by Viki Storm
Another humpf and another cold manacle around my other wrist. I thrash my legs, trying to twist myself out of bed, but whatever is holding onto my wrists is holding on tight. Humpf, humpf. My legs are now pinned down, ankles spreading to each corner of the bed. The manacles move, pulling my arms overhead, stacking my wrists together.
I’m completely helpless. Completely at his mercy.
“What do you want?” I ask, fighting to keep my voice even. We are still in the darkness, and I cannot make out his features. He is most likely a brigand, after the substantial cargo we’re holding in the secret compartments of The Golden Plague. On our last job, we picked up a load of protein powder and vitacaps and are waiting to deliver it and start our next job. I’ll be damned if I let some two-bit pirate take our cargo. There are people all over the quadrant that will pay good coin for nutritional supplements—one of the few products that sell themselves and never go out of style.
“I want you,” he says. His voice shocks me like a slap to the face. It’s low and powerful, each word, so calmly spoken, seeming to echo throughout my entire body.
I am stunned into silence. There is no witty response for that. I struggle again against my bonds, but they are holding me in place tightly.
He pushes buttons on some sort of control panel, and the manacles snake around my midsection, wrapping around my stomach and between my breasts. Even through my reinforced spacesuit, the manacles feel cold on my skin, and my nipples stiffen involuntarily.
How did this happen? One minute I’m asleep, and the next I’m tied up by some piece of binding technology that I’ve never even heard of.
And a corsair has boarded my ship because he wants me.
I’m so fucked.
No, you’re not, I scream at myself. You didn’t escape captivity just to let this brigand win.
That’s when one of the arms of the manacles starts to trail up and wrap itself around my neck. It is not tight, not constricting, but I still feel the old hatred and panic and fear. How much it feels like my old collar, the one the Rulmek forced me to wear.
I pull against the bonds, struggling to free myself. This thing seems to be one writhing mass of flexible metal arms that can extend and contract, wrap and twist, holding me in place. It’s not connected to anything, not wrapped around my bed or anything else as far as I can tell. I should be able to at least roll off the bed. If I can do that, maybe I can get to my weapon.
I try to roll to the left, away from the intruder, but I’m stopped cold. It’s as if the manacles have been cemented in place. They won’t so much as budge. I’m getting a feeling of claustrophobia, the panic that I’ve so far managed to keep under control threatening to scramble what’s left of my wits.
“Get these fucking things off of me,” I command. I am surprised that I actually still sound like the captain of this ship. You’d never be able to tell by the sound of my voice that I was caught asleep in my own room and bound tightly before I could even open both eyes.
“Not a chance,” he says. “We need to talk.” Hells, that voice. It’s smooth as velvet but hard as steel. It’s giving me unpleasantly pleasant thoughts.
“About what?” I say.
Just then, one of the manacles between my breasts moves, gliding over my suit and rubbing against my nipple. I let out a surprised gasp, but it comes out sounding pitifully weak, more like a moan.
The intruder laughs, as if he’s doing all this on purpose. The manacle circles around my nipple, the metal tip trailing around until it’s a hard peak. I feel a second little manacle creep across my chest, searching out my other nipple. The thin strip coils around it, and I can’t help the little purr of pleasure that hums deep in my throat. What the fuck is he doing?
And why is my treacherous body responding like this?
“What the fuck are you doing?” I demand.
None of the abuses I suffered at the hands of the Rulmek ever inspired feelings of… arousal? Is that what this is? Am I actually aroused by the stranger who has invaded my ship and bound me to my bed?
I am sick with myself. I should be raging with fury, I should be screaming for my crew, I should be finding the nearest weapon.
Did my time in captivity ingrain some sort of bizarre subservience into me? Condition me to be aroused by abusive behavior?
“Oh, nothing,” he says casually. The manacles stop their serpentine probing. “Just readjusting your bonds so you do not break free.”
