by Stella Cassy
I was back in my too-small cell aboard the ship, and I’d just been kidnapped by teleportation.
Rethryn had reneged on the deal.
23
Rethryn
Rethryn
Mission accomplished.
I had enough gold to satisfy the taskmasters back on Thirren and had escaped the planet relatively unscathed. Better yet, there was no ridiculous repayment scheme and no need to debase myself by apologizing to someone who didn’t deserve it. All in all, it was quite the successful diversion. What were the mission planners thinking sending me begging in Minapolis to start with?
“Status?” I barked across the bridge.
“The ship received negligible damage to its electrical systems and is now fully functional. All gold was safely secured onboard. The slave was successfully teleported aboard to the holding cell. Sir, the mission to Earth was a success.”
As I thought. I surveyed the bridge a final time before departing. Everyone was at their correct position, and everything was operating smoothly. On the screen, the distant image of the rapidly dwindling blue and gray planet was shrinking by the moment. We were making good progress away from the backwater. A backwater that was good for only two things as far as I could tell: gold, and attractive slaves. Nefarious, untrustworthy, beautiful slaves.
“The bridge is yours, first officer.”
Once outside, I headed to the ramp that led to the cargo hold and Talia’s cell.
As I stepped down the ramp, I swished my caudal angrily. Those humans had shot at my men and I without even talking to us first. Like we were raiders instead of politely arriving to make a trade deal.
And Talia. She had planned the whole thing. She may not have specifically asked those men to shoot at us — to give her credit, she did ask her father to stop it — but she had used me to get back to her planet. She had put her own selfish wants ahead of those of the Drakon race, the Hielsrane fleet, and most importantly, me.
I could hear her before I even entered the cargo hold. Or treasure room, as it had now become. Stacked up in the spacious wooden crates were fifteen tons of beautiful, yellow gold that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on.
But that wasn’t the only treasure I had.
“Rethryn! What the hell!” came the screeching yell of Talia from her cage.
“Talia,” I said as I stood in front of her. She was leaning back against the bars behind her, bruised white and pink knuckles visible as she gripped the bars in front. Her eyes were wild, like a cornered beast at the end of a hunt.
“You… you stole me!”
Offering her a nonchalant shrug, a gesture I had learned from her, I grinned at her.
“They attacked me.”
“Yeah, but then you made a deal! You promised to return me in exchange for the gold.”
Repeating the gesture, I shrugged again.
“I did return you. It’s not my fault they couldn’t keep you safe.”
“You’re a backstabbing crook, Rethryn! My Dad is going to be so mad…”
“I’m a backstabbing crook? You’re the one who tricked me into crossing the universe just so you could sneak off back home.”
She shook her head adamantly.
“I got you the gold, didn’t I? Isn’t that what you were after? Wasn’t that the whole point of your stupid mission?”
That earned her a low growl. It may well have been a stupid mission, but it was my prerogative to call it that, not hers.
“That may be, but your species violently assaulted my men and I. If it wasn’t for your presence, I would have lit up your father and his little army with a conflagration of destruction. It is only out of respect to you that I did not do it this morning, after I’d seen the gold had been supplied as requested.”
“Respect for me? You’ve locked me up in a cage! Again!”
I went closer, stopping in front of the door, my hand hovering in front of the electronic reader.
“What would you have done, on your world?”
She glared at me with tear-streaked eyes.
“I—I don’t know. Got a job. Maybe in a bank or something.”
I couldn’t help but let out a loud, surprised laugh.
“A bank? You must have enjoyed your time as a slave on Minapolis.”
“No, I did not enjoy my time as a slave in Minapolis. I wouldn’t have been a slave at a bank on Earth.”
“Working for money is slavery,” I said to her through the bars. “Fighting for honor, for glory, for gold, that is the only freedom.”
“Yeah, well I’m not cut out for military life.”
“No. You are right. You’re a better slave than a warrior.”
She did not take the compliment as well as I thought she might.
“So is that it? Is that what I am to you? A slave?”
“That’s like asking if I think a fire is a fire or a door a door.”
Yet another reasonable statement earned me another unreasonable reaction. Talia balled her fist and whacked it against the bars of the cell again, immediately screwing up her face in pain as soon as the gesture of anger was complete.
“Let me out of here, damnit!”
“That’s what I came to do.” I pressed my hand against the reader, unlocking the cage door. “You may have free run of the ship until we return to Thirren. Your assistance in obtaining the gold for my mission has been noted.”
The door swung open silently when I pulled at it, and Talia stepped forward hesitantly, standing in front of me.
“You’re a jerk!” She smacked both her palms against my chest. “A kidnapping, violent, enslaving, jerk!”
“Thanks.’ It was nice to receive a compliment for once. Except for jerk, that wasn’t quite so complimentary, but it didn’t seem too negative to me either.
“I didn’t mean it in a nice way! Those were not positive traits!”
“To me they were.”
She looked up at me, anger in her eyes but without, I thought, hate in her heart.
“You don’t care, do you? You just don’t care! After what we did together, after everything… you just don’t care!”
