by Maren Smith
A tic of muscle leapt along his jaw as Rowth searched the bed, but the tablet wasn’t hiding under a pillow or lost among the bedclothes. Nor was it tucked between the mattresses or stashed underneath, or in the drawer of the bedside table. He knew for a fact that she hadn’t left this room, but he tested the windows anyway. Apart from the bathroom and the closet doors, the only other exit out of this room was the door he’d come in through and he knew it had been locked.
He came back to her bedside, temper pricked and patience tested. “What did you do with it?”
Lying on her back with her hand crossed on her chest, she stared in silence at the underside of her canopy and never said a word. And yet, a master at reading subtle changes in expression, while he never saw so much as a twitch around her eyes or mouth, somehow that stare turned a little more smug.
He checked physically underneath her and even moved the bed away from the wall, but found nothing.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Brinley finally said, but something in the way she said it gave Rowth suspicious pause. Almost against his will, the bathroom drew him and there he found not just the missing tablet, but half a dozen implements from his closet. All that she, limping about on fragile legs, could reach down off their hooks. Every one lay half-submerged in the toilet. What she’d done on top of them didn’t require more than a half-glance to identify and yet he stood there, hands on lean hips, staring at the whole mess for many minutes longer than such a misbehavior required.
That wasn’t a message; it was a challenge and the gods of Na knew, he’d never been one to ignore a challenge.
Rowth came out of the bathroom shrugging out of his magistrate’s coat, which he threw over the foot of her bed before rolling up his shirt sleeves.
Brinley rolled for the opposite end of the mattress, but she stopped fighting when he caught her by the hair. She grabbed his wrist with both hands, but that was all the fight she offered when he dragged her back to him. Dropping to sit on the edge of the mattress, he blocked her fumble of a slap and hauled her, shouting disparagements on his lawful parentage, all the way across his lap.
“That,” he told the back of her head, “was a very expensive mistake on your part.”
“I want to see my friends,” she seethed in return. “I swear I’m going to make you rue the day you ever clapped eyes on me-e-ee!”
Locking her down across his knee, Rowth painted her pale bottom a fiery shade of red. With swift, hard swats of his open hand, he took her from frantically squawking insults—“Monkey-ball-licking asshat!”—to just plain squawking, at the end of which he carted her into the bathroom, sat her on the counter by the sink and watched while she cleaned off each and every one of his implements. He made her wash and dry them. He made her re-oil and seal the leather. He made her wait until each was dry and then he put her back across his knee and gave her a blistering introduction to each and every one.
“Never touch them again,” he told her while she wept her bitter tears into the covers of her bed and he rehung each paddle, strap, and even the three-switch leather crop back in the closet. The tablet, he was more upset about. That could not be washed, dried, and reused, so he simply let that go. Placing a call to his cabinet assistant, he had another tablet ordered on account and delivered directly to his house. Without a word, he place it back on her bed.
“I hate you,” she hiccupped, rubbing her bottom and sounding broken.
“Perhaps.” He wasn’t offended. “Shall I get dinner started while you begin your lessons?”
That tablet was still lying on the bed beside her, exactly as he’d placed it, untouched, when he returned some time later to bring her to the table. He didn’t punish her for that. Beginnings never went according to anyone’s plan. If they did, they’d be called ‘endings’. Tomorrow was soon enough to start again.
Except that the very next day, Brinley came up with a whole new misbehavior and, because of the prior day’s naughtiness, he got to watch her do it via the motion-activated camera system he installed in her room. He wasn’t even out of the garage before his wristwatch pinged an alert that she had crawled out of bed. By the time he switched his personal security newsfeed over to the household security monitors, she was at the windows, struggling to pry one open with the eating utensil he had left for her lunch.
Rowth stayed home that day. He worked from his office, filing paperwork, interviewing via conference communications—which he did not prefer. It was infinitely more satisfying to interrogate the truth from the guilty when one could watch them squirm and sweat from a mere chair’s distance away. Having to do it long-distance annoyed him, but being at home meant a response time of minutes when she crawled out of bed a second time and, using a tiny piece of metal she must have detached from her bed, popped the screen off the heating vent. He reached her just in time to catch her ankles before she took a nosedive straight down the pipes. She’d have hit the bottom of an elbow-bend before she reached the furnace. It still wouldn’t have done her any good.
“You can’t watch me all the time!” she bellowed as he carted her back to bed.
He spent the rest of the day lying right there in bed beside her, his long legs stretched out towards the footboard and crossed at the ankles, feeling positively scandalous for performing his duties in such a laggardly fashion. Interrogating anyone in such a position was impossible, so he filled out two pre-requisite forms and then made a nuisance of himself as he followed their wending progress through all the appropriate channels. The first was for a medical therapist. Since she was so determined not to rest as she should, Rowth saw no reason to delay the next phase in her healing process. The bones would strengthen on their own, so long as he continued to see to it that she took her medication. But the longer she lay about immobile… or defiantly quasi-immobile… the more her muscles would atrophy. And while she didn’t need to walk in order to be useful to him, a part of him was starting to enjoy her predictably unpredictable rebelliousness.
