“Granted,” Kellen said grimly.
“Monica knew about her,” Shauss said as he continued to stalk Jasmine. “In fact, she was helping her to deceive us. Tell him, Tiber.”
“Dr. Teague was replicating a hormone complex yesterday. I couldn’t place the chemical structure at the time, but now Empran has verified that it was a pheromone blocker. Miss King is a Sparnite—or rather, she’s infalone, which is the Narthani term for delayed development.”
“Monica, is this true?”
Jasmine kept her head down, watching him without looking. When he went behind her, where she couldn’t see what he was doing, it was torture.
“Yes,” Monica said, “it’s true but— No!”
Shauss struck. He grabbed Jasmine’s arm and stripped the gown off her, yanking it painfully out of her clenched fingers.
“No!” Monica shouted again, crowding between them and throwing her arms around Jasmine. “Stop it! Shauss, listen to me—”
“Get your mate out of my way,” he grated.
Monica’s arms went limp around Jasmine and she collapsed to the floor.
“No!” Jasmine screamed, fighting Shauss as Kellen leaned down to scoop Monica up. “Oh God, what have you done to her? Don’t hurt her! This is all my fault, not hers—please, Commander, don’t hurt her!”
She was relieved when Monica spoke. “I swear to God, Kellen, if anything happens to Jasmine, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Frankly, sziscala,” he said in a dangerous tone, “it’s my forgiveness that should concern you.”
The minister walked in, followed closely by Hastion, Zannen and at least a dozen others she didn’t recognize. Her nightmare was coming true—she was completely naked and surrounded by enemy warriors.
“Miss King has confessed to being a Narthani agent.” Kellen looked like he was barely holding on to control himself.
“All concessions granted Jasmine King in her mating bond are hereby rescinded,” the minister said in a dispassionate voice. “Lieutenant Shauss, as her primary mate, you’re authorized to extract whatever information you can from her and then dispose of her in any manner you see fit.”
Monica cried, “No! Father, please!”
“That’s enough, Monica,” Kellen said. “You can’t help her now.” He looked at Shauss and then they disappeared in a flair bubble.
“Keep me updated, Lieutenant.” The minister whirled and walked out, leaving behind his contingent.
“I have to commend you, aramai,” Shauss said. “You’re very good. Even after your first deception, I fell for your act completely.” He let go his excruciating grip on her arm. “Get on your knees.”
Jasmine swallowed a ball of nausea and dropped gracelessly to a kneeling position, her heartbeat drumming in her throat. Although the atmosphere was sultry, as it was all over the ship, she shook as if freezing.
When she gathered the courage to look up, he snapped, “Head down.”
He nudged her knees apart with the toe of his boot. “Cross your hands behind your back.”
Oh God, she was about to die, and that would probably be the easiest part of this.
With her head bent in submission, Jasmine looked at the blood and semen smears on her thighs and saw Shauss’ beautiful body arching over hers. Felt his hips anchoring her, spreading her, grinding her into the bed. Smelled the heady flood of his pheromones. Heard their mingled shouts of satisfaction. She’d let go completely, showing him everything she was, and in return he’d lost his vaunted control, sharing everything lovable in him.
Now he would exact revenge by showing her the true depths of his brutality.
Tears of dread and perverse excitement dripped from her eyes, disappearing as they hit the biologic pad between her thighs. Her complete vulnerability was its own terrible reward—she’d never felt so vitally alive as she did at that moment.
It suddenly hit her with crystal clarity just how much she wanted to stay that way. Shauss’ pheromones still clung to her skin and nasal passages, and edging into that dangerous subspace, she’d imagined she wanted to go to her death wrapped in the priceless scent of his desire for her. Now that attitude seemed ridiculously defeatist. She had to at least try to save herself.
When he reached for her, adrenaline exploded in her veins and she rolled away, jumping to her feet in one smooth move.