She punctuated her words with several more smacks to my chest. I stepped backward and held out an arm in front of me to stop the annoying, but largely painless assault.
“I don’t care?” I shook my head at her. “Of course I care. You’d be dead otherwise.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Shaking her head to herself, she stomped out of the cargo hold. I watched as she walked away, her behind seeming to swing teasingly with every step, wagging angrily at me to follow her.
I don’t think she realized what she did to me.
When she was gone, I was left alone, just me and fifteen tons of gold. While it was clear there was a huge amount of the substance, I had not performed an exact accounting of it.
I expected Talia’s father to have shorted me by at least ten percent — he wouldn’t be any kind of businessman if he hadn’t. But I was curious as to how much lighter than agreed the hoard was. And I needed to know exactly what I was bringing back to Thirren anyway.
I stalked across the room, lifted down the first heavy crate from the stack, and pried it open.
It was time to count my gold.
24
Talia
Talia
When you’re kidnapped into slavery you’re supposed to feel pissed. The first time it happened to me, almost two years previously, I’d been filled with righteous indignation.
And now, after — what? one day of freedom back on Earth? — it had happened again.
Kidnapped by aliens.
If you count the first time Rethryn took me from Minapolis, I guess you could say I’d actually been kidnapped by aliens three times now. Was that a record? I knew there were a few other humans taken by the Pax, but had any of them been kidnapped three times?
I should get a book deal or something, I thought to myself in annoyance.
I was sitting in the rec
room, which also doubled as the mess hall for the poky little ship, trying to work out what exactly I was feeling.
It wasn’t rage, not like the first time. And it wasn’t shock, like the second time.
It was something like… relief? But that couldn’t be right. Why would I feel relieved after being snatched mere hours after having gained my freedom back on Earth? It didn’t make sense.
I looked around the rec room, with its too-high bench seating, broken comms unit, and one remaining video screen. Why was I feeling relieved to be back here, instead of furious I wasn’t in Dad’s palatial new Californian mansion?
The thing was, I knew why.
I just didn’t want to admit it to myself. Not yet. I needed time to re-adjust. When your persona shifts, your character, your worldview (universe-view?), you don’t recognize it right away. You cling to the past. You try to hang onto your old self and fight off whatever it is you’ve become. Until you just can’t anymore. And now, I was near that point.
Until I’d gotten back to Earth, I’d still seen myself as a rich, ever-so-slightly spoiled, fashion-loving, jet-setting It girl. Even when I was cleaning the kitchen on Minapolis, that was how I saw myself — temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
But when I got back to Earth and saw my magnificent new bedroom, when I thought about the shopping trips I was going to take and the restaurants I was going to visit, I just didn’t feel it in the same way I had before. I was no longer that girl who got excited about the half dozen new pairs of Louboutins I was going to buy or hitting up the latest trendy brunch spot with oh-my-god mimosas to die for.
Lying in my new bedroom, I’d realized none of that stuff excited me anymore. It left me cold. I’d changed. But changed into what?
“I’m like I’m a butterfly turning into a caterpillar,” I muttered to myself. A beautiful young social butterfly on Earth, turned into some weird space-caterpillar.
I was never going to be normal again.
And that’s why I wasn’t anywhere near as angry as I should have been, after being ripped away from Earth again, before I’d even really had a chance to get reacquainted with it.
But the problem was, where did that leave me? Technically, I was still a slave. That wasn’t exactly a career with good prospects.
There was a slim chance I could get hired as a non-slave back at the bank on Minapolis. But I didn’t really want to go back there. While the planet itself wasn’t terrible, having heard Rethryn’s constant belittling of its people and their culture, a lot of it had rubbed off on me. I looked down on them and working at the bank would suck anyway. I needed something else.
I wouldn’t go back to Minapolis. Not to live.
That was just idle daydreaming. It was foolish. No, I knew there was only one thing I really wanted out here in the universe. Well, one thing and the Drakon attached to it. I giggled to myself at my clever wordplay. Or thought play, or whatever it was.
Rethryn.
Rethryn the jerk.
Rethryn the kidnapping, bad-tempered, jerk.
But the truth of the matter was, I wanted him. To be with him. To at least give it a chance.
There were humans among the Drakon. Back on Minapolis I had even heard that one of their commanders had taken a human wife or mate or whatever the Drakon called it. I mean, I didn’t know if that’s what I wanted with Rethryn…
“But maybe I should find out!”
Pushing myself to my feet, I decided to go and find him. When I’d left him last, he’d been staring longingly at the crates of gold he’d traded me for. Crates of gold he had in fact stolen, since he didn’t honor the deal.
I walked down the ramp to the cargo bay, and there he was. Rethryn. The yellow-scaled prince and thief. Hielsrane captain and kidnapper. Jerk and lover.
Most of the crates were now empty, and next to the cage I’d found myself in again earlier, was a large heap of gold. It wasn’t just bars, there were piles of coins as well. And I knew where they’d come from.
