by Fox, Jaide
“I’m not,” said Pamela, a redhead and the plainest of the group.
“Not me,” added Michelle, a pretty but fearful redhead, and Rebecca, with dark red hair and a nerdy, problem-solving temperament.
“You told us not to let it happen!” cried Cassie and Suzanne, the two sweet-tempered pale blondes.
Ebony sighed again. “Yeah, I guess I did. But now that we’re kidnapped, I’d hoped that King Kore might be worried enough about some of us carrying his unborn children to try to bring us back.” Her eyes flicked across their faces in the dim moonlight of the shelter, but all she saw there was pleading and fear. “I guess we’ve all been a little too successful at diverting his attempts.”
The other women looked away, or at each other, but kept silent. Ebony shook her head. “With none of us pregnant, I don’t see that there’s much to inspire the king to rescue us.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Jane. “All the king wants is sex, morning, noon, and night. He needs all the women he can get.”
“But--there are no native women at all to be found on Chalcydon,” said Rebecca. “You heard what they said when we got here. They said that all the women died in some kind of plague.”
“Yeah, but the Grays land practically every month with a fresh supply, just like they did with us,” Ebony said. “There’s not exactly a shortage anymore.”
The women began quietly weeping again. “But maybe the king won’t think of that,” Ebony added quickly. “He’s not exactly the smartest man I ever saw.”
“Or he could just use the opportunity to replace us all with a fresh new harem!” cried Cassie.
“Yes--one that might have better luck in getting him an heir,” said Jane, hissing through her teeth.
“Oh, we should have thought of that!” wept Michelle, and all of them collapsed together again.
“Shhh. Shhh!” Ebony told them. “The what-ifs will keep us all up all night if we let them. Tonight we’ve got to rest and save our energy. Then we’ll figure out what to do. All right?”
The women all quieted at that, and nodded silently. To Ebony’s relief, they began to settle down together and prepare to rest. And then, later on tonight, once both the men and the women were asleep, she’d get away on her own.
If she was lucky, she could make it back to the city and send help this way for the other women. She could find Adrienne and her husband, Captain Dezec Zeta, and they would help her. Dezec could enlist others to come and rescue them all. He was smart. He would find a way and he would find them. Adrienne would certainly encourage him to go and free a group of women captives--women that she knew herself.
And if she wasn’t so lucky--well, she could only hope that Fallon and his rebel men weren’t as horrible as the stories said they were. She replaced the broken seashell within her ragged clothes once more, lay her head down, and tried to sleep.
***
Sleeping came easy. Waking up was a different matter altogether.
It was the cacophony of snoring from the men that finally awakened Ebony. She wasn’t sure who was the loudest, or if they were having a pissing contest in their subconscious, or what, but luckily the dregs of her exhaustion had worn off enough that she could rouse herself from slumber.
On one side of her, Damon lay on his back. To her right lay Fallon. Both seemed deeply asleep, if the roaring and snuffling out of their mouths was any indication.
Ebony popped her head up. A quick glance around the camp by the faint light of the three moons showed her that everyone else was asleep, too, and no guard had been set.
She almost laughed. The men must have assumed they would not be discovered out here if they were all willing to sleep at the same time. And, even better, they must have been equally confident that the women could not get loose--or would be too frightened to run if they did get loose--or perhaps they thought the women did not have any desire to escape in the first place.
That was good enough for her. Feeling confident, Ebony carefully stood up--not easy with one’s wrists tied together--and tiptoed over to the far end of the shelter, on the other side of the sleeping women.
She slipped the seashell out of her underwear and went to work on the ropes that bound her. It took her a while, but she kept patiently whittling with the thin piece of shell--and finally she tore through the rope enough that she could snap the binding with brute strength.
Finally free at last, she rubbed the raw skin circling her wrists. She was tempted to go back and just smother Fallon and Damon in their sleep, but she was pretty sure they’d wake up and snuff her lights out. Ebony crept surreptitiously from the shelter and stepped into the darkness of the woods.
She hadn’t made it twenty feet from the camp when she heard a snap of underbrush.
Whipping her head toward the sound, her eyes widened and her mouth gaped to see Fallon standing in the dark, stalking her with a furious expression on his face.
The urge to shriek strangled in her throat when he launched himself at her. Ebony tried to leap backward, but she stumbled over a fallen log and landed on the ground flat on her back.
Instantly Fallon pinned her to the ground with the full weight of his body.
Her lungs whooshed like a bellows as he crushed her into the loam with his weight. She tried to speak, but could only gasp for breath.
At last he grunted, and rolled a little off to one side to keep from squashing her like a bug. But he remained on top of her enough to keep her pinned down, and his anger was evident in every furious breath as he tried to hold back from punishing her. His rigid arms were like a cage around her, preventing her from scrambling out from under him or rolling away to escape.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.