“You can’t stay here forever,” she sulked, glaring at the canopy curtains.
No, he couldn’t. But he could take her with him, and so he did. The very next time he went to the bathroom, in fact. After that, she was delightfully quiet the rest of the day. Now and then, he couldn’t help but chuckle. It made filing and hounding his second requisite much more fun. That one was for a security guard to keep her company while he was out because, really, he wouldn’t be General Magistrate Lashat for long if he never got out of bed.
The physical therapist arrived that afternoon and for two hours gently, nervously and with a great deal of obnoxious adoration, prostration and deference to Rowth’s station, put Brinley through the most cautious exercises. The apologies each time he was required to touch or stretch her legs and Brinley winced grated Rowth’s nerves, but he kept his annoyance in check through practiced patience and Brinley’s by thumping the top of her head with a warning finger each time she cursed or growled at the poor man.
“Behave yourself,” Rowth told her.
“Go fuck yourself,” she snapped back.
Could human males really do that? It was too bad none survived the crash. Out of sheer curiosity if nothing else, he suspected he might enjoy observing the sort of differences required to make such a physical impossibility happen. Earth men were either enviably endowed or hinged in a way he could scarcely comprehend.
The security guard arrived shortly after breakfast the next day. Rowth stationed him in front of the door with a list of allowed activities (her tablet, her food and water, the occasional trip to the bathroom) and allowed visitors (the physical therapist each afternoon and himself, of course), and then followed it with a list of activities that were not allowed (anything not specified on the allowed list or, in fact, anything that involved her leaving the room). So long as the list was being obeyed, the guard was to remain standing at the door. When Rowth left for work, he left confident that his orders would be obeyed and thrilled to be getting back to work. So far, he’d had
her for almost two weeks and for two weeks, his work had come second to corralling the misbehaviors of one tiny and very stubborn human being.
He reached his shuttle and was in the process of backing out the house doors when his wristwatch pinged. Knowing the security guard would handle whatever situation Brinley had decided to get into, Rowth nevertheless switched over the newsfeed.
…and sat stunned, unable even to blink as he watched the guard violate Rowth’s rules and approach the foot of Brinley’s bed. Brinley was naked upon it, slowly rising up on her arms as she watched the unfamiliar guard through narrowed eyes. Her mouth was moving; Rowth had no idea what she was saying because he hadn’t activated the sound. But, if she was spewing some of her physically impossible sexual suggestions, that might have explain why the guard moved closer. Trying to puzzle through one of her insults could easily make anyone forget what they ought to be doing.
Except, that Rowth then saw the guard being recorded on his security system touch himself, adjusting the front of his uniform trousers before he reached over the footboard and up the mattress to grip Brinley by the ankle. There might not be any sound, but Rowth felt it in the small of his back when hers snapped into a writing arch and he heard the scream he saw rip out of her as dragged down the bed. Both feelings hit Rowth like a lightning bolt, searing up his spine and through his veins before stabbing up into the back of his head.
He didn’t at all remember pulling back into the shuttle house or parking his car, and that was disturbing because a General Magistrate should never forget anything, much less things that happened mere minutes before. He didn’t remember walking down the steps, around the face of the cliff and through his front door. He barely remembered the crisp steps that took him back to his desk where he entered his keycode and pressed his thumb to the signature pad. And there were yet patches of haze where he struggled to recall feeling the weight of the gun as he took it out of the locked drawer, checked to make sure it was both loaded and charged to fire, and then walked out through the dining room to take the steps down to the mid-tier level at a jog.
It was strange, feeling his heart beating like this. Hard. Slightly faster than normal. With that even stranger echo that pounded at his temples in a way that almost made him think he might be angry. Except, he’d been angry before. Many times, in fact, and never mind that at least half of those facts had happened within the few weeks since he’d met Brinley. But never had it felt quite as… volatile as this before.
The weight of his footsteps echoed off the floor and through the empty hall in the same beat as the pulse pounding at his temples. He passed his room, then Rog’s and hit Brinley’s door with his open fist, because at the end he’d been moving faster than the automated panel could respond to his approach. It was a show of emotion unlike any he had ever—not in all his adult life, and certainly not in his professional one—ever allowed himself to display. Not one time.
No, the first real memory he had of this encounter began the moment he saw the security guard he had hired standing over Brinley. Holding her all but upside-down while she grabbed both legs and the sheets and screamed. Not once did the guard loosen his hurting grip on her fragile shins. Not until Rowth was almost to the bed and a footstep or flicker of movement must have betrayed him. Startled, the guard dropped Brinley then, but it was too late. It had been too late, Rowth suddenly realized, from the moment he’d touched her.
The guard snapped to attention.
Rowth never said one word. As soon as he was in reach, he raised the gun and shot the guard between his widening eyes. A second shot guaranteed the kill before Rowth stepped over him. Dropping the gun on the mattress, he caught Brinley in his arms, enduring her pained cry as he gathered her abused legs and carried her from the room.
If he never heard that sound again, it would be too soon.
