His Untamed Mate (Swarii Mates Book 1) by Korey Mae Johnson (2)

Chapter One

One year later…

Jazeel’s palace was by the sea, so Ellie assumed that all the white noise coming from outside was just the ocean roaring far more than usual. She stretched across her bed and looked at the clock and was instantly annoyed that she had woken up a full half-hour before she had to.

She sat up and crawled to the edge of the bed, set to get up. She heard her door open and shut. “Oh, good! You’re awake! Prima, the master wants his morning meal early today.”

“Oh!” Ellie said, sitting back on her haunches at the corner of her mattress, looking at the slave girl. Ellie had been Prima for a couple of weeks now, and she found herself always looking over her shoulder whenever one of the other slaves called her that, looking for who they were really talking to. “Okay,” she nodded. “No problem, I’ll be in the kitchens in a jiff,” she assured.

“Do you need help adorning yourself in your jiff?” the girl asked innocently.

Ellie shook her head. Oy vey. Captive-borns. “No, I can get my, uh, ‘jiff’ on by myself. Thanks. Just make sure the cook has the platter ready when I get out there.” She walked over to her vanity and splashed some water on her face.

“Did you hear about the fabulous news?” the girl asked, walking toward the window. “The Swarii scourge has been defeated! There is a celebration outside—a parade and everything! A lot of the girls plan to watch the celebration from the balcony, if you want to join us.”

Ellie, who was now in the middle of brushing her teeth, blinked with confusion. She practically bent backward to look past her vanity and in the direction of her window, which the girl was opening up. It was incredibly noisy outside, only for the first time Ellie noticed that it wasn’t the sea making all the racket. It was a crowd of celebrating Frians outside. She could see the waves of people and banners move around like a colorful, overcrowded ant farm.

“Ah!” she said, without any feeling. She had been interested in the Swarii for a few months when she had first gotten to the palace, since she supposedly looked a little like one. But she had never seen one, and they were normally the topic of most of Jazeel’s most boring conversations. The Swarii were an alien species with which the Frians were at war, and Ellie had assumed the reason Jazeel had bought her was so he could have the pleasure of seeing a little Swarii-like girl spanked and punished horribly often. “Is that why the master’s up early?” she asked.

The girl nodded. “Oh, yes. Supposedly there are prisoners. The master’s going to execute them in a couple of days in the square when Lady Galaal arrives. There will be a night festival with balloons and all sorts of treats!”

Ellie frowned at the girl’s enthusiasm. God help those captive-borns—they got excited by the simplest things. The only thing that would make Ellie bounce on her toes like that would be if Jazeel was diagnosed with some wasting disease. Certainly never because he got his way.

The only good news about Jazeel getting his way was that he would be in a good mood, and thus the chances of him being completely awful to everyone in the palace were lower than usual.

Ellie put on a skimpy yellow sundress, which she disliked but which was very Jazeel-approved, keen on keeping the lizard in his good mood. After brushing her hair, she walked out of her chambers and began her march down the hall to the kitchens.

The kitchens were empty except for a counter full of food. She looked around and down the hall and saw a slew of slave girls all crammed out onto the balcony, watching the festivities. Apparently, that cleared out the place. She walked into the pantry to grab herself the platter she’d need for Jazeel’s breakfast.

Less than a second later, she walked right back out of the pantry, sans platter, rubbing her eyes like they were going to burn right out of their sockets from the unholy sight they had witnessed. “Good lord!” she cried, horrified that the image of Peyton ass-fucking his girlfriend was now going to be permanently burned onto her retinas. “In the pantry, guys? Really?” she whined.

There was certainly no mistaking what the couple had been doing. Peyton’s fingers were pressed firmly onto Mary—the new cook’s—hips, and she had been pressing back against his groin to take his member more fully into her bottom, moaning with a mixture of pain and pleasure.

It took a moment before Mary scurried out of the pantry, adjusting her short skirt back into position. Whipping her mussed blonde hair back out of her eyes, she groaned, mortified, “I am so sorry, Ellie!”

“My eyes are burning!” Ellie cried, still pressing her palms over her eyes.

“Shh!” Peyton hushed fiercely, following Mary into the kitchen while buttoning up the front of his pants. “Shut up, Ellie! You want the whole place to be informed of what you saw?”

“Sure! Be like that! Lecture me because you were doing the nasty in the pantry!” Ellie scolded back, putting her hands on her hips to face down the burly man standing over her.

He sighed and looked at the ceiling with exasperation. “Grow up. You know we have trouble finding a place. And everybody’s out watching the parade. It was as good of a time as any.” He shrugged unapologetically, then hoisted himself up on the counter and stole an apple from the array of food laid out there. He bit into it and continued, “It’s practically a holiday today. Jazeel’s as happy as a clam.”

She walked into the pantry and came out with a silver serving platter. “Yeah, so I’ve heard. I don’t see why all the girls are happy, though.”

“The girls are simple,” Mary said, rolling her eyes as she helped Ellie load up the platter. “Their threshold for excitement is embarrassingly low.” Mary, who was only abducted from earth six months ago, was still filled with disdain for the palace. Ellie liked that about her.

Most of all, she liked that Mary was smart. Arguably smarter than either she or Peyton; perhaps smarter than she and Peyton put together. She had been working on her residency at a hospital before being abducted at twenty-six years old. She had an extremely calm demeanor that had helped Ellie and Peyton get back into their right minds more than once. She also didn’t mind playing the referee between the two of them.

And they definitely needed a referee. Although she and Peyton had become unlikely friends, especially considering that he had spanked her within a few hours of meeting her, the two of them butted heads more often than she had with any of her family back at home, which was saying something.

“Well,” Mary said, “the girls need to stop thinking it’s a holiday. It’s not. Jazeel has more guests than ever right now, and we’re going to be swamped down here.”

“What time is it, anyway?” Peyton asked, looking around for a clock.

“Lose track of time, did we?” Ellie replied snarkily, fluttering her lashes at him. He rolled his eyes at her, but she felt she needed to continue, putting her hand against her hip. “Just make sure you’re not caught, okay? And I don’t even want to remind you of what would happen if you stick your thing in the wrong hole. I just don’t think you’d be the Peyton we’ve all come to tolerate once you’ve been neutered.”

Mary elbowed her teasingly in the rib. “Trust me,” she said with a laugh. “His balls are constantly in the forefront of both of our minds.”

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Ellie sighed, shaking her head and unable to keep from smirking. Deep down, she felt bad for them. It wasn’t easy to have a relationship in the palace, and virginity checks happened at random. The only way the two could consummate their relationship was with anal, although they looked for every opportunity to do that. Mary didn’t seem to mind. But Ellie was fully aware that Peyton had been smitten with Mary since first resting eyes on her, and if he had had his druthers, he’d have already married her and they’d be awaiting kid number one.

Ellie had never expected her life to end up with a white-picket fence and two-and-a-half kids, so it was a loss that she didn’t have to mourn over. She knew that for Peyton and Mary, on the other hand, they knew what they were missing.

They could barely even hope that they would ever get to ‘breed’ together in the future. Jazeel’s future bride would be there within days, which Ellie assumed would end the virginal state of most women there, because Lady Galaal’s prime was a well-known human breeding champion. He would probably get his pick, and Peyton wouldn’t be able to do much about it. Nobody liked to talk about it, most of all the three of them, but there had been a cloud looming over any happiness they had had since the last time Lady Galaal had visited and Ellie had overheard a lot of her plans for her future ‘pets.’

“So I heard that they’re bringing the Swarii prisoners up to Jazeel,” Ellie said as she and Mary put together Jazeel’s breakfast tray. “What’s the point in that?”

Peyton grabbed a piece of ham and toast and began to take grand bites. “He wants information on other bases,” Peyton replied simply, as if that should have been obvious. “This is his M.O. First he asks nicely for information, and then he’ll bribe them, and then he’ll torture them. And then, you know, he’ll kill them. He doesn’t have many prisoners—just a small handful that couldn’t evacuate and didn’t get killed in the raids. If we’re lucky, none of them will do something that will piss Jazeel off. I don’t like cleaning up bodies.”

“Well, he’s in a good mood so far,” Mary reminded, picking up the tray and sliding it over Ellie’s outstretched arms. Over the last year, she had gotten used to toting around the massive tray, despite it weighing easily twenty-five pounds when it was loaded. “So let’s do everything we can to keep that going. It’s all we can do.” She walked to the door to the kitchens to open it for Ellie.

“Don’t you miss mornings where the people around you have at least some hope of it being a good day?” Ellie joked flatly, raising her eyebrow as she scooted out the doorway.

“You want me to give you my Curly impression?” Peyton asked, already grinning, which meant he was going to say something ridiculous next. He immediately burst into song as he pushed himself off of the counter. “Oh, what a beautiful morning… Oh, what a beautiful day…”

Both girls laughed, mostly because he was actually singing well. “You’re going to make me drop this, doofus,” Ellie said, turning back into the hallway with her tray.