“Get these fucking things off me,” I say. The manacles are not painful, not constricting, but their mere presence threatens to send me into full-on panic mode—and I can’t afford to lose my head. Not now. Not when I was so close to losing it when the manacles were brushing against my breasts. And what the hell was that? That odd tingling sensation that came over me, that feeling of being drawn. I bite the inside of my mouth, using the pain to focus my thoughts and my energy. “The last bastard who put a collar around me was treated to the singular and fruitless experience of trying to cram his guts back into his gaping stomach before he died.”
“Oh, I bet he did,” the intruder says with a laugh. He doesn’t fear me, the fool. “We need to talk about the Rulmek ship,” he says. He finally steps all the way into my room and turns on the light so I can see him better.
A fucking Zalaryn.
Not just any fucking Zalaryn—I’d bet money on that. The bastard who had the nerve to send the comm demanding that I stand down and let him turn away the Rulmek ship.
“Not a chance,” I say. “The Rulmek deserve to hang from their own foul entrails from a gallows made from their excised bones. You want to just turn them around? So they can go somewhere else and take slaves? Fuck that and fuck you for wanting to—”
All of a sudden my voice disappears. It’s an odd sensation. The vibrations of my throat seem to intensify and buzz against the collar, but there is no noise that comes out of my mouth. I scream and shout… but nothing.
“That’s better,” he says. “Now we can talk. Or rather, I can talk and you can listen.” He drags a chair to the foot of the bed and sits down. I can see him now, the asshole. His skin is dark red, the color of a sunset. He isn’t wearing a shirt, and the shadows play off the ridges of the muscles on his chest and shoulders. Had I gotten the impression of pure masculine power? Well, that’s pretty much dead-on. His head is bald but covered with large raised circular bumps. He has a sneaky, mischievous look on his face.
And his face. It’s a human face, handsome in its features. His eyes are large and inquisitive, his nose is straight, and when he smiles it almost makes me think I could trust him.
Almost.
But like I said, I’ve never been stupid.
I try to speak and forget that I can’t.
“Don’t bother trying to talk,” he says. He speaks my language almost perfectly. He must have an implant or something. “I have enabled the bond around your neck to absorb the vibrations from your… what do you call them? I don’t know all the terms for human anatomy. We call it the throat flaps. Anyway, I’ll let you talk after you hear my proposal and my terms. I’d say they’re generous, considering I could have just boarded your ship, overridden the lock mechanisms and set the whole thing on fire.”
There’s not a lot I can say to that—and not just because the metal around my neck is absorbing the vibrations from my ‘throat flaps.’
His close presence is distracting. I can feel the warmth of his body, his eyes locked with mine. I can’t stop thinking about the brief moment he teased me with the manacles. I can’t remember the last time I was in this intimate of a setting with a male. I’m on a small ship with four crewmen, but that’s not the same. They’re just my crew. I do business will all sorts of species of males, but that’s not the same, either.
This Zalaryn bastard, he’s a male and he’s in my private quarters. And his presence is doing something to me. Something that threatens to undo me, to undermine all the hard angles and scars that I’ve cultivated in order to survive.
“Are you ready to listen?” he asks.
I nod. I don’t have much of a choice here.
I just hope I like what he has to say.
BANTOKK
What did I expect? Not the exquisite creature stretched out on the bed in front of me. Truthfully, I expected a dried-up old human female, face in a perpetual sneer, skin like the cured leather of my waist-pouch. A tough customer, angry and bitter from life’s hard turns.
I’m right about the sneer at least, but that’s it.
The female bound on the small bed in front of me is not what I expected. She’s young. How did a female so young manage to earn a captain’s position with the Three-Star Rebels? She must be ruthless and possess very little in the way of moral scruples, willing to lie, cheat and steal her way to her Captainship. That’s how these Three-Star Rebels operate. But she doesn’t look it. Her dark hair is cropped short, sticking up wildly in different directions, as if she cut it herself with a cooking knife. Her eyes are an arresting shade of light blue, ringed in a dark circle of indigo. There is a long, twisted scar running down the side of her face from one of those blue eyes to her chin. I feel a flare of anger at the cruel primitive who would mar such singular beauty with a knife wound.