“Escaping!” she wheezed, thrashing beneath him. Then she managed to get one knee up, and made every effort to connect it with his balls.
He blocked her attempt--barely--and then moved to pin down her bucking hips, sitting on top of her groin as he continued to hold her arms on the ground with a grip that felt like steel manacles.
“I realize that,” he said. “Why are you trying to escape? Do you love the king so much that you would risk your life to return to him?” His face hovered directly above hers. The deep shining of his hair caught the moonlight, making him look entirely wild.
Ebony laughed, noting a slight hysterical edge to her voice she wished she could curtail. She sucked in a deep breath, willing her nerves to settle down. He hadn’t beaten her to a pulp yet and she judged he probably wouldn’t if she could just keep her cool. “I hate the king.”
He glared warily at her. “You and me both. But if you are to be believed, why would you try so hard to return to him?”
Ebony blew her straggling hair out of her face, and became still. There was no use battling against him in a fight she could never win. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s like they say: Better the hell you know than the heaven you don’t.”
“I think I need to make myself clearer to you, Ebony.” He spoke with quiet menace. “Just so there is no confusion: Do not try to escape from me again. You will not like the consequences if you do.”
Looking up at him, into his blue eyes that pierced her even in the dark, she felt a flutter of nerves in her belly. The weight of him pressed her into the soft forest floor, and the great strength in his arms and shoulders kept her there with no effort at all. Ebony choked back her nervousness, disliking the uncomfortable emotions running through her. “Good,” she said. “I was beginning to think you were all bark and no bite.”
Fallon said nothing for a long moment, studying her face as though she’d grown a third eye in the middle of her forehead. “You wouldn’t like my bite, but I am happy to oblige you if you ever test my limits again.”
She tried to move beneath him, but he only held her more firmly. Ebony arched her back a little--all that she could--and heard him catch his breath as her breasts, covered only by thin red silk fabric, pushed up against his chest. She moved her hips ag
ain, almost grinding against him, and then--as she expected –began to feel him harden against her thighs.
“Will you rape a member of the king’s own harem, Fallon?” she said, as innocently as she could. “How will King Kore feel about that?”
He stopped and became very still. “If I wanted to do such a thing, no one would know and you could not stop me. And I promise you,” he said, gritting his teeth and holding her arms even tighter, “I will do whatever I must to see this plan through to the end. There is far more at stake here than you realize. If you interfere with those plans again, I promise that you will suffer the consequences--member of the harem or no. Do you have any further doubts as to my intentions?”
She swallowed convulsively. “Oh, no. That’s all right. I’ll behave myself from now on. I promise.”
Fallon stood up and hauled her to her feet. She stumbled against his chest, and he righted her. “A promise from you is like sand in the wind.”
She wrinkled her forehead, looking up at him as he dragged her back to camp. “Irritating to the eyes?” she asked.
He glanced down at her. “Exactly. Irritating and of no value. But you will come with me now, and stay with the other women the rest of the night, and make no further move to escape.” Fallon stared hard at her, and finally she nodded and began walking towards the camp. Fallon let her walk past him, and then followed her closely every step of the way.
Ebony felt highly insulted, in spite of the fact that he was right. If she had the chance to get away again, she probably would do exactly the same thing. But twice, now, she’d been an absolute failure. He was either a much lighter sleeper than she realized or she was a very noisy walker.
Either way, the man would have to be a moron not to keep a close watch on her now. She’d be lucky if he didn’t put a block of wood between her ankles and then get a sledge hammer and cripple her. And yes, it was probably also lucky that they didn’t have any popular horror novels on this planet, either.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When Fallon and Ebony returned to the shelter, Damon quickly sat up, and his expression turned fierce as he realized what had happened. “I’m sorry, my lord. It won’t happen again. Here, I’ll tie her hands--double-tie them this time--”
“Don’t bother with it, Damon. She doesn’t have any respect for me, or for you, or for any of the rest of us. There’s no reason to tie her again. She already knows that if she tries to escape again, she will most fervently wish she hadn’t.”
“Hey, that’s fine with me if you leave my hands untied,” Ebony said, “but if I’m not tied, then the rest of the women aren’t tied, either. And if you won’t take their ropes off, then you can just put mine right back on.”
Fallon looked at Damon. “Go. Untie them all.”
Damon sighed. “I knew this one would be trouble if we brought her along,” he said, as he drew his dagger and began cutting the ties on the wrists of the other women. “I’ll keep watch to make sure she can’t escape again.”
Fallon shoved Ebony back into the midst of the huddled women. “I should have known better. It was foolish to think these females would be compliant, even though they were captives where they were being held.”
“Do you really think the king will pay to get us back?” Ebony asked, brushing herself off as she sat up beside Cassie.
Fallon glanced back at her over his shoulder. “For your sake, I hope he does, though I could see why he might not want to have you back. You are nothing but trouble.”