She could still hear him finish the line, “I have a beautiful feeling… Everything’s goin’ my way.” From the squealing from Mary, Ellie was pretty sure that he had picked her up and started kissing her. Ellie shook her head at them—they were too cute for space.

After a couple of turns, she came across the front doors of Jazeel’s chambers. A Frian guard standing outside grudgingly moved to open the doors for her, only because she had complained about him not helping her in the past to Jazeel, who seemed to enjoy not having his coffee spilt outside the chamber doors every morning.

The doors opened, and she walked in. She hadn’t expected the scene in front of her somehow, even though she had talked to Peyton about the prisoners and she had been told that Jazeel would be meeting with the Swarii. Ellie had never seen a Swarii before—she hadn’t even seen pictures of then. She had known that she reminded Jazeel of a Swarii girl, but that hadn’t signified much. After all, there were moments where Peyton reminded her of an alley cat that used to live outside of her family’s garage, but that didn’t mean that Peyton was orange and fluffy.

The Swarii looked like… people. Overly large people, for certain, but definitely like humans. Their eyes were extremely bright colored, just like hers. Even if they were different colored, like brown, it was a bright, milky brown. Two of the prisoners had eyes just like her own. She just stood, staring at them, feeling unable to even breathe from her surprise.

YOU’RE A FOOL, COMMANDER MASTERSON, Jazeel was saying in shal’ta, which surprised her. She had never heard him talk to anyone except other Frians in shal’ta, let alone a whole other species. Yet it must have been possible for the prisoners to understand, judging by the look of absolute hatred on their faces as Jazeel droned on. YOUR RACE IS AT ITS END. WHY DRAG OUT THE DYING PROCESS? WHY DON’T YOU ALL JUST TRY TO LIVE AS COMFORTABLY AND AS QUIETLY AS YOU CAN? Jazeel stopped communicating to look straight at Ellie. He broke into a wider, sharper smile. “Oh, my dearest pet. Do not be afraid of these creatures. They cannot hurt you,” he assured, beckoning her to approach him by crooking his finger at her.

The Swarii commander turned around and looked straight at her when she stepped closer to the small handful of prisoners who were kneeling on the floor with their arms shackled behind their backs. She and the commander stared at each other and she found herself blushing uneasily as he looked into her eyes with surprise.

He was so strikingly handsome her brain went blank.

“Pet,” Jazeel said, a little more firmly. “Come.”

Feeling more ashamed than ever at being ordered around like a dog in front of these witnesses, she forced herself to turn to Jazeel and step up toward his throne.

* * *

Ellie forced herself not to shake as she began to pour and serve Jazeel’s coffee to him.

ENTRANCING, ISN’T SHE? Jazeel said in shal’ta to the group of prisoners. SHE IS HUMAN, BUT I BOUGHT HER SINCE SHE LOOKS SO CLOSE TO ONE OF YOUR FEMALES. IT SOOTHES ME TO IMAGINE ONE OF YOUR KIND BEING OBEDIENT. When she finished fixing his coffee, Ellie knelt before his chair and served it to him, careful to keep her eyes off of the Swarii. Knowing that they were looking at her was embarrassing enough. Jazeel took the coffee and just placed it onto the table next to his throne.

She glanced up and noticed Jazeel gazing at her hardened nipples, which were peeking through the fabric of her flowy dress. “Sit on my lap,” he told her, patting his knee with his gray, scaly hand.

She closed her eyes for a moment, wanting to sit on Jazeel’s lap even less than usual. It was always embarrassing, but it was a million times worse in front of company, and that was compounded multiple times in front of this particular company. She stood and glanced toward the commander, who was still making a study of her, and gave him an embarrassed glance as she turned around and let Jazeel easily lift her onto his lap.

In the next moments, Jazeel positioned himself so that she was straddling his large leg. Now she could really take a good look at the prisoners.

They were great walls of men, all of slightly different heights, averaging at about seven feet tall. One of them was surely Jazeel’s height. They were bulky, muscular, and would serve as a mean defensive line for any American football team. They were dirty, and some were bleeding from cuts on their bodies and faces, but their chiseled features were very expressive. They were definitely not human, though. Besides their god-like height, none of them had seemed to feel the urge to blink over the last minute, and the commander’s hair was a dark chestnut brown that seemed like it had a purplish sheen in the room’s lamplight.

I KNOW YOU HAVE THE INFORMATION I NEED, COMMANDER, Jazeel continued in shal’ta. She felt like he was an evil villain in a Bond movie and she was supposed to play the part of the pet cat. MUST I REALLY TAKE IT FROM YOU BY FORCE? THERE ARE MORE PLEASANT WAYS…

I COULD TELL YOU WHERE TO SHOVE THOSE MORE PLEASANT WAYS, LIZARD! the commander hissed back in his own shal’ta. It was slightly different than Jazeel’s, she noted. It sounded almost human-like, while Jazeel’s was a reptilian hiss.

Jazeel merely nodded at the guard who was hovering over the commander with one of his taser rods. The guard shoved the rod forward and gave the commander a loud, frying zap. What looked like lightning shot out of the end of the rod and hit the commander squarely between his shoulders, and he grimaced and hunched forward, making a sharp sucking noise with his teeth.

Ellie, completely unused to seeing anyone tortured in front of her, jumped in her seat and flailed a little bit in place. She tried to step back with her feet, which weren’t even touching the floor. Jazeel looped his arm firmly around her waist, and his free hand came down quickly and slapped one of her exposed thighs, hard. She squeaked from the pain and then ground her teeth together and forced herself to still.

Grumbling slightly, Jazeel untied the back of her dress, which had closed at the back of her neck, and then plucked the fabric down to her waist, ignoring her soft whines of protest. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to forget that she was now topless in front of strangers, her bare breasts completely on display. When she opened them, she saw the commander was still wheezing with his forehead nearly resting against the marble floor. The other four prisoners, however, were watching carefully as Jazeel rubbed his hand across her breasts, bringing their attention, apparently, right to her pink, unprotected nipples.

She could barely stand for this, but the slap she had received on her thigh was still stinging and threatening to bruise already. She wasn’t used to this level of humiliation, but she was used to Jazeel playing and toying with her nipples after a year of being his pet. In that time, she had endured his fingers exploring every inch of her body. It was impossible, however, to ignore a small handful of men ogling her.

Even worse, having others in the room who Jazeel knew could understand shal’ta was causing him to censor his own thoughts for once. Now he was only using his ability to communicate with them, leaving his inner thoughts a secret to her. She had no idea what to expect at this point. All that she could do was wait and hope nothing more horrible would happen to her.

Her body was beginning to shake now, partially from the cold air in the room, but partially because she was more nervous than she’d ever been in her life.

“Ah, looking at my pet, are you?” Jazeel chuckled to them. “See what I mean? These little beasts are all so similar to yourselves. Stupid as bricks, but they do have something that might appeal to you… you could use them for your own sick pleasures. They have the same breasts…” Jazeel’s fingers pinched her exposed nipple extra-hard. Her body jerked and she gave a sharp chirp of protest. “…The same wet, delicious little cunnies…” he said, his hand drifting lower and landing on her still-covered mound. “I cannot use them to their full extent myself, unfortunately, but your kind certainly could. They are extremely obedient, making them excellent little bed-warmers.” He smiled widely as he added, “I imagine they would be a nice respite for your natural needs, especially since your female population has dwindled so much as of late…”

The Swarii growled collectively, but the commander shoved up from the floor and launched himself violently at Jazeel.

Horrified by his quick movement, Ellie let out a shrill scream. But once again, the commander was knocked to the floor just below their feet by the guard’s rod.

She felt Jazeel’s chest heave a heavy laugh from under her. “I can see that’s still a tender issue.”

“I swear to God, I will tear you apart!” the commander growled from the floor.

Jazeel was still grinning as he motioned for the guard nearest to them to hand him a blaster. He shrugged coldly. “Very well. Don’t say I didn’t try to ask nicely.”

Ellie heard the blaster heat up with a whirr. She gasped; one thing she hadn’t prepared herself for was seeing such a handsome man get his face blown off two feet away from her. “No!” she screamed, and just as Jazeel pulled the trigger she reached out with both hands and pushed the gun toward the floor. The shot left a large scorch mark upon the marble.

A very silent moment passed. It was possible that nobody was as surprised about what had happened as Ellie. But the next thing she knew, she and the gun were both thrown violently onto the floor. “You insolent little brat!” Jazeel shouted at her.

He reached down, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her up on her toes. With his own hand, he peppered a volley of sharp blows upon her too-thinly covered bottom. The pain was discombobulating, since he was using so much strength in each blow, and she could barely believe what she had done, or what she could do to prevent further assault.

She was now hideously aware of how light Peyton had been with her a year ago. Since then, when Peyton had spanked her in front of Jazeel, he would do it as one might do for a circus crowd, hamming up the show as much as possible, but would still make her bottom a bright red. Later she would often whine at him and stomp her feet about her mistreatment and assure Peyton that he had ‘taken the show a little too seriously!’

