He doubted she’d wanted to hurt him. The means she’d chosen to escape was about as non-lethal and painless as possible. But she was desperate for more than what he’d given her. She’d shown him that in a hundred little ways before her escape, and he’d hardened his heart, thinking it was for the best to withhold the full strength of his affection from her.
“I’m not going back,” she said defiantly.
“Okay,” he shrugged. “Then I’ll stay here.”
She frowned in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Your father abandoned you, Celeste, but I will not abandon you. Ever.”
He watched confusion, pain, and possibly hope chase across her face. She wanted to believe him, but it would not be as simple as him saying the words. Hope quickly turned to anger as she waved the gun at him, as if she could swat him away like a fly.
“I don’t want you, Alistair! Go back to your world and leave me in mine. I will not be a pet to a man. I will live free of you and your games.”
“This is an asteroid,” he said. “A big one, but not big enough to survive on for very long. Leaving you here alone means leaving you to die. And that, I won’t do.”
“I will shoot you!”
He took a step toward her and she jabbed the gun in his direction. An ineffectual motion, because her finger was still well clear of the trigger. Someone had taught her how to handle a weapon at some point—a fact he was both curious about and glad for.
“No, you won’t,” he said gently. “And you know why? Because everything I’ve ever given you, you’ve given back a dozen times over. I took you as my pet and you took me to task every minute of every day. You’ve made my life just as hard as I’ve made yours.”
“Is that right?” she said, sounding cynical. “I must have missed the nights I made you sleep in a cage.”
He couldn’t help the smile that rose to his lips. He meant every word he was about to say, but he knew she would not receive it well. “You put my heart in a cage.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Do you think sweet words will make up for everything that has happened between us?”
“I think I need to start telling you how I feel about you.”
Celeste sighed and let the hand holding the gun fall to her side. “You are unbelievable, Alistair. I knock you out and leave and you come running after me to tell me you love me? After weeks of holding me captive? Do you really think I’m that stupid? Or are you that stupid?”
“You never know what you’ve got until it sticks a needle in your neck and steals a shuttle,” he grinned, attempting to lighten the mood.
“You’re enjoying yourself,” she said in accusatory, disbelieving tones. “You like this!”
“Reclaiming my pet, what’s not to like?” He began to move forward, stepping to within arm’s length of her.
“Reclaim this,” Celeste said, raising the gun just as he’d known she would. Before it rose anywhere near his body, his hand had covered hers and twisted the gun free from her fingers. It was the work of half a second to take it from her, and even less time to holster it on his own leg.
“Bastard,” she swore, retreating.
He reached out and grabbed her by the arm, saving them both a short and pointless chase. “Maybe,” he growled down at her. “But I’m your bastard.”
She tugged at her arm, her feet scrabbling against the ground as she tried to pull away. “Let me go, Alistair!”
* * *
To Celeste’s great surprise, he actually let her go, though he did it slowly so she wouldn’t fall over from all the pulling she was doing. She supposed it didn’t really matter if he held her or not. He had her gun now, and they both knew she couldn’t outrun him. It was a nice gesture, nothing more.
“Do you really want to go back to your father? To the life he had for you?”
“You don’t care what I want,” she said bitterly.
“I’m asking, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know what I want,” she said. “But I know I’m not going back in your cage, Alistair.”
He smirked at her and she was caught between finding him handsome and very much wanting to slap the smile off his face. Truth be told, she was confused. Her escape had not felt as triumphant as she had thought it would. Instead of feeling free, she had felt guilty and worried about whether or not Alistair had survived. Seeing him come off the shuttle had been a relief.
“It’s getting dark,” he said. “And it’s going to get cold. We should start a fire.”
“What do you mean, we?”
“I’m staying on this rock as long as it takes,” he said. “But it’s going to get real cold out here, so as long as it takes won’t be very long if we don’t sort out shelter and heating. I’d suggest the shuttle, but I’m guessing you won’t want to get on board in case I try to run away with you.”
He was right about that. “How cold is it going to be?” She had not exactly dressed for the weather. The uniform pants were heavy enough, but her upper body was already feeling somewhat chilly.
“Well, with the orbit of this thing, I’d say we’re looking at negative temperatures overnight. Cold enough to freeze your extremities so bad they’ll snap right off.”