One of Dad’s last ventures before I’d been taken from Earth the first time had been oceanic asset recovery, as he called it. Basically he went after old, sunken ships and searched them for treasure. It was a costly business to get involved in, especially if the wrecks you were searching were deep in the ocean, but it could be highly profitable if you found the right ones.
And Dad had found the right ones. A pirate ship’s stash of gold coins in fact — sacks and sacks of them, from an old Spanish galleon that had been shipping it back from the New World to the Old. The galleon had been intercepted by pirates who had looted and sunk the ship, and then in turn been caught up in a violent Atlantic storm which had in turn sunk them, sending all their treasure to the bottom of the sea. Until Dad found it.
That was partly why he’d been able to get so much gold at short notice. He literally had it sitting in warehouses.
Rethryn certainly seemed pleased with the pirate treasure. He had a set of scales and was in the process of weighing another heap of coins when I interrupted him.
I marched across the room, stopping in front of him. He looked down at me, curious but wary. He was probably worried I was going to smack him in the chest again. To be fair, I probably was going to. But not yet. He’d need to annoy me first, but judging by past experiences, that wouldn’t take long.
“Fuck it.”
He looked at me in surprise.
I reached up, put an arm around his head, and yanked it down toward me.
With a thunk, a heavy bar of gold fell onto the deck beside us as Rethryn wrapped his arms around me. It felt good to be more valuable than gold.
Our lips met, and Rethryn lifted me up into the air so that he wouldn’t have to stoop down. Kissing passionately, he slowly walked us across the room before laying me down on his pile of gold.
Our lips broke apart from a moment and he let out a low growl.
“Now I’ve got all my treasure in one place.”
Treasure. I’d never been called that before.
I lay back, put my arms around his neck and pulled him down toward me. I was going to show him just how hot his treasure could get.
25
Rethryn
Rethryn
Funny, isn’t it, how we value things? I had a heap of gold, a stack of it, a hoard of fifteen tons of gold just lying there.
But that isn’t what I was interested in.
It was the slave lying on top of it that I wanted. The slave that was worth just a minuscule fraction of the value of the gold she was lying on. But I only had eyes for her. Hands for her. Desire for her.
She had come back wearing human clothes, a small pair of shorts and a white shirt type thing. A blouse they called it.
“Rethryn… I missed you.”
We were only apart a few hours, but I knew what she meant. I could understand because I felt the same way. There was something addicting about this little human creature that I couldn’t get out of my system. I didn’t want to get it out. I wanted more of it, more of her.
I held her chin, cupping it in the palm of my hand, sharp talons gently resting against her cheek. My other hand roamed lower, slicing down the front of her blouse and popping off the buttons one by one. I yanked it open, revealing the smooth, bare skin underneath.
I thrust my head down, pressing my mouth against her salty-sweet skin while my hand roamed behind, slipping underneath the bra she was wearing and unhooking it with the flick of a talon.
Talia’s hands didn’t remain inert by her side. She was grabbing at me, scratching at me, running them all over my body, teasing me with the gentle pain she could cause by raking her nails against my flesh.
“I want you inside me… now.”
I didn’t take much persuasion. It wasn’t that I take orders from slaves, but sometimes they have good ideas. Like when they demand to be fucked.
Pressing my mouth against a breast, I sucked it greedily into my mouth, swirling the tip with my tongue. I undid her shorts and yanked them d
own her thighs while she eagerly lifted first one leg then the other, wriggling like a juicy fire-worm as she kicked down first the shorts and then the underwear below.
I kneeled above her, admiring my treasure trove. My golden-haired slave was laying there, naked, atop the heap of gold coins, piled on more gold bars underneath. Her skin and hair were almost the same color as the treasure, and right then I think I was one of the luckiest Drakon in the whole damn ‘verse.
She ran her hands over her breasts, across her taut, quivering stomach, down to her thighs. She raised her feet, spreading herself open for me in aching, hungry, desperate submission.
I could not stand it. Having removed my garments I hovered over her, letting her see just how big and hard and yearning my quivering dragon was for her. She grasped it in her hands, hesitant — not because she was scared, but because she couldn’t decide which way to guide me.
Talia pushed herself up with her hands, putting her head right in front of me, and then slowly parted her lips, her eyes looking up, locked on mine.
I willed her with my mind to take me inside, and she did. Her mouth spread into a wide, surprised O as she wrapped herself around me, her hot, wet mouth a perfect cavern for my dragon to slip inside.
Her hands grasped my buttocks from behind, squeezing the iron-tight muscles. I ran my talons through her hair and grasped her head tight, locking her in position as I thrust myself back and forth between her hot, willing lips. So hungry was she for me, that her tongue writhed and swirled around me, teasing out early drops of my essence, causing me to quiver inside her mouth.
One hand dropped from behind me, and glancing down, I saw she had it between her legs, sliding up and down as she lightly played with herself.
I pushed her head back, releasing myself from her and immediately feeling the cold air of the cargo-hold against the wet skin. I quivered as my dragon demanded to be placed back in the hot wetness that Talia offered.