Little had she known that Peyton hadn’t been taking it seriously whatsoever. He had become a diligent artist at the craft of making her bottom look like it was in more pain than it was. He had never left bruises, even on that first day, which had been the hardest of all. Even when Peyton had occasionally given her a motivational slap on the behind, it had been more the noise that made her jump than the pain.

This, however, was quite the opposite. Jazeel, who was easily eight feet tall, was lanky, but he was strong. Strong enough to pick her up without any strain, and he was always picking her up as if she were a little Chihuahua. She, in turn, had always pretended to like it. But she never thought of him before as ‘scarily strong,’ even though he very much was, and it felt like he was using all that strength in his arm to beat her.

If she was told beforehand that this sort of thing was going to happen, she would have been worried about the embarrassment of being spanked while standing up and trying to escape the whole time. She would have been mortified at the notion of what it would be like to be spanked in front of such an audience.

Strange enough, now that the spanking was actually happening, she couldn’t care less about her audience. She was too focused on trying to avoid Jazeel’s hand, which was easily painting her bottom a black-and-blueish color underneath her yellow, flowing dress skirt.

Apparently, Jazeel wasn’t feeling satisfied by hitting the thin fabric of her skirt. “Take off the rest of your clothing,” he demanded of her, beginning to unbuckle his belt with resolve.

“I’m sorry, my lord! Violence frightens me!” she whimpered miserably, turning her pain-stricken face up to him. “I couldn’t bear it! I didn’t mean to anger you! Have mercy on my stupidity!” She got to her knees and grabbed at his pant leg. “But show your mercy upon their stupidity, too! They don’t know yet the great leader that you are! Please!” She was certain that she had witnessed a similar buttering-up technique in an old movie back at home, and if memory had served her right, it had worked.

Just as it worked now! Jazeel stopped taking off his belt and sighed with frustration. “See how you’ve frightened my pet?” he blamed the commander, whose mouth was hanging wide open. If it was possible, the Swarii commander seemed even more disturbed by witnessing her beating than she had been when watching a gun pointed at his face.

Jazeel looked down at Ellie, who turned away from the rest of the room and broke into a frightened sob as she wrung her hands over his pant leg. After huffing with frustration for a moment, Jazeel finally petted her head and then reached down to pick her up and put her on his hip as if she were a frightened animal. “Take them away for now,” he told the guards, waving at the prisoners. “Let them think upon my offer for a bit.”

The room cleared quickly, leaving only Jazeel and Ellie in the chamber. He put her back down onto the floor and then turned to his chair and his breakfast. “Prime!” he shouted, taking a seat.

Ellie knelt submissively at Jazeel’s feet, feeling awkward and empty. She pressed her forehead against his knee, trying her best to appear remorseful, as she felt her bottom throb with pain.

Peyton was quick to answer, as usual. “My lord?” Peyton asked with a bow of his head.

“This floor needs to be repaired,” Jazeel said with a wave toward the scorched piece of marble in front of him. “See to it that it’s done within the next day or so. Also, my little pet here needs a reminder of her place. Bring me the plug.”

Her stomach clenched upon those words. She had never received ‘the plug’ before, but she had stood by and watched it done to other slaves who didn’t have the privilege of reading Jazeel’s mind. It didn’t seem like having a phallus crammed inside their anuses was the highlight of their week, to say the least.

Ellie didn’t argue like she knew Jazeel wanted her to. He wanted an excuse to spank her again. Her action, though not premeditated, had embarrassed him, she knew. She would have enjoyed his embarrassment if it had been created by anyone else, but now that it was herself—or rather, her bottom—facing the fire, she humbled herself immediately. She buried her face into his lap, trying to look too sad and pathetic to manhandle. “Please forgive me,” she pleaded. “I didn’t think.”

“Oh, my poor little pet,” Jazeel sighed and raised her head up with his hands so that she had to look up at him. “I swear sometimes you have me wrapped around your finger, far more than you are wrapped around mine,” he gently chided. “But this is for your benefit. It will help you serve me better. Don’t you want to serve me better?”

She swallowed what she really wanted to say and monotonously said what he wanted her to say instead. “Yes, my lord. Thank you for the opportunity to serve you better.” But she didn’t mean it; her eyes dropped with misery as soon as she had finished saying it.

Anger was heaving within her bared chest by the time Peyton was standing behind her, dutifully passing over to his master what looked like a short ivory phallus, only one that was flat at the end. She turned her head toward Peyton, just to glare at him for not making an excuse to Jazeel about how the anal plug was impossible to find. He was looking quite angry himself, however. His eye seemed to twitch as he glanced back at her.

“Undress and lie over my lap, my beauty,” Jazeel ordered calmly.

She dropped her upper body from Jazeel’s knees, falling back onto her heels with depression. There was nothing she could do, she knew, but obey and let him do what he wanted with her bottom, since he ‘owned’ it for all purposes that mattered. She forced herself up to her feet, moving the speed of an injured snail, hating every single movement that led her toward this inevitable end. She couldn’t pretend to be anything less than hateful about this.

It didn’t matter if she pretended to like it or not, she knew. It was obvious that Jazeel was becoming excited by her loathing of the plug.

She pulled the rest of her dress down beyond her hips and let it all puddle onto the floor around her ankles. She closed her arms over her breasts and put her hand modestly in front of her bare cunny, but stepped away from the clothes and approached the side of Jazeel’s knees and was guided over his tall lap.

She poorly stifled a whimper as she felt Jazeel pet her aching bottom roughly with his hand after he had pulled her up and over his lap. After dallying for a long while, he spread her bottom cheeks. He ran his fingertip over her puckered anus for a moment, but then delved lower and slowly began to push his hard, cold fingers up into her exposed pussy, surely just to see her squirm. “You have to relax,” he cooed with a grin.

As her body dangled over his knee, she put her face in her hands. She was so ashamed by the idea of the plug that she hadn’t been listening to his shal’ta, which was no longer guarded. His thoughts flowed freely, exposing how much he was enjoying this. Now, she had a new reason to be mortified: he was actually going to try to play with her.

He adjusted her on his lap so that her legs splayed more comfortably apart. He rubbed his fingers everywhere she wished that he wouldn’t until he found her little nub and started to play with it.

The strangest thing happened then—her body began to betray her. Her mind wasn’t filled up with images of Jazeel, of course. Some part of her brain had decided that, in order to get through this moment with her sanity intact, she had to pretend that she was somewhere else, with someone else.

Before this morning, it was unlikely that her brain would have been able to find anyone from her past that she wanted to think about at a time like this, but as of now her thoughts hung on the recent encounter with the Swarii commander.

Despite his roughed-up look, the man had been quite attractive, though in a mature way, not boyish at all. She couldn’t tell exactly how old he was—he had one of those faces that could have belonged to a man in his late twenties or a man who was pushing forty. His features were incredibly defined, even with a nose that looked like it had been broken a couple of times. His eyebrows and mouth seemed expressive enough. She actually appreciated his size. His arms weren’t quite as huge as Peyton’s (whose were?) but they looked strong, like he had worked with them often. He also had a chiseled jawline, broad shoulders, and a broad chest.

She imagined that man being her master, and that she was a new harem girl who had been willful and naughty. She imagined that it was his lap she was bent over, and it was his fingers teasing her, flicking her clit, and running around her bottom hole in circles until he pushed one into her after wetting it with her own slick arousal. “Oh!” she panted, her cheeks flushed as she felt the penetration and the small amount of discomfort that went along with it.

She began to make soft mewing sounds and wiggled her bottom back and forth shamelessly. Jazeel, who surely had never seen such a reaction, grunted with confusion at first. According to his thoughts, which were piercing into her mind, he had read about reactions such as these, but he had never seen it. With a scientist-like interest, he continued playing with her, dipping the cone-like end of the plug slightly into her vagina, and in moments it was completely slick with her juices. She writhed slightly as he settled the plug just outside of her puckered rosebud.

With one swift motion, however, Jazeel was able to break the spell and she was shaken out of her fantasy and pulled back into the real world. “Eeek!” she screamed shrilly as he pushed the plug all the way into her with a single, firm thrust that stretched her opening to the one-and-a-half inch diameter it had been at its thickest.

Her posture suddenly became a singular straight line from her shoulders to her toes. “Eeek!” she continued to shriek as the pain, she realized, had yet to ebb even slightly. The plug was still stretching her anus far beyond what it was used to accommodating. “Please, please take it out!” she panted desperately, even reaching behind her. Tears were stinging her eyes. “Master, please!” she implored. “It hurts!”

“Relax,” he told her with a grin. He pushed her hand away, back toward the floor. “It’s meant to be uncomfortable, even hurt. But the strongest of the pain will fade in time, I’m told.” He watched her muscles try their best to release the uncomfortable item, to no avail. Eventually, her body realized that it wouldn’t be able to push the plug back out easily, and she laid limp and crying over his lap. “That’s a good girl,” he praised, patting her bottom.

Finally, he had her get off of his lap. Every movement was uncomfortable, sending a numbing ache coursing through her.