“Ooh, you’re going to fight me?” he purred. “I do enjoy a challenge—however short-lived.”
She didn’t answer, too focused on assessing everyone in the room. When Shauss swung a long hand toward her, she kicked it away with a sharp yell and then resumed her fighting stance, bouncing on the balls of her feet with her arms up in front of her.
Yes! She wasn’t panicking this time. Without the hindrance of a tight skirt, the self-defense lessons were paying off when she really needed them.
He reached for her again and she blocked him with her forearm, following through with a side kick at his crotch. He jumped back with millimeters to spare and grinned as he grabbed for her again.
This time he managed to snare her wrist and her heart rate skyrocketed. She kicked out at his leg and he grunted when her heel connected with his kneecap. Immediately grabbing her own captured hand with the other, she yanked it free and drove her elbow into his gut with another loud kiai, and felt a surge of fierce satisfaction when the air whooshed out of him.
Dancing back, she resumed her stance and waited for his next strike.
“Every blow you land only adds to your punishment, aramai,” Shauss told her almost casually.
This was ridiculous, really, since there was no getting out of the situation even if she did manage to defeat him. But she just couldn’t help fighting for her life.
“It’s hard to get any deader than dead, Lieutenant.”
He shook his head. “You’ll only wish you were dead.”
Fear clogged her throat and all she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry her eyes out.
Shauss leaned forward and smacked the side of her head with his fingertips then pulled back before she could connect with his arm.
He showed her his teeth in a nasty smile. The bastard was playing with her!
Tears of rage spurted from her eyes as she attacked, advancing on him with a steady barrage of punches and kicks that would have taken down most of her old sparring partners, shouting her kiai with every strike. Shauss, however, retreated with so much speed and agility, she never connected once.
“Try a few more kicks,” he suggested. “The view of your cunt is spectacular.”
His callousness took her breath away.
“I hate you,” she said in a thick voice.
There was a long, significant pause before he said in a deadly tone, “So finally we hear some truth from you.”
Pain seized her. He thought she’d been lying when she told him she loved him.
Looking into his secretive black eyes, she knew she couldn’t die letting him think that. She couldn’t leave him thinking she was hard and mercenary enough to fake her feelings for him. If she had to die, she wanted to die as the real Jasmine King—flawed and weak and desperate for the love of a man who hated her.
Although every instinct in her screamed to keep fighting, she took a deep breath and let her trembling legs fold, kneeling with her knees spread and her wrists crossed behind her back. Staring into his startled eyes, she whispered, “I’m yours.”
A cyclone of conflicting emotions spun furiously inside Shauss.
“Is that so?”
She continued to stare at him through spiky tear-clumped lashes. “I’m not asking for your forgiveness because I don’t think it’s in you…but I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Because he couldn’t bear to look at her anymore, he ordered, “Head down.”
She obeyed immediately and a huge sigh shuddered through her. He circled her again, slowly, deliberately, knowing she was watching his boots with wary eyes.
Touching the gold clasp at the back of her neck, he murmured, “I should
probably take this off before it’s damaged.”
Jasmine went stiff but didn’t raise her head. “Please don’t.”
“You want to die wearing my collar?”
“Yes.”
Pain lashed at him. He’d wanted her to die wearing it too—many decades in the future. What a fool.
“How touching,” he sneered.
When he passed behind her for the third time, he reached over her left shoulder and cupped her right rib cage. Then he reached under her ass with the other hand and heaved her up off the floor by her cunt.
She squeaked and grabbed his forearm with both hands but then hung unmoving in his grip, her heart fluttering against his wrist as he carried her facedown to an exam table. Her warm, fragrant weight in his arms conjured vividly sensual memories, and he hated how much he missed her already. It figured that the one female in the galaxy whose nook fit his spur, the female who fit him in every conceivable way, was a Narthani spy. Would the Powers never stop fucking with him?
Anger and humiliation and pathetic grief made him rough as he laid her across the table. He held her pinned there by the neck, her slender legs dangling limply off the side of the table.