Yet somehow the puckered and shiny scar enhances her beauty rather than detracts from it. It serves as a counterpoint to the otherwise perfectly delicate features and ivory-smooth skin. It gives her an air of mystique—of danger—that’s very alluring.
“Are you ready to listen?” I repeat. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. This restraint system is a rare asset. I had it custom made by one of the more cunning artificers on my home planet. The manacles can compress into a small pod, easily shot from any type of pneumatic weapon. It’s equipped with a homing device that can detect infrared signals and heat signatures from living beings. Once it acquires its target, the manacles will extrude and wrap around limbs and torso. The artificer claimed he modeled the computer code after the phototropism exhibited by creeping vines. To hold the target, the manacles are equipped with a GPS coordinate lock, meaning that once they latch on, they freeze position at a precise set of coordinates and cannot be moved. In addition, they can seek out vibrations and absorb them, rendering the target effectively mute. It’s a cunning device and worth every coin I paid.
“What’s that?” I ask. “Can you listen to me?”
She nods, but the fury in her eyes lets me know she is not going to forget this.
“Good,” I say. “My name is Bantokk, and I am here to talk some sense into you. Failing that, I am here to restrain or imprison you. Failing that… well, let’s not even think of what’s going to happen if you refuse to cooperate. Here’s the problem: I cannot let you attack that Rulmek ship. Don’t bother protesting. I mean, you can’t talk, but don’t even bother thinking of reasons why. I don’t care if the Rulmek deserve to be attacked. I’m going to assume that you didn’t bother to fully read my comm. Perhaps you can’t read. Can you read? Nod your head if you can.”
She nods, but I can see her jaws clenching together, the muscles pulsing beneath that fine skin of hers.
“That’s encouraging,” I say. “If you learned how to read, then I can assume you learned arithmetic, too. In case you didn’t, here’s a quick refresher. One thousand is bigger than five. One thousand Rulmek versus five ill-equipped humans. Here’s another one. Thirty-nine is less than forty-two hundred. Your model of ship can carry thirty-nine kilos of explosive fuel in its munitions hold. Compared to the AXB-550 the Rulmek are flying, which can hold forty-two hundred kilos. Do you understand where I’m going with this?”
She nods again, that same hate-filled stare boring into me. It would be frightening if she wasn’t so tiny. She might be a formidable adversary to another human female, but this small creature poses no threat to me. It’s almost cute that she thinks she could hurt me.
“The Rulmek have set a course to my planet, Lekyo Prime. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s a small planet but a purely human colony. Well, it was a purely human colony. Now it’s a human and Zalaryn colony.”
At this, her mouth flies open and a hoarse gasp manages to escape.
“Relax,” I say. “I can imagine your concern for the good citizens of Lekyo Prime. The Rulmek aren’t planning a raid; they’re planning to conquer the planet and colonize it as their own. Naturally, we can’t let that happen. But neither do we have the fighting power to stave off a thousand of those evil pricks and forty-two hundred pounds of explosives. Which is where I come in.”
The little human is still struggling against her bonds, and for some reason it’s making my cock hard. I’m trying to keep a clear head, but it’s difficult. I shouldn’t have used the manacles to stroke her breasts. I meant to do it to scare her a little. I would never take a female against her will, but I thought it might serve my purpose if she thought I would. Keeping your opponent scared and confused and off-guard is the best battle tactic. I didn’t anticipate that it would arouse her. I could sense the change in her heart rate, her muscles became tense, her pupils dilated. And the smell. I could smell a trickle of sweet essence from between her legs. How I longed to bury my head between them and suck every drop of it.
Now it’s me that’s confused and off-guard.