“Have her carry out her duties, as usual,” he told Peyton. “You may remove it before she goes to sleep tonight.”

She blanched and stared up at Jazeel with large eyes. “Please, Master… That’s all day!”

Jazeel lowered his head toward her as he locked his eyes on her expression. “Yes, it is.” He cocked his head to the side and looked her up and down. “You’ve been an extremely whiny pet all day today,” he noted. “It makes me feel like I’ve neglected you.”

She was already shaking her head ‘no.’

“Perhaps I should put you on a punishment regimen, so that you become properly aware of what happens when little pets argue with their masters.” He watched her closely, and she knew he was curious to see how she’d respond to his threat.

Knowing that he was testing her, she finally became wise. She hung her head and said the most appropriate lines that came into her mind. “Only if it would please you, Master.”

He squinted indecisively. “It may. I will have to think on it. In the meantime, I think it would be wise if you acted more like the prima that you are,” he told her, and then turned to Peyton and waved him away as a means of excusing them both from his sight.

“Thank you for your discipline, my lord,” she finally said, bowing her head respectfully. She then gingerly bent to gather her clothing before walking over to Peyton and letting him guide her out of the room, still naked.

As soon as the guards closed the door behind them and they were around the corner, Peyton let go of her arm and gave her a firm spank on her already smarting skin. “What’s the matter with you?” he charged. “What did you do in there to make him upset with you? Have you lost your mind?” Though she tried to cower away from him, he grabbed her arm and spun her around so that he could spank her again.

She dropped the clump of clothing on the floor so that she could cover her tender bottom with both hands. “Peyton!” she whined. “You don’t even know what happened!”

“I know what should have happened!” he retorted. “You needed to be your usual charming self, and you failed! He was in perfectly good spirits when I last saw him this morning! Next thing I know, I’m called in and sent for the plug.” He snorted, bending over and picking up her clothes for her. “Well, fine day for us all,” he grumbled as he pushed the dress into her hands. “I hope that thing feels as uncomfortable as I think it does. Not that you didn’t writhe like a bitch in heat while he put it in.”

She froze, and her cheeks flushed red. His words stung so much she sputtered, speechless, for a moment before she hissed, “You can be such an ass, Peyton! How many times have I saved your neck? Or your balls, should I say? If it wasn’t for me, you ass-hat, you would be sponging off women right now and not even having the ability to enjoy it.”

“What was I supposed to do?” he asked, as if she was the one being argumentative. “Not obey? If the day ever comes, Ellie, that I step between you and Jazeel, it will mean that your life is at stake, and not just your ass.”

She huffed and then tried to dress herself again without moving her bottom—a very delicate task that proved impossible. “Well, you could not spank me afterward!” she advised haughtily, wincing every time her bottom twitched. “Do you know how a spank feels when one of these is inside of you? Let me fill you in: breathing hurts right now! Besides, what time period were you born in where you learned all this spanking nonsense? I know you’re from Texas, but… Holy Pete! Do you actually fancy yourself McLintock?” she nagged miserably.

Peyton shook his head ever so slightly, as if he was trying to shake himself free of a headache. “I have over a hundred and fifty women under my command and twenty eunuchs,” he reminded. “I have to keep human men out of the palace at all costs. I have nearly fifty Frians to feed, clothe, and wait upon. You have only Jazeel to keep happy. Now, get to work or you’ll find out what it feels like to be strapped with the butt plug in,” he threatened darkly. He threw up his hands with exasperation. “I don’t have time for you.” He turned to march down the hall.

She pressed her lips tightly together in a pout. “Fine. Go. Enjoy being a slave, you ungrateful ass!” she muttered.

Peyton turned around and raised his eyebrows. “You want to throw a little more attitude my way, little girl?” he asked with impatience.

She swallowed, looking him over. He was not in his easy-going mode. He was in his kicking-ass mode. And she did not want to be on his ass-kicking list. “No,” she grumbled softly, avoiding eye contact with him as if he was a large gorilla banging his chest at her.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, then turned back around and stomped away.

She sighed and then slowly meandered toward the kitchens. Mary took one look at her as soon as she walked in and cleaned flour off her hands, asking, “You okay, kiddo?” with her voice already filled with sympathy.

Ellie forced a brave smile. “I’ll get by. Your boyfriend there’s a piece of work, though,” she admitted.

“Tell me about it,” Mary agreed, rolling her eyes. “Sometimes I think he’s on the verge of an ulcer. He needs to learn to relax. When he’s less stressed, he’s actually very funny.”

“Peyton?” Ellie drawled. “Funny?” She gave a snort. “Sure…”

“You should be nice,” Mary lectured, putting her hands on her hips briefly before she grabbed a freshly baked scone and buttered it for herself. “If you only knew how highly he thinks of you, you know. He loves you like a sister.”

Ellie waved Mary off with both of her hands. “Yeah, yeah,” she sighed, then leaned wearily against the counter ledge. “He’s a saint. Whatever.” She put her hand on the countertop and started to drum her fingers upon the surface, frustrated. There was no position that she could stand in that felt comfortable. She looked over at Mary, whose eyebrows were lowered, obviously not having appreciated being waved off by someone seven years younger than she was. “Sorry,” Ellie said, heaving a sigh. “I’m in a bad mood. I was…” She cleared her throat. “Plugged.”

Mary gasped and closed her hand around her open mouth. “No!” she gasped. “Are you serious?”

Ellie felt her cheeks heating slightly, but nodded. “Yeah. By Jazeel,” she added for clarity, since Peyton had also occasionally plugged a girl or two in the past who had been flirting with human men through the peephole near the kitchens where supplies were delivered. As Peyton would be blamed for the loss of any of the girls’ virginities, he didn’t allow any non-eunuchs anywhere on the premises, and so the small face-wide opening in the doorway was the only place where slave girls could see any new men. Ellie had often teased Peyton about it, and called him a bouncer, but not even she had ever considered even glancing outside of the hole in the door after seeing the consequences.

Ellie jutted out her bottom lip and said, “Peyton was less than sympathetic about it.”

“What could you have possibly done?” Mary asked, still shaking her head incredulously. Her amazement wasn’t surprising, since Ellie had never done anything to earn Jazeel’s displeasure. In fact, Ellie had always been put upon a pedestal as an example of how the other girls should serve him!

“He was about to shoot this Swarii guy in the face,” she explained passively, as if that sort of thing happened regularly. “And I sort of… hampered him. Look,” she put up her hand and changed the subject. “Have you ever seen a Swarii, Mary?”

Mary nodded. “Yeah, actually. The crew that abducted me picked a couple up and tortured them to death,” she admitted. Ellie, now knowing what they looked like, was now more disturbed by that forward explanation. “They look like… us,” she said uncomfortably.

“But they’re not,” Mary was quick to correct, her voice almost stern. Mary had well established that as far as she was concerned it was humans against everyone else.

“But they look like…” Ellie continued.

“They’re not human, Ellie,” Mary told her, cutting her hand through the air. “Don’t let yourself be confused by the coincidence that they, in some way, look like us. They’re far more advanced than us. They’re also, like… I don’t know, eight feet tall.”

“There was only one of them I would say was even close to eight feet,” Ellie argued dispassionately. “Seven feet, maybe. I mean, yeah—tall. But Peyton’s like, six-and-a-half, so that’s not too weird. You obviously dig tall men…”

“Is that why you saved one of them?” Mary prompted, raising a blonde eyebrow. “Because you thought they were human?” It was apparent in Mary’s expression that if Ellie said she thought they were human, she was going to think less of her.

Ellie shrugged. “Well…”

“Look, Ellie,” Mary sighed. “We have enough of a time protecting our own skin. The last thing we need to do right now is lay ourselves down for a whole other species we know nothing about.”

At that moment, Peyton marched into the kitchen. His attention immediately was taken by the two girls. He might have noticed that Mary’s expression was a little darker than it usually was. Ellie was still wallowing in self-pity. “What are you two talkin’ about?” he asked them briskly.

“Nothing,” Ellie replied, barely looking at him.

Peyton squinted at her as if she was plotting against him. “Are you lying to me, now?” Peyton asked, stepping dangerously close to her.

Mary put a calming hand across Peyton’s chest. “You need to turn it down a few notches, sweetie,” she told him. “We were talking about girl stuff. Besides, you should give her a break. She didn’t anger Jazeel on purpose, obviously, and besides, she’s entitled to screw up every now and then. She’s only human!”

He grunted, but seemed to calm down nearly immediately. “I need you to get some mechanical work done, Ellie,” he told her. Her mouth opened to protest, but he put one of his thick fingers across her lips, silencing her. “I don’t care how sore you are. There’re a lot of jobs that need doin’, and they need to get done. Mary’s sewin’ machine needs to be fixed, the oven’s having troubles, the air conditioner on level two is off…” She sighed as he continued the list.

She was regretting ever telling him that she was a mechanic. She missed just having a car to repair—just a car! She missed being up to her elbows in grease and listening to her uncle and her father’s cursing, or to her cousins’ tools blare and shrill from across the room.