Celeste frowned at him. “That’s not true.”
; “You want to bet your nose and toes on it?” He reached out and tweaked her nose gently.
“Stop it,” she said, swatting his hand away. “We are not friends.”
“No, you’re my little runaway pet.”
“I’m not…” Celeste let out a sigh. “You will never stop calling me that, will you.”
“Absolutely not,” he said with a smile. “I’m sorry if you hate me, Celeste. But I’ve loved you for longer than I wanted to.”
She shot him a dark glare. “Is that supposed to make me feel good?”
“Yes,” he said. “You were supposed to be a prisoner. I could have traded you for a great many favors if I’d wanted to, but you got under my skin.”
“Oh, dear, I’m so sorry you felt too guilty to be a terrible person and trade me for favors.” Her eyes narrowed at him in angry disbelief. “Do you hear what you say, Alistair?”
“Huh?”
“The words that come out of your mouth, are they at all recognizable?”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” He cupped his ear and she finally realized that he was playing some goofy joke on her.
“You’re not cute enough to get away with being as much of an asshole as you’ve been,” she said bluntly.
“And you’ve not run far enough to get away with keeping on calling me an asshole,” Alistair warned her gently.
“What are you going to do? Punish me? Do you think that will make me love you?”
“I think you already love me. Maybe because I do discipline you,” he said knowingly.
“Oh, you think I love you?”
“I’ve seen it in your eyes, Celeste. If I dragged you back to Vector Prime now, chained you to my bed and never let you go, you’d love me. But you’d deny it with every breath in your body too. That’s why I’m not dragging you back. We’re going to stay right here on this asteroid until you ask me to come back.”
Her jaw dropped. Just when she thought he was being nice, he managed to display a new, even more arrogant facet of his personality.
“I’m never going to ask you to take me back.”
“We’ll see,” he said with a knowing smirk.
She watched him, stunned as he began to gather materials for a fire. He paid no further attention to her as he worked, first to assemble a circular stack of sticks, moss, and grasses, then to erect a small tent nearby. His shuttle seemed to be very well stocked. Hers was just a short range hopper and it didn’t come with much of anything besides a first aid kit.
He was an exceptionally capable man, she noticed. Back on Vector Prime, everything had been done for him, but it was obvious from the way he carefully and methodically constructed a complete camp that he had done his time as a grunt.
“One thing about planetoids like this,” he said as he worked. “Spores and the occasional seed can make it here, but animal life finds it much harder to get a foothold. You know what that means?”
“No.”
“No food,” he said. “Unless you like scraping pond scum out of puddles of what may or may not be water—and if there is water, boiling it down for some protein. Is that what you planned on doing?”
Handsome jerk. She wanted to call him worse names than that too, but she kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t supposed to be finding him attractive.
“Me, on the other hand,” he said. “I brought rations. Did you bring rations?”
“No,” she said. “I guess I didn’t.”
“Quite an oversight,” he said with a wink at her. He was very much enjoying rubbing her nose in her mistakes, but she was going to have the last laugh, she was absolutely sure of that.
He lit the fire as she began to shiver at a distance. The asteroid was moving at quite a blistering pace relative to most planets, making the stars slide by the horizon in a beautiful, constant cascade. It was going to get cold fast, she could already tell that by the way the temperature was dropping as the asteroid tilted away from the glowing gas sun in the distance.
He started to cook his meal, a thick hunk of dehydrated meat that grew into an appealing, if raw, steak with the application of a little water. Celeste watched him impale it on long metal prongs and suspend it just above the flames.
She suspected he had chosen meat for the pungent aroma, which she would not be able to ignore. If that had been his plan, it was effective. She was cold and her stomach was growling with hunger.
The situation was hopeless. There was no way off the planetoid without Alistair. She had swapped her cage for a bigger, infinitely more dangerous kind of captivity.
“Five-hour days,” Alistair commented as he added more dry plant material to the fire. “This is a rapid cycling little planet.”
Celeste made a little grunt and started working her way around behind him. He was pretty focused on the fire and its warmth, which meant she had a few moments to put a last, desperate plan into action.
“How many days in a month here?” She didn’t care what the answer was, she just wanted him to be thinking of something else.