Rog was in the hallway. The Mekron raised his head when Rowth stepped over him, but he watched them go without asking any questions that Rowth wouldn’t have been inclined to answer anyway. He took Brinley, sobbing now and clutching at his coat, to his room. He started to lay her on the bed, but somewhere in the chaos of his thoughts, he must have changed his mind. He sat, holding her instead. On his lap, wrapped in the pale comfort of his arms, he rocked her, stroked her hair, and soothed over and over again, “Hush, little one. I have you, and you are safe.”
He rocked her, and stroked, and whispered in that soft, sweet-smelling spot in the hollow behind her ear, until her weeping eased into ragged, hiccupy breaths and she raised her head to look at him.
Then she looked at his mouth.
Moist with tears, hers parted. She lifted her chin, hesitating twice before shyly closing the few inches of distance between them and brushing her timid lips to his. It was her breath that undid him. A tiny expulsion no more than a sigh that he stole with his next inhale as he let her explore the stern lips of his mouth. One fragile kiss turned into two, and then three, and he might have made it through the fourth if only she hadn’t whimpered. That was when his hunger, like some savage, living thing, broke free of his control.
His hand seized hold of her hair mid-stroke. His other snapped up to catch her wrist, the trembling fingers of which had only just found the courage to touch his cheek. He had that wrist pinned to the small of her back before she could gasp, her green eyes flashing open wide as he yanked her as close as she could come.
He let her feel his strength in both his grip and in the force of the kiss he used to capture her. And capture again, loving the softness he felt in her responsive lips. Loving even more that she never once had the sense to pull away. Instead, on a sigh of the sweetest submission, her mouth opened to him. She yielded, all of her melting against all of him.
Her back arched, needing to feel his touch against her breasts. He released her hair, switching his hold on her wrist and obliged her. He caught her breast, finding the taut peak of her nipple already taut and begging to be touched. He obliged that need too, and her head fell back when he abandoned her mouth to take possession of that teasing bud.
“Oh!” Her hips ground tiny undulating circles into his lap. The heat of her moistening core seared through his pants to his skin. The heat called to the burning in his own molten veins until at last he just couldn’t stand it.
He twisted, lifting her onto the bed, so careful of her legs as he lay her on her back beneath him. Off came his coat, thrown to the floor with no more consideration than he spared the shirt that followed. Perhaps he’d spare a tsk and a shake of his head for that carelessness later when he stood pressing the wrinkles back out of both, but for now, the only thing that mattered was how much of her softness he could feel against his bare skin. How much he liked it when her fingertips wandered up his back before she twined her arms around his shoulders to cling as he found his fill at her tight little nipples and the hunger within drove him onward. Downward. Not sated but incensed with even taste he stole as he kissed his way across her ribs, down the quivering rise and fall of her belly, the twitch of her navel as he circled it with her tongue, the aphrodisiac scent of her bare little mons, the insides of her thighs as he splayed them open wide to admit him, and the slick, swollen folds of her sex laid bare to his gaze, his touch, and his taste.
“Mmm!” She ground her lips to keep back a moan, her fingers catching in his hair as he spread her open there as well and found the peak of her desperate clit straining to be touched. Human and Pra’kirian women were more similar than different, he mused as she threw back her head with a squeak when he fastened his mouth upon her. Her legs tried to snap shut, hitting his shoulders. Her cry at first contact was both pleasure and pain, but she couldn’t seem to hold herself still. He suckled and her hips danced, grinding into the bedding. He lashed her with his tongue and she flooded, pussy quivering and overflowing beyond his ability not to touch. He sank his fingers—two on the first thrust, three and then four—wedging them inside her just so he could feel the spasm that put that hitch in her constant stream of moans
. He took her right to the very edge, until the bucking of her hips grew frantic and her gasping breaths began to catch, and when he felt the quivering clutch in the hot walls of her pussy bearing down upon him, in a surge of sadistic fascination, he whipped his hand out of her, tore his mouth away, and robbed her of her orgasm just as she perched on the knife’s edge of finding it.
“Fuck, no!” she cried. “Son of a—Ah!”
He slapped her pussy, grinding the pain in with a rub that soon had her moaning and her hips grinding back again. “Not until I say,” he told her. “Not until you beg for it.”
Her cheeks flushed hot. She glared at him, snapping her mouth shut before another slip of a moan could escape her, but her hips were her biggest betrayers. Her thighs strained with her attempts to hold her body still, but the more he rubbed, the less they cooperated. Her weeping pussy convulsed again, twitching as her need to come built once more.
“Say it,” he ordered, husky and low as he twisted and flicked his fingers just so he could watch her hips buck up higher and ride him. “Say, ‘Please, Master, may I take pleasure?’”
She pressed her lips tighter, but like her undulating hips, her face betrayed her distress. Her short, jerky movements grew more frantic. Her belly flexed, tiny spasms quivering the length of his thrusting fingers and all the way up her pussy. Deeper than he could reach, at least with his fingers.
“Say it.”
She turned her face away, but already her back was arching, and her pussy was milking, and her panting breaths grew faster and shallower yet.
He yanked his fingers out before she could claim her completion and he punished her disobedience with three sharp swats that amplified exactly how wet, eager and ready for him she was, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
“No!” she wailed, her voice near sobs.