With the duties Peyton was giving her, she might as well have been an electrician.

“Are you even listening?” Peyton snapped.

She definitely had not been. Her eyes slowly climbed up to his face so she could stare wearily at him.

“First thing I want you to do, li’l girl, is go downstairs and fix the damn locking mechanism in the prison cell.”

“You said it wasn’t a high priority,” she parroted from something he’d said a few days before.

“That was before we had prisoners in that cell,” he replied. “Now we do.” Her eyes widened as she realized that he meant that the Swarii were down there in that cell. “The guards will let you down there,” he told her. “They know it needs fixin’—hell, they just bugged me about it. But if you’re nervous, you can go ahead and wait. The Swarii are gonna be executed in a couple days, anyway.”

“Like the exact day Jazeel’s getting married?” Ellie replied flatly, disgusted.

“I know. He’s a real romantic,” he snorted sarcastically. “Apparently he thinks a Swarii execution would be a real nice weddin’ gift to Galaal. She’ll probably agree. Besides, he wants to have a big audience for the execution, and everyone will already be in town for the event. He just gave me the details a minute ago.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of Jazeel’s chamber.

Ellie began to laugh. “This reminds me of Robin Hood. You know, with Kevin Costner? Where the bad guy plans this big execution for the chick’s wedding—?”

Peyton raised his hand to silence her again. “We’re not having a movie night right now,” he informed her. “Did you want to get that job done, or should I call down to the guards and tell them to deal with extra security duty until the cell’s empty?”

“I’ll go,” Ellie said lightly, shrugging her shoulders. Now that the option was there, she wanted another good look at the Swarii. They were doomed to die, probably in some horrible gruesome way, knowing Jazeel, but she knew she’d be up all night if she didn’t have at least another look at them, just to see if she could spot something that was extremely alien about them and unlike humans to a damning degree. “Electrical work is loads of fun,” she lied.

“Thank you,” Peyton grunted. He gave her a much more playful swat than earlier. Ellie feared it was his way of apologizing for his earlier terseness. “Get on with it now.” He then turned and glanced longingly at Mary, who blushed knowingly at the look. “I need to talk to Mary about a thing or two—real fast. In the sewing room,” he said, nodding to the other side of the hallway while Ellie groaned and rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, I bet.” Ellie stuck a finger down her throat to illustrate a gag before she left the room and closed the door behind her, shutting the couple away from her sight.

She ran her hand across the back of her perspiring neck as she entered her bedroom to change into her working clothes and to get her tools. Her brain suddenly thought of what she’d walked into that morning, only instead of Peyton and Mary, she thought of that Swarii commander and herself acting out the grunting, animal-esque behavior. “Whoa, Ellie,” she told herself, shaking the thought out of her head. “Don’t start that now. He’s not gonna be around long, anyway. There’s nothing for you at the end of that tunnel!”

* * *

Ellie took her time getting down to the dungeons. Her bottom had finally relaxed a little and the plug wasn’t quite so alien and painful as it once was. She was dressed in more comfortable clothes, now—a jumpsuit, in fact—and she didn’t need to be in Jazeel’s company for another few hours until his next meal, which was uplifting for her mood in and of itself.

The stairs down to the dungeon, however, she still took slowly and tenderly, especially with her pack filled with tools. As soon as she reached the bottom, she saw the yellow eyes of the guards scanning over her warily from where they sat all day in their comfortable La-Z-Boy-esque chairs. “You need something fixed, I hear?” she asked, tilting her head to the side.

One of the guards finally began to speak in what she could only guess was his attempt at English. It was horrible, but she did make out a couple of words and choice phrases like, ‘You stupid human cunt’ and ‘tiny bitch.’ Finally, after he felt like he had told her off enough in her own language, he stretched, pulled himself out of his chair, and walked to the door of the cell and opened it for her. The door opened only halfway, and it had taken the guard seven tries to get the unlocking mechanism to work at all.

She walked inside and turned around, watching as the same guard began to close the door. “You’re… not coming in here with me?” she asked, confused. She quickly looked behind her at the Swarii, who were on the far side of the cell, huddled together as if they had been having a pow-wow, and who were now glaring suspiciously at her.

“No,” the guard snorted. “Go fuck yourself. Pound on the door for a while and we might let you out,” is what she believed he grumbled at her before he slammed the cell door in her face.

“What a dick,” she muttered before she slowly glanced around and looked back in the Swarii’s direction. She expected them all to be where they had been a few seconds before, but now they were much closer; they had gotten up and moved like shadows to be this close.

“Hi,” she squeaked nervously, trying her best not to gulp and give away that she was feeling nervous about their sudden attention. She cleared her throat and turned back to try to focus on getting her work done quickly.

She pulled out a key from her belt that helped her uncap the locking panel around the mechanism, which was close enough to the floor that she had to get down onto her hands and knees to work on it. She listened intently around her, thinking that she would be able to pick up on some shal’ta, but instead she heard some whispers in a language that sounded very much like Gaelic to her untrained ears. This surprised her; she had figured that a species that could shal’ta would never have felt the need to develop their own spoken language. At least, the Frians hadn’t.

She looked into the door’s panel and immediately cursed her rotten luck. The panel was, as Peyton would have put it, completely fucked up. It needed to be totally rewired and then fully reprogrammed, and that sort of work would take her hours.

She sighed in sympathy for her throbbing rectum, which would not be in any comfortable position in the near foreseeable future.

“Are you well?” a voice asked suddenly from directly above her, in English.

Startled, she looked up—and up—and into the milky brown eyes of the commander himself. He was leaning up against the wall above her, his arms crossed, nearly appearing like a guy who was trying to be cool on purpose.

He spoke English? How? Why? She found herself getting excited; she hadn’t anticipated being able to talk to them at all. The Frians only knew English for the purpose of communicating with their slaves, most of whom they had purposely taken from Earth’s English-speaking countries. The Swarii, however, as far as she knew had no reason to bother learning her language.

“Well?” he asked her, and she remembered his original question.

She frowned, certainly not wanting to lament about—or even mention—the plug inside of her. So she simply pointed to the wall and said, “Yeah, this is just gonna take me forever to fix,” she replied.

“No, I mean…” He sighed and looked up at the ceiling, apparently struggling for proper phrasing. “I mean you are not too bruised, I hope?” he asked, his tone actually sounding soft and concerned. “You look like you’re still in some pain.” To her horror, he waved toward her bottom.

She blushed immediately at the implication. “I’m fine,” she assured him, pulling a tool from her utility belt. “You’re not going to… kill me or rape me or anything I should be concerned about, right?” she asked, squinting at him.

He looked taken aback for a moment, but then he gave a singular, quiet laugh. “No. You don’t have anything to worry about at all, I promise you,” he assured her. “I owe you a debt, in fact. You know, as you caused Jazeel to miss his mark.” He brushed his hand toward his face, gesturing toward his nose.

“You don’t owe me,” she assured frankly. In fact, being thanked at all was making her feel uncomfortable. Bad, even. It probably would have been a better death for him to die on Jazeel’s floor than in whatever horrible way Jazeel was presently thinking up.

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have been beaten,” he told her, his tone firm.

She shook her head and pulled out her electrical pliers. “Look, all I did was save you to be executed in a couple of days, anyway. I hate to drop this bomb on you, but you’re all set to be the entertainment at Jazeel’s wedding.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asked, sounding curious rather than shocked.

She shrugged. “That’s what Jazeel’s saying,” she admitted.

When she looked up at him, she curiously found his expression… amused. He rubbed the stubble on his chin thoughtfully with his fingers. “You don’t say…” he hummed. “I thought he wanted to tempt us into a deal…”

She squinted at him. “Jazeel doesn’t deal. He just gets what he wants. Anything that implies otherwise is just smoke and mirrors.” She raised her eyebrows then and asked, “Why? Were you hoping for a deal?” It certainly hadn’t seemed like that earlier. The commander had looked set to strangle Jazeel with his bare hands.

He shook his head immediately. “No, of course not. But normally pretending like we could be persuaded, possibly, does keep us out of torture for a few days, and that’s really the game on the table. Sometimes it’s all about staying alive long enough to find a solution. But if he’s going to just execute us in front of an audience in a few days, anyway… Then why bother pretending? We’re unlikely to be tortured; he doesn’t have the time. Frians like their victims to be healthy before killing them for spectacle. They’re odd that way.”

She snorted with disbelief. “Well, don’t you sound knowledgeable?” she said sarcastically. “You act like you’ve been captured before.”

“I have,” the Swarii quickly announced, straightening proudly. “This is my eighth time,” he said with a sincere swagger of his head.

She blinked at him a couple of times before she just shook her head and went back to work. “Nah,” she denied. “If it was, you wouldn’t have just told me that.” She cut a couple of wires with a small pair of scissors before she ripped out the whole line with a firm tug. “You don’t know me,” she reminded. “I could turn around and just tell my master that you’re escape artists. That’d have him kill you in five minutes rather than three days, just to make sure. That would be a hard timeframe to wiggle out of. Most human slaves will do that, you know—they’d sell you out for dibs on the clothes on your dead body.” And that much was true. Peyton had been right about how fast the slave girls would sell each other out. She had witnessed one girl selling out another girl into a whipping to get a second cookie with her dessert.