“Well, planetoids aren’t known for having moons,” he said. “So there aren’t any months here. No months. No food. No way to make fire without me around. How long do you reckon you’ll be able to survive here without me?”
“Long enough to leave you here,” she said, dashing into his ship. She sprinted to the main controls in the cockpit and hit the ‘door close’ control. The doors started to close, but far too slowly for her liking.
“Come on, come on!” she yelled at the console. “Shut the damn door!”
“Celeste! Cut it out!” Alistair’s yell from outside the ship made her laugh—right up until his arm slid through the doorway and he hit the emergency stop panel on the wall next to the main door. The door swung open with the same smooth whoooosh with which it had closed, and Celeste knew she was in trouble. Deep trouble. His eyes were locked on her, one dark, one bright, both deadly serious as he strode into the ship and reached for her. Celeste ducked under his arm, and would have gotten away if he was a slower man, but he caught her on the second pass as he turned to follow her. She felt his heavy hand descend on the back of her neck as he grabbed the tunic, scruffing her hard enough to lift her off the floor.
He dragged her out of the ship, something she tried to resist by grabbing at the walls and the doorway. Alistair was not amused by her antics. His hand met the rear of her pants, one of the very few places that wasn’t reinforced with armor plating. She let out a yip of pain and tried to wriggle out of his grasp, but he had a good hold on her and didn’t seem inclined to let her go.
“You have a real talent for making things harder for yourself,” Alistair noted as he sat down on the stool he’d set out by the fire and hauled her pants down to her knees where the tight material effectively hobbled her. She was whining even before his palm landed hard on her bare bottom.
“Please, Alistair!”
She knew begging for mercy was pointless and really only contributed to her humiliation, but the words escaped her mouth before she could stop them. He was already spanking her hard and fast, his palm landing multiple times a minute, branding her bottom with hard slaps that made her jolt over his thighs.
This was a real punishment. He’d been playing right up until the moment she’d almost shut him out of his own ship.
“You’ve got nerve, pet,” he said as his hand thundered against her bare cheeks. “But that kind of bravery isn’t good for either of us. You have no idea how to fly my ship, and if you’d managed to lock yourself inside it, there wouldn’t be a damn thing you could do other than radio for help.”
“I’d work out how to fly your stupid ship!”
“Sure, because it’s that simple. It has a handy ‘push to escape’ function. There’s no risk of turning yourself into a fireball in front of me, is there?”
The scathing sarcasm was almost as painful as the heat blasting across her bottom.
“I managed to fly the other shuttle!”
“You managed to crash th
e other shuttle,” he growled. “You got lucky once. There’s no guarantee you’d get lucky twice.”
His hard palm started landing lower, on the backs of her thighs. She missed the kinder, gentler Alistair of minutes earlier. He had been relatively nice for a warlord, but now she was feeling his wrath in the most poignant, painful way.
“Naughty pets who try to steal my ship end up with very sore bottoms, don’t they, Celeste?” He snarled the question down at her and all she could do was whimper in response.
She’d felt so bold and certain in her plan, it hadn’t actually occurred to her that she could be putting herself in danger. It also struck her that the danger was the part that really seemed to get to him. It wasn’t her misbehavior, or her defiance, or even trying to run away. It was that she hadn’t been paying attention to her own safety, a fact he lectured her about at length as his palm met her quivering red cheeks many more times.
It felt to Celeste as though it would never stop. His arm didn’t seem to be tiring, and his punitive desire wasn’t weakening either. Her butt felt like two swollen globes of some superheated matter sending aching pulses of pain through her body with every slap.
“It hurts!”
“It’s supposed to,” he said without mercy. “I’ve given you plenty of leeway since I landed. All you had to do was ask nicely to come back to Vector Prime with me and you’d be able to sit on the journey home. Instead you took advantage of my good nature and tried to steal my ship.”
“Good nature!?” She let out a bitter laugh. “You don’t have a good nature.”
“Is that right? Seems to me like I’m saving you from yourself even though you gave me every reason to send a contingent of men down here to arrest you. And I’m giving you the freedom to make a choice between me and whatever fate your father might have in store for you.”
“There’s no choice!”
His palm stilled on her bottom. “If you tell me right now that you want to go back to him, I’ll put you on a shuttle home. You have my word on that. Is that what you want, Celeste?”