Leaning down, he asked in her ear, “Are you afraid, aramai?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You should be.”
“I don’t know anything useful, so you might want to just kill me now.”
Scraping her earlobe between his teeth, he drawled, “And waste a perfectly good piece of ass?”
When she tensed, Shauss chuckled darkly.
“Déjà vu, darling?” He raised up far enough to drag his zipper down slowly. “Don’t worry. I have every intention of following through on my promise this time.”
She blinked rapidly, her breath coming in short, tortured gasps, but she didn’t reply. Shauss had come less than an hour before and was far from aroused in learning of his mate’s deception, but only a dead warrior would fail to respond physically to the sight of her laid naked and submissive before him, utterly terrified of the punishment he was about to mete out.
He looked at Tiber. “Lubricant?”
Tiber gave him a measured look before striding to a cabinet. He flipped the cap open and tried to hand him the tube, but Shauss held his hand out until Tiber squirted a blob into his open palm. After he worked the chilly gel over his cock, he held out his hand again and had Tiber squirt some on his fingers.
Shauss separated her legs by bracing one knee against the underside of the exam table and slid a finger over the pucker of her anus.
Jasmine squirmed.
“You will relax every muscle in your body,” he reproved.
Tiber gave him an incredulous look but said nothing.
Jasmine took another shuddering breath and loosened her fists until they rested limply against the exam table on either side of her head. Her obedience eased the tightness in Shauss’ chest. At least something about this falsehearted female wasn’t a lie.
With a smug look at Tiber, he pushed one finger deep into her tight little ass and she tensed again.
“Breathe deeply,” he ordered. “Make noise, if you must. But do not fight my incursion.”
She took a deep breath and then yelped when he slid a second finger in beside the first. He twisted them and watched a tide of red wash up her neck into her cheek as she groaned.
“Whose ass is this, aramai?” he asked softly.
“Yours,” she gasped.
He withdrew and pushed in three fingers. It was hard to say whether Jasmine’s protracted keening as he worked them in and out of her was anguish or desire.
“I have no desire to challenge your authority in this bond,” Tiber told him, “but if you harm her, I’ll have no choice.”
Shauss glared at him. All this concern—for a deceitful enemy! “You’ll lose.”
“So be it.”
“She’s worth dying for?”
“You tell me.”
Shauss contemplated Tiber for a moment and then ordered, “Implant a biomet. You can monitor her vital functions and pain levels.”
Jasmine’s labored breathing was the only sound in the room while Tiber implanted the unit under her arm. She whimpered and stirred when it penetrated her skin.
Without further delay, Shauss withdrew his fingers and rested the head of his cock against her opening. “Don’t move,” he whispered as he let go of her neck to brace his hands on the table above her shoulders.
He penetrated her one slow, agonizingly delicious inch at a time. Peserin, with a grip this tight on his cock, he might not require any additional stimulation to come.
“I’m fucking your ass, Jasmine King,” he whispered.
“Yes.”
“This is just the beginning of your punishment.”
“I know,” she sobbed. “Ah God, it hurts!”
He sank even deeper. “And you want more, don’t you?”
“Yes!”
“All of it?”
Without waiting for her answer, he hilted, pressing the emerging tip of his spur hard against her tailbone.
“Yes!” she screamed, pushing her torso up off the table and throwing her head back until she hit his breastbone. Her feet flew up against the backs of his thighs to hold him against her.
“I told you not to move.” Shauss planted one hand between her shoulder blades and forced her back down to the table but allowed her feet to remain hooked behind his legs. Holding her in place, he began to move, earning a breathy grunt for every inward stroke and a guttural groan for every slow, dragging outward stroke. When things began to get sticky, he reached for the tube and squirted more lube on the rocking shaft of his cock.