“That may be true for others,” he replied carelessly. “But I don’t think you will.”

“What makes you say that?” she said with an amused grunt.

He leaned in toward her, lowering his voice, despite that they had already been talking in very quiet tones. “Because you hate your master almost as much as we do,” he replied frankly. “And because you’re not fully human.” He said the second part of that so sing-songishly, like a teasing child, that it didn’t actually settle into her mind for a couple of seconds.

She smoothed her forehead and gazed at him out of the corner of her eye warily. Not really human. She snorted. That was the stupidest thing she’d heard for a while. What did he think she was, then? It was a little unnerving that she had so easily given away her true feelings for Jazeel. She had obviously not been acting very well that morning. “And why would you say that?” she asked him calmly.

“You don’t look human to me,” he replied. “I’ve spent a lot of time with them. We were all imprisoned for three months with several human slaves on the mining planets a few years ago during a mission. We saw a lot of slaves, and got to know them well. You don’t have the bearing of any one of them. Your eyes are especially inhuman. Unlike any I’ve seen.”

“Well, you just didn’t see enough of us, then,” she replied haughtily. “We’re all different little snowflakes, you see.” She grinned up at him and then smirked. “I’m not anything special,” she assured him. “Hell, most of my family has eyes like mine. They just haven’t been nabbed from Earth yet.”

“You don’t smell like a human, either,” he added, not grinning back at her. “They don’t smell as sweet as you do. They smell saltier.”

She frowned and went back to her work. “Uhh,” she hummed. “Thanks? I guess…”

“It’s not a compliment,” he clarified. “It’s a fact. You don’t smell very human. Our species aren’t very different, mind you—we consider humans our distant cousins, biologically speaking. But we can easily tell the difference in the way they smell compared to the way we do, and you don’t smell like either of us. It’s subtle, but…”

“But creepy,” she finished for him peevishly. “Humans have the decency not to go around sniffing each other,” she assured him, reaching into her tool bag for new wires and pulling them off their spool. She raised her head aloofly and stared at him. “So then what do I smell like, Mr. Smartypants?”

“You’re special,” he replied with a small smile. “And my name is Mahstersyn, actually,” he informed her, though he didn’t extend her any hand to shake. “Commander Graam Mahstersyn.”

She blinked at how regular his name sounded to her ears. “Graham Masterson?” She was distracted by how… American that sounded.

He gave her a small smile. “Yes,” he said with a single, appraising nod.

“I didn’t actually think your name was Mr. Smartypants,” she felt she needed to clarify. “I was insulting you.” She looked up and saw a flash of hurt appear on his face, so she quickly added, “Lightly insulting. In fact, let’s call it ‘teasing,’” she amended with a peaceful grin. He finally grinned back. She looked back at her work for a moment, incredulous with herself that she was hedging her words so that she didn’t hurt his feelings. She never had hedged her words before, except for with Jazeel. Never. “So, what do you think I am, then?”

“No idea,” he replied simply, but added with renewed certainty, “Not human.”

“I was born and raised on Earth,” she assured him.

“I didn’t say you weren’t an Earthling,” he replied with a small chuckle. “But I’m still not convinced you’re human.” He stared at her for a bit after that. She worked, but every time she glanced at him, he looked more and more sure about what she was not, in his mind.

“So you’re getting this from my eyes and my smell?” she chuckled, shaking her head skeptically. She reached deeper into the control box to strip a couple of wires to be able to replace their pairings.

She heard him say behind her, “And the fact that you can hear shal’ta and are keeping that from your master,” he added austerely. “That’s also how I know you have no loyalty to him.”

All the blood drained from her face and she dropped her wire stripper on the floor. She took a deep breath at his statement and then decided that she would play this one ‘cool.’ There was no way that she could have made such a crazy mistake that would let him know something like that. He simply had to have pulled the idea out of the air, completely at random.

She picked up the wire strippers again and reached back into the control box, trying her best to keep her hands from shaking from the excitement of his accusation. Not the kind of excitement one gets from the circus, unfortunately; she was feeling the type of excitement one feels when one’s cat comes home with the neighbor’s pet rabbit in his mouth.

“Humans can’t speak shal’ta,” she reminded him monotonously, twisting a couple of wires loose and trying to ignore his breezy phrasing.

“Which is why I don’t think you’re huma—” She had jerked out the control box and cut him off by suddenly punching him in the arm, as quickly, as hard, and as desperately as she could. His bicep, covered by a tight, black, leather-like cloth, felt like steel, and she feared she’d just hurt her knuckle far more than she had hurt him.

She rubbed her hand and hissed, “Stop saying that! I don’t know shal’ta! I don’t know what you’re talking about! Just shut up. Don’t talk to me!”

“You don’t have to tell me you don’t. You just told me you did. While you were looking into that box of wires there, I was speaking with shal’ta the whole while,” he informed her simply. “You just weren’t paying attention. You thought I was speaking.”

She put her wire cutters back down as she felt like she was on the verge of a heart attack. Something in her chest was clenching so tightly that she could barely breathe. She had forgotten that when the Swarii and Jazeel had been speaking to each other earlier, she herself had noted that their shal’ta had been a very different type than Jazeel’s. She knew she wasn’t a Mensa candidate, but it was insulting to be fooled this easily over something so important. “If you tell anybody…” she tried to threaten, though her voice came out in a sputter.

“I was just kidding. I was speaking the whole time. I just wanted you to admit it,” he said playfully, clapping his hands together as if he had won a round of cards.

Her lips pursed together and she saw an angry flash of red that clouded her vision. Blindly, she grabbed the first tool next to her hand and threw it at him. The pliers she had chosen for the job smacked him square in the nose. This surprised her—not that she was pissed enough to throw something at him, but because she was aiming for his shoulder and missed that badly at that short of distance.

Still, the pliers did what they were thrown for. Their impact had rubbed the smile right off his face. Unfortunately, the pliers had also created a fresh scratch across the bridge of his nose, and he looked pissed. Maybe it occurred to him, as it was occurring to her, how close the pliers had come to taking out one of his eyes.

She scrambled away from him quickly, but the sudden movements made her clumsy enough to fall down backward onto her ass. The resulting pain caused her body to freeze, where all she could do was suck air in between her teeth. He was hovering over her, looking at the blood on his fingers. He wiped the blood on his pants efficiently, sounding like he was swearing in his native language as the other prisoners, who had been watching nearby, laughed.

Graham was practically spitting he was so angry. “You ever throw something at my head again, little one, and you won’t sit for a month of—” He stopped when he focused on her and noticed the look of pure agony on her face. He instantly calmed down. “Are you in pain?”

“No,” she wheezed, then winced and tried to move before realizing she wasn’t ready to, yet. Her ass was aching inside and out. “I’m fine,” she lied, yet dropped flat against the floor on her back.

“No, you’re not,” he argued, watching her closely as she sprawled out on the floor. She just wanted a bulldozer to come into the prison and run her over. “I’m bleeding and not in that much pain,” he noted as he crouched down over her.

“More like… discomfort to a high degree,” she corrected in a groan. Finally, she sighed and said more evenly, “Don’t press me. It’s embarrassing. I’m just going to lie on the floor here for a moment in misery before I can get up, finish my work, and then go lick Jazeel’s feet or whatever I have to do to feel better.”

He shook his head, completely lost. “I don’t understand,” he admitted.

“Good. Help me up,” she said, putting her arm in the air. He stared at her hand for a second, looking slightly anxious, but then walked over and leaned down so that he could grab her elbow, mostly just getting the sleeve of her jumpsuit. With extremely little effort, he pulled her into a standing position without any help from her.

She adjusted her twisted clothes and the sleeve he had stretched slightly when he pulled her up. “Thank you,” she said, lifting up her shirt collar and groaning as she moved back down to her knees in front of the control panel.

“Are you still in pain?” he asked.

“Stop asking,” she snapped, then reached to grab her pliers off the floor in order to continue her work. “Okay, so how’d you know I speak shal’ta, then, if you didn’t learn that through a dumb trick? What even gave you that stupid idea?” she demanded bitterly.

“You mean, that correct presumption?” he retorted. “Only the completely alert expression on your face when he was speaking with us. You have to get far more skilled at acting stupid. Your eyes reacted to everything you heard,” he lectured, his voice surprisingly stern. “I know an eavesdropper when I see one.”

She pouted into the control box for a moment, feeling like this whole situation was unfair. She hadn’t asked for the ability. She hadn’t asked to be abducted. She certainly hadn’t asked to be a slave. Yet there she was, listening to some alien prisoner lecture her about being a bad actress. “Well, luckily Jazeel doesn’t,” she finally replied. “You’re still wrong, by the way, I’m a human. I’m just a freak.”