It’s her fertility, I tell myself. All species of females send out pheromone signals when they are fertile. And Void take me, it’s working. All I want to do is crawl into bed with her. It’s blinding me to the fact that she’s a sneaky, stubborn, dishonest rebel.
I’m forgetting that she’s the enemy.
“Here is my plan,” I say, and I go over the details with her. I explain how I’m going to reroute the Rulmek ship but that I need to get close enough to beam the computer program into their system. I remind her that I won’t be able to get close enough if she’s flying around shooting at the bastards.
She listens, even nods at the appropriate places, all the while fixing me with that icy blue stare, as if a neuroparalytic were going straight into my brain. Because that’s how it feels. This female is doing something to me. I feel hot and flushed, my skin itching like I fell asleep near a hive of angry insectoids. Pheromones, I tell myself. That’s all it is. I haven’t been with a female in a long time, and this is just a natural, bodily reaction.
Still, it’s making it hard to do my job.
“Do you understand?” I ask her. She nods her head vigorously. “Can we talk now? With limited use of insults and vows for vengeance?” She nods again, though I notice not as vigorously. That brings a smile to my lips. “I’m going to un-silence you, okay? But I can re-silence you with the push of a button.”
I deactivate the voice-dampening element and brace myself, but she does not launch into a shouting tirade as I’d expected. Instead, she just looks at me, that look on her face that says she’d kill me if given even the flimsiest of weapons. At least she’s smart, I think. Anyone who breached my ship, disarmed my crew and tied me up would be dead the moment I had the chance.
My eyes are drawn again to that scar on her face, and for some reason I think of the monster who did it. I want to hurt that bastard, slowly and meaningfully. And isn’t that a weird thought. Why would I give a fuck about an old scar on a crazy rebel bitch?
The pheromones, I think. Nothing more.
It occurs to me that maybe I can have this female, give her a few vigorous mating sessions before my mission ends and I return to Lekyo Prime. Why not? I can sense her arousal—she can’t hide that from me, no matter how much hate is in her eyes. What does it matter if she is a crazy rebel bitch? That won’t make it any less satisfying to sink it into her hot flesh. In fact, it might make it all the more challenging to get her into bed.
And I do like a challenge.
Of course I do, otherwise I wouldn’t be here in the first place.
“What say you?” I ask. “Do I have your word that you will not interfere?”
It’s a long time before she responds, and when she does,
it’s full of all the insults and vows for vengeance that I expected.
LIA
Fuck. Why does it have to be Lekyo Prime? I know that Bantokk’s right—engaging the Rulmek ship in open combat is risky, and there’s a chance of failure. It was a risk I was willing to take if it meant that I could at least temporarily sate some of my ravenous desire for vengeance.
But if Lekyo Prime is at stake? If there’s a sliver of a chance that we’d fail and the Rulmek would proceed to my home planet? To my sister Bryn?
“Tell me more about your plan, you alien motherfucker,” I say. “Then I can decide if you need to die for what you’ve done here today. And take off these damned manacles. I can’t concentrate like this.”
“Like what?” he says, that damned cocky smile plastered to his face. “You can’t concentrate when you’re aroused? Do you like to be tied up?”
“No, asshole,” I say. The nerve of this bastard. It might have been a little… pleasurable when the manacles were caressing my breasts, but that was nothing more than a physical reaction to a stimulus acting on nerve endings. “I can’t concentrate when I’m tied up and wearing a fucking collar around my neck like some damned mangy kecklet. You want me to be your ally, then treat me like one. You wouldn’t have done this if the captain of this ship was a man.”
“Void, no,” he says. “If the captain of the ship was a man, I’d have just beaten him senseless and locked him in the nearest storage closet.”
“Why didn’t you do that to me?” I can’t stop myself from asking. “Because if you think you’re going to seduce me, you’d better get that thought out of your little pinhead right now.”
“Seduce?” he asks, face turning honestly puzzled.
“Yes, seduce.” I think of how to explain. “You know, try to win my affections. Try to get me in bed with you.”