She glared at him, miffed at the truth of his statement and still resentful. “It isn’t in my nature to just go along with someone’s plans for me and not ask any questions,” she said. “Mama didn’t raise no followers.”
But there was nothing else she could do right now. She was too hungry, too cold, and too tired. Ebony lay down, crossed her arms over her chest, closed her eyes, and tried to go to sleep.
***
Fallon and Damon were sound asleep long before she was, and she was left to listen to their snores rumbling into her body, ears, and brain. “Men!” she whispered. “Even on another planet, they’re both deafening and distracting.” She sighed and turned over, certain she would not sleep any longer that night.
Perhaps it was the snore-generated rattling of her eardrums and brain that finally lulled her into slumber. She wasn’t sure, but the next thing she knew, she was being dragged back into consciousness with a sprinkle of water on her cheek and Damon’s broad face hovering above hers. “Wake up. It’s time to go. Relieve yourself with the others. Then you can eat and drink.”
Groggy from so little sleep and stiff from the dirt floor, Ebony sat up and moved like an invalid, slowly getting to her feet and following the rest of the women into the bushes. They all looked as miserable as she felt.
“Another good morning,” Ebony said to them, “and another communal bathroom break.” She sighed. “Squatting and peeing in the woods has never been high on my to-do list.”
Pamela stood up from the ground and smoothed her skirt, and gave Ebony a small smile. “Not on your bucket list, as we used to say on Earth?”
Ebony managed to laugh a little as she carefully crouched down over the pine needles. “That’s right. This kind of thing goes on my fuck-it list. If the bucket list is things you want to do before you die, the fuck-it list is things you never want to do again as long as you live!”
They all laughed at that, even if it was the grim laughter of being in dire circumstances. At last, Ebony pulled her skirt and panties back up, dreaming about beautiful tiled bathrooms and endless rolls of toilet paper and clean flush commodes and steamy showers with hot running water.
The men walked toward the gathered women, and Ebony eyed their captors with a baleful expression. One of the men gave each woman a handful of some kind of food, and the other allowed each one to drink from a metal cup refilled from what appeared to be a large leather bag. She started to sit down, but Fallon stopped her. “Stay on your feet. Keep moving. Now. All of you.”
“I see it’s breakfast to go this morning,” said Ebony. Then she jumped a little as something poked her in the back, and turned around to see Damon prodding her with his fingers to make her move faster. “I’m going,” she said, shooting daggers at him with her expression. “You can stop doing that anytime.”
She began walking with the others, and looked down at the food she’d been handed. “Mmm. Water and more mystery meat jerky,” she muttered. “I’d give anything for a good cup of coffee right now. And a nice ham-and-cheese omelet with plenty of toast and butter and apple jelly.”
Ebony sighed and kept on going down the trail, biting off a piece of the tough jerky and picking her way through the sticks, pine needles, and random rocks that hurt her already sore feet, and trying to avoid the prickly sticker bushes that snagged at her bare skin and thin skirt. All of the women were having increasing difficulty walking through this rugged terrain. Ebony saw streaks of blood and dark purple bruises on their feet, even as they tried to keep their whimpering to themselves.
But all of the women were moving slower and slower, and Ebony had to bite her lip to keep from crying out when her own cut and bruised feet hit yet another rock or yet another sticker burr.
Fallon and Damon watched the women hobble through the forest for a time, and then stopped them. “We’re going to have to do something about this,” said Damon. “The king kept them barefoot and practically naked, thinking it would keep them from trying to escape.”
“Worked, too, didn’t it?” said Ebony.
The two men ignored her. “All right,” said Fallon. “We’ll stop here and figure out some way to protect those soft little feet, or it will be nigh onto a month of traveling at the rate they’re going before we reach the base.”
Ebony and the other women stopped in their tracks and sat down on the forest floor. “I’ll be thankful for a break no matter how long it might last,” Ebony groaned. “And if they come up with something to cover my feet, I’ll take that
, too.”
Cassie sat down beside her. “I can’t remember the last time I wore shoes,” she said, her voice quivering. She reached down and tried to massage her own bruised and bleeding feet.
“Well, the last time I had shoes on was when my sister and I were forcibly disrobed and bathed before going to see the king and his audience,” said Ebony. “I figure they burned all the clothes we had on our backs.”
“Oh, that happened to me, too...I think it happened to all of us.” Cassie was on the verge of real tears again.
“Well, at least my sister gets to wear shoes.”
“Yes, but she is not in the harem!”
“Nope. Lucky little heifer goes and marries the head of the king’s guard. She gets a comfortable life and a man who treats her like a treasure.”
“And shoes.”
“Yeah. And shoes.” Ebony managed to get her broken fingernails on another sliver of thorn near her heel. “Hate to admit it, but our boy Fallon there is right about his brother, the king. Keeping us all shoeless and practically naked is just another way to control us without the leash. Don’t need a leash when the bitch can’t run.”