“Normally if you don’t stalk like a leppron, bite like a leppron, or howl like a leppron, then you’re not a leppron,” was his ‘clever’ response. He was sounding exasperated at this point, as if she was being stubborn about this just to spite him.

“First—what the hell’s a leppron?” she asked. He opened his mouth to reply, but she swiped her hand through the air. “Never mind. I don’t care. Second, you can argue this for the next three days, Commander. I know what I am, and nothing you say will make that any different.” She pulled the new wire in and began to twist the ends together.

He stood inches behind her, apparently watching her movements over her shoulder. “Isn’t that… extremely dangerous?” he drawled like someone watching a cat they like try to cross a busy street.

“Hey, if you can get those assholes outside to turn off the power and make it safer, then be my guest. They won’t, though. I’m an affront to their high standards of laziness. They wouldn’t even reach into their pocket to lend me a pen if my life depended on it.” She efficiently twisted the two hot wires together and then reached down to cut more wire off of the new spool in her toolbox.

He watched her work, eventually making a curious hum in the back of his throat. “You do this often?” he asked her. She had heard the same sort of question in the same tone before at the garage. It really asked, “You’re a woman, so shouldn’t you be off baking a pie somewhere?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “When I’m not wiggling my ass for Jazeel, I’m normally knee deep in this sort of thing. I used to sit around eating cookies all day by the window, enjoying the sea breeze, but then Peyton-the-Prime found that I was too comfortable and threw me at more work than I can shake a stick at. I mean, I have my limits. I can’t manage around crystal technology or anything like that. That’s too alien for me.”

“Crystal technology?” he echoed, and then snapped his fingers. “Ah! You mean what the Frians use on their ships’ control boards? We don’t use that, either,” he admitted conversationally. “I’m not an engineer, but I understand that if those crystals break, then they’re nearly impossible to replace or repair, which can really create a problem. You can’t just—”

Zzzpoppop!

A spark flew out of the panel she was working on, blinding her with a bright flash of white light. The power first froze her up and then pushed her backward in an explosive movement. She flew backward and would have easily landed on her ass again if Graham hadn’t grabbed her arm and pulled her to his body and away from the panel. In the next moment, as more sparks flew out of the panel, looking like a bolt of energy was trying to leap out and grab them, he pressed himself against the nearby wall, cradling her against his chest, his chin pressed protectively against the top of her head.

In the next moment, it could be said that Ellie Jonas fell in love with Graham Masterson.

Actually, it wasn’t ‘falling.’ It was more like electricity—something powerful had grabbed her and made her clasp herself as close to him as possible. He tightened his hold on her, and it was as if they had been melded together, body and soul. They stood for a moment as if paralyzed from doing anything except holding onto each other as heat flowed into Ellie, starting at the tips of her toes and quickly rising with her every heartbeat.

There had never been a time before that she was so completely unaware of anything and anyone around her. There was no sound, as if she had been deafened by a close explosion, and she couldn’t look away or feel anything except his body. Distantly, she wondered if she had been hurt, but she wasn’t in pain. Quite the contrary, she had never felt so full of energy in her life… she had never been so aroused, either. The heat that rose in her seemed to be most concentrated in the pit of her stomach and in her loins.

Graham’s chest, she noticed, was heaving violently, as if he had been running as fast as he could for as long as he could.

Slowly, voices around them began to fill her consciousness. She began to realize that the other Swarii had stepped forward and were now talking slowly to Graham in their native language. Their faces, when she was able to pull her attention away from Graham and glance at them, showed concern and tension.

Graham suddenly whisked her to the side of his body, away from the other prisoners. He growled at them as he gripped her protectively to him, snarling like a rabid animal.

The other Swarii instantly fell silent and merely stared at them, the closest one holding his hands up to show that he didn’t mean any harm.

She slowly began to feel restless, even awkward. She felt like suddenly her whole world had fallen off its axis. She began to squirm, trying to feel normal again, although she couldn’t remember what ‘normal’ felt like. She felt so flushed, so hot, and she pushed slightly against Graham to move out of his vise-like grip.

“Don’t move,” he rasped out, and his arm pressed her even more firmly against his chest.

She couldn’t even squirm now, and she was beginning to panic, feeling like she couldn’t get enough air, or enough of something else critical to life itself. At the same time, she felt like she wanted to climb Graham… like a tree. She shook her head, somehow remembering that the urge didn’t make any sense, but her arousal was plowing her over with the power of a fire hose.

Graham, without any warning that she could see, suddenly let her go and pushed her several feet away from him. He turned away from her, looking like he was crumpling with pain and agony.

She stood, panting, and pressed herself against the cool wall. “Wh-what just happened? What was that? Was that shock? Were we shocked?” she sputtered, feeling confused. Graham didn’t react to her words at all. He was still hunched up against the wall like an injured man. “Graham?” she asked, but still nothing.

She turned toward the Swarii, who were watching her with widened eyes. “Did you guys see what happened?” she asked.

One of the Swarii, who was shorter than the rest of them, making him the same height as Peyton, cleared his throat awkwardly. “You should give him a moment,” he advised in practiced English. His accent, which was almost Scottish, was thicker than Graham’s yet still understandable.

She looked over at Graham, her brow furrowed with concern. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked, waving her arm desperately at him. Even when she moved to see his face, he merely looked shell-shocked, like he had seen a ghost.

“He’s trying not to claim you,” the tallest of them replied. He stepped forward and gently pulled her back behind him and backed up with her, away from Graham. “I’d step back, little one,” he told her.

She suddenly wrapped her brain around his crazy statement and literally jumped back away from all of them. “What?” she demanded, hoping there had been some mistranslation.

“You both… just… um… if I’m not mistaken…” he said, turning slightly to her but not completely away from Graham, either.

The short Swarii cut him off, saying, “There’s no way he can do that with her. She’s not Swarii.” He turned to her and added apologetically, “No offense. It’s just impossible. It’s not that you’re not cute.”

“Don’t… talk… to her…” came a low growl. She turned and saw Graham moving away from the wall, looking very unlike himself. His expression was much less human now—it looked primal, animalistic. For a moment, it looked like he pulled it back and was warring with himself. He hissed at them, showing very sharp canines in his mouth that she hadn’t noticed until now.

He then slowly pressed himself against the wall, as if the coolness of the metal wall was soothing when he held his face against it.

“I… I need an explanation,” she said, still stepping back. She barely felt coherent herself. Her whole brain felt like it was lost in a heavy fog. The room around her was so hot now that it was hard to concentrate. “This is… weird. I feel… weird…” she panted. She didn’t want to add that, on top of everything, she felt a very keen desire to strip all her clothes off and get down on all fours so Graham could properly mount her. The idea didn’t seem to match up with her conservative background.

“Relax, little one. You just felt the Union,” the largest Swarii told her delicately. He turned to the short one and added, “We saw it with our own eyes.”

“Riiight,” she drawled, having no idea what he had just explained, or if he had explained anything at all. Apparently, he was using a word that had some meaning she didn’t understand.

The large Swarii sighed and looked wearily at the ceiling as if he was trying to dumb down astrophysics so that it could be understood by a seven-year-old. “You were chosen as mates,” he told her.

“What?” she cried incredulously. “We most certainly did not choose each other as mates!”

The big Swarii ran his hand over his face, looking much more stressed than she felt he needed to be. “When two Swarii fated to be together touch skin, the Union takes place. You don’t choose it. It can only happen once in a lifetime. Fate decides. Biology decides. Not you.”

“That’s why it’s weird. How would he possibly be compatible with you?” the smaller Swarii asked, sounding frustrated. He huffed and then added, “Again, no offense. You’ve got nice boobs and all, but you’re so… small. And weak, and you’re just a weird-looking little—”

“Shut the fuck up, Thorton!” Graham roared, pushing himself away from the wall and launching himself at the smaller Swarii, who apparently wasn’t quite through explaining all the reasons why she was inadequate for mating.

The two Swarii who she had assumed did not speak English, or at least wouldn’t speak it to her, scurried over to hold Graham back, although it looked to Ellie like Graham wanted nothing more than to rip one of Thorton’s arms off and beat him to death with it.

Thorton picked himself off the floor after Graham was successfully pulled off of him. “Huh,” he said, dusting himself off and looking surprised.

Ellie backed away. This was all far too much for her to handle. Two seconds ago, Graham had been someone who was almost charming. At least, he had been conversational and somewhat normal. Now, he was practically feral!

She turned and jumped toward the door and pounded on it with her fist until the guard finally answered by pulling the door away from the wall manually. He looked quite cantankerous, as if she had woken him from a nap. “What?” he demanded. He glanced at the pile of wires on the floor before he noticed Graham, who was still on a quest to destroy one of his companions. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know. He went nuts,” she panted. “I’ll come back when he’s cooled off.” She turned and glanced over her shoulder, watching Graham, but telling the guard, “I’ll serve Lord Jazeel his lunch, and then I’ll come back and finish.”

“You’d better,” the guard grumbled in reply, then manually closed the door behind her again.

She scurried as fast as she could manage up to the main floor of the palace, where it looked like Peyton was about to serve lunch to Jazeel for her. She stopped him in the hallway by stepping into his path.