He fucked her patiently, deriving brutal enjoyment from both the punishment and the unblinking stares of over a dozen ravenous warriors. Every one of them would sacrifice an eyeball to stand where he did at this moment.
Eventually Jasmine began to squirm and moan. “Please,” she gasped.
“Please what?”
“Harder. Please.”
He obliged, picking up his pace, slamming his pelvis against her. Her moans became frantic and she pushed up against his restraining hand.
“She’s actually enjoying this,” Tiber said disbelievingly.
“She’s my submissive,” Shauss replied, as if that explained everything—which for him, it did. Jasmine King might be the enemy but she was a genuine submissive. His genuine submissive, who would suffer at length for deceiving him. While he was tempted to wring her fragile neck for her treachery, he saw no reason to condemn himself to a lifetime of fucking the probe.
Jasmine became agitated, throwing his rhythm off with desperate thrusts of her own.
“By all that’s mighty, she’s nearing orgasm!”
Shauss ceased all motion. “What do you have to tell me, aramai?”
“No!” she screeched. “Please don’t stop!”
“Tell me what I want to know and then you can come.”
“I don’t know anything!”
“You know who you really are.”
“So do you.” Her voice trembled. “I’ve told you the truth about everything. My name really is Jasmine King and I’m an American. I was born and raised in Colorado and I consider myself a Terran. My parents may have been Narthani, but I swear to you, I’m a Terran in every—”
“Silence!” Shauss shouted, crowding her harder against the table’s padded edge. “Who are your parents?”
“It’s all in my records!” she screamed back, panting. Taking a deep breath, she continued. “My parents are Ragan and Dayree King. They were sent to Earth twenty-eight years ago to study the population and evaluate the planet’s readiness for contact with a more advanced civilization.”
“You mean they followed us to Earth to spy on us.”
“No! It was a scientific mission. They were supposed to be recalled after ten years, but no one ever came for them.”
Now that, he believed. “Crunus interruptus,” he spe
culated.
Jasmine nodded, and just for fun, he leaned all his weight into his hips, grinding the thick base of his cock into her virgin ass. Her squeal of pain was wickedly soothing to his ego.
“And how many Narthani are on Terra right now?”
“Just my dad and me,” she whimpered. “My mom died last year in an accident.”
Shauss grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled her head up, twisting it on her neck until his face was millimeters from hers. “Surely you don’t expect us to believe that,” he breathed in her open mouth. “No operation of this magnitude would be launched with merely two operatives.”
“You have to believe me because it’s true—God knows I bugged my parents about it a million times and they always swore we were the only ones on the planet. My mother wouldn’t lie to me.”
“Find Ragan King,” Shauss ordered Zannen.
“With all due respect, brother, jurana is still in effect and the secondary claiming period is nearing an end.”
“You still want her? An underdeveloped Narthani?”
Zannen shrugged. “A fuck is a fuck.”
Too bad. “Very well. It can wait a few minutes.”
Almost convinced by Jasmine’s claims and yet unwilling to chance another deception, he grasped her wrists and slid them behind his neck. In lieu of the cuffs he’d used to secure her in this position last night, he ordered, “Clasp your hands and do not let go.”
When she complied, he slid his hands around the fronts of her thighs. Grasping them by their tender inner flesh, he straightened and pulled her up off the table. Leaving her impaled on his cock, he turned, spreading her thighs wide and exposing her dripping cunt to the Garathani males who crowded the room.
“Hastion, your protected claiming time draws to a close in fifteen minutes. If you wish to finalize your claim, free your cock and use it to show your mate the error of her ways.”
Tiber’s heart thundered with equal parts alarm and arousal. Jasmine’s head lolled back against Shauss’ shoulder, the golden collar gleaming against her skin. Her pupils were so dilated, the blue of her eyes had nearly disappeared. Her chest rose and fell in shallow panting breaths. If it weren’t for the shiny slickness coating her open labia, he would have said she was terrified. And she probably was, but that terror was definitely secondary to arousal.
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