“You done with the door down there?” he asked her, but then frowned after his eyes glanced her over. “Hey—you okay, kiddo?” he asked, now looking concerned. “You look… I dunno… feverish or somethin’…”

“No,” she replied, rubbing her sleeve against her hot forehead. “Can I serve lunch to Jazeel?”

He pondered this, obviously, but then he shook his head. “You look like hell,” he told her.

“I’m gonna continue looking like it if I don’t get the plug out,” she replied tersely, reaching up to grab the tray away from him.

“Fine,” he said, rolling his eyes at her as if her complaint made her a weakling. “I’ll go in with you,” he offered, carefully handing her the tray and following her to Jazeel’s chamber. He opened the door for her and quietly followed her inside.

Jazeel was in the middle of a call, and was too focused on the image of the caller whose hologram was a few feet from where he was seated to even notice her as she served him his lunch. After she completed serving him, she slowly got to her knees and rubbed her face on his boot.

This pathetic display seemed to succeed in distracting him from his phone call. He sighed and said in shal’ta to the Frian on the call, I’LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK, COLONEL. IT SEEMS MY PET NEEDS MY ATTENTION. He hit a button within a small panel that was strapped to his forearm. “Yes, my pet?” he asked her, sounding somewhere between amused and annoyed. “How’s your bottom feeling?” he added wickedly.

“I fell, Master, and now I’m dying,” she whined miserably, letting out a fake sob.

He sighed again. “I have never known a pet that took a punishment less well than you, Prima,” he scolded half-heartedly. “And what you’re wearing, by the way, is horrid.”

“I’ve been working as you ordered, my lord,” she replied. “It’s how I fell. But now I’m dying,” she repeated, raising her face to him.

“You’re not dying,” he argued. “You’re—” He stopped and quickly reached out, pressing his cold hand against her misting forehead. “Are you…?” He moved his hand down to her cheek. “Are you ill, my poor little pet? You feel overly warm. You’re feverish!”

“I’m dying,” she swooned once again as miserably as she could muster, resting her face dramatically in his lap.

“Peyton!” he snapped, suddenly looking up toward the prime, who was waiting by the door. “Why haven’t you cared for this poor little beast?” he accused crossly.

Peyton straightened and then shifted his weight foot to foot. “I…” he said, obviously hedging his words into something that wouldn’t get him whipped. “Master, I could never disobey you… Besides, other girls have survived this punishment fine enough.”

“Those other girls aren’t as fragile as my little rose,” he retorted crisply, petting his hand over the back of her head. He huffed, “Fine, then. I forgive you,” he decreed to Peyton. “See she is given whatever is required and discontinue her punishment immediately.” He reached down and cupped Ellie’s face in his hands. “My poor, sweet little pet. Enjoy this now—my wife will have a stricter hand, you know,” he chided.

Ellie knew that very well—Galaal was going to be a challenge. She thanked him profusely while looking as pathetic as she could until she was properly dismissed, at which time she let Peyton guide her gently from the room.

He closed the heavy chamber door behind them, but then grabbed her forearm and practically dragged her all the way to her room. “You are ridiculous,” Peyton told her as soon as they were alone in her room, slapping her on the ass as he grabbed a chair away from her vanity and moved it to the center of the room. “Take off your work suit,” he instructed.

She began to unfasten her utility belt until she looked up and saw Peyton’s stern expression. “You’re not gonna spank me, are you?” she felt she had to ask. “Because I didn’t know Jazeel was going to get angry with you.”

“Well, he ain’t gonna get angry with himself,” Peyton sighed, but then visibly relaxed his shoulders, calmed. “No, I’m not gonna spank you.” He added with a grin, “Much. But one of these days, you’re gonna get me whipped, and you’d better believe that I will share some of that pain with you.” He patted his knee to signal for her to bend over it.

She pulled herself free of her jumpsuit and then pulled her panties down to her knees and bent uncomfortably over his lap. If she was ever going to get used to being bottom-up over a knee, she figured, it would have happened already.

“You know,” Peyton said conversationally, “this isn’t even a big one. There are bigger in the palace. Hell, Mary gets something like this up her bottom with no complaints, and it’s twice this size, at the least. And she likes it.”

She squinted as she thought back since Mary had arrived there. “Since when has Mary ever been plugged?” she asked.

“Never,” he replied, and then gave a couple of throaty chuckles that made her realize what his joke was.

Her lip curled up over her teeth in a sneer. “Gross, Peyton. I don’t need to know any of the details concerning your… thing.”

“It’s like a baby’s arm holding an apple,” he described teasingly, enjoying her disgust as he adjusted her comfortably on his lap.

“Oh, gag!” she whined, and then twitched when she felt Peyton’s fingers under the rim of the plug.

“A little sensitive today?” he implored, apparently noticing her twitch. After a second, he asked, scandalized, “Wait—are you aroused?”

“Only to the idea of death,” she whimpered.

“You’re aroused. You’re… wet,” he noted, appalled.

She ground her teeth. “Can you not torture me?” she demanded.

“Torture’s kind of the program,” he explained, twisting the plug around slightly and then tugging it back and forth. “I’m taking it out the easy way, rather than just ripping it out of you.”

It was impossible not to pay attention to every movement Peyton was making. Ellie moaned—not groaned, but moaned. She clapped her hands over her mouth, horrified.

“Whoa…” Peyton noticed, obviously feeling a little awkward at this point. “What’s got you in the mood?” Suddenly he demanded, “You’ve been away from the supply room door, right?”

“Oh dear lord, duh!” she snapped. “I’ve been in the prison the whole time with the Swarii prisoners. Then something happened. I think I was electrocuted or something by a wire. I’ve been feeling weird ever since.”

“I think you liked being electrocuted,” was his reply.

“Urgh, Peyton,” she nagged, kicking her feet uncomfortably. “Shut up already. But seriously—some of them spoke English down there, and we were just chatting, and then all of the sudden I got zapped, and one of them started acting really strangely, and he even tried to attack one of the others, and—”

“I love a good story poorly described,” Peyton grunted curtly. “It’s like when you were describing that movie with that guy who was in love with that girl from that other movie and there was this evil guy after them that’d once played that doctor on that one TV show.”

“Christ, what do I look like?” she retorted tersely. “A poet?”

“So what’d they say to you in English when you were down there?” he asked, continuing to play with the plug.

She nearly didn’t want to describe the event any further. The thought of Graham made her hot all over again. “The Swarii commander—and oh!”

Peyton’s actions all stopped. “Are you about to come?” he asked, his legs feeling frozen stiff under her. “Mary would not like this at all…”

Enough was enough. This had to end already, she decided. “Stop being so damn nice, then, Peyton!” she snapped. “Take this goddamn thing out of me, or I swear to God I will be the one ripping your nuts off!”

She didn’t know what she was asking for, but she swore she saw stars after Peyton did exactly what he was told and yanked the plug out of her tender rectum without any further ado. “Sweet baby Jesus!” she hissed.

“Yeah,” he said, acknowledging her discomfort, as if it wasn’t enough that she was currently writhing and digging her toes into the floor, trying to deal with the startling amount of soreness. “Ass sex is not a good option for you, apparently. Wuss.” He gave a laugh. “Now, what the hell is it with this commander guy?”

“Never mind,” she simpered miserably. She remembered that Peyton was paranoid about men, and there was probably nothing about what had happened that wouldn’t get Peyton’s hackles up, especially if she told the truth and explained the passion that she had felt, or the animal urge to mate with Graham. Peyton would just gladly step in the way of her ever seeing him again and figuring out just what had happened down there.

She picked herself back up on her feet and pulled up her panties swiftly. “It was just weird that they spoke English at all. I guess they were holed up with a bunch of slaves on some sort of mining planet. I didn’t even know that there were mining planets.” She grabbed her jumpsuit and stepped back into it.

She glanced over and saw Peyton looking thoughtful. “I think I heard something about it. I’ve heard some slaves on the outside tell us we have it easy. I couldn’t imagine things being any harder, but who knows?” He grunted. “Keep me in the loop. They say anything else interesting?”

“Nah, we didn’t talk a whole lot. I was mostly just working,” she lied dismissively, zipping her suit back up.

“You’re not… attracted to them, are you?” Peyton drawled out suspiciously, lifting an eyebrow. Damn, he was good at guessing.

She snorted. “What? Gross,” she replied. “They’re not even human, Peyton. Be serious, here.” She grabbed her utility belt and started to strap it on her waist. “Besides, the guards are right there, watching. Even if I wanted to have a romantic picnic with one of them, it’s not quite the venue,” she added with extra sarcasm.

He gave a small chuckle and agreed. “Right. Just… be careful down there, okay? You don’t have to talk to them. It’s probably better if you didn’t,” he said. “Keep as much distance as you can.”

“As much as I can manage,” she promised. Luckily, he couldn’t see her fingers crossed behind her back. She had already bought a ticket down this particular rabbit hole. Peyton didn’t have to know it.