by Ravenna Tate
Evernight Publishing ®
www.evernightpublishing.com
Copyright© 2015 Ravenna Tate
ISBN: 978-1-77233-339-8
Cover Artist: Jay Aheer
Editor: Karyn White
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DEDICATION
To my readers, thank you for making my debut series such a success. This is the last book in the Voyeur Moon series. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
SEDUCED BY TWO WARRIORS
Voyeur Moon, 4
Ravenna Tate
Copyright © 2015
Chapter One
Gia Falconetti had been working on the planet Sera in the Alpha Centauri system for two years now, and she’d never seen anything like the mess just dumped on her desk. “What do you expect me to do with this?” She stared first at the pile of tiny data drives, then into the face of her immediate supervisor, Honora. The alien woman had a penchant for treating Gia like nothing more than a scut worker.
Two years ago, after Gia had escaped from the man who had taken her for a sex slave from the infamous holding cells on Voyeur Moon, a nearby planet in the same solar system, she had been grateful to find relative freedom and safety on Sera. And this job, even though it had included learning an entirely new language, was perfect for her. But she was an interpreter, not this woman’s personal servant.
“Translate them,” said Honora, in her own language. She never spoke English with Gia, even though all the inhabitants of Sera, Addo, and Voyeur Moon could speak nearly every language on Earth. “I need them by the end of the day tomorrow.”
“I’m in the middle of a special project for your boss. You know … Petroff? You already know that. I’m not to be working on anything else until it’s finished.” Gia stood and scooped up the data drives, then handed them back to Honora. “Find another staff member to do it.” Gia, on the other hand, always spoke English on purpose, just to piss off Honora.
Most of the drives clattered on the floor because Honora hadn’t really tried to hold them all. She glared at Gia, and Gia knew any second now she’d be ordered to pick them up, but she was saved from having to tell Honora to do it herself when her aforementioned boss’s boss walked in.
Honora bristled, practically standing at attention and saluting Petroff. He ran the entire department, and Gia had always liked him. It was thanks to his influence that she’d landed this job to begin with. Petroff was a Second Order Regum, but he didn’t act like a Regum. He was so easygoing and unpretentious.
The Regum were the current ruling class of Sera and Addo. They had also ruled Voyeur Moon at one time, but that planet was now under the control of the dreaded Tyranns. The Regum were old school, and it was due to their ancient laws and rigid ways that the Tyranns had risen up over fifty years ago to begin with.
The Tyranns’ original purpose in revolting against the Regum was to be allowed to dictate certain aspects of their own lives, apart from the omnipresent control of the Regum. But within the past three years, an extreme faction had emerged from the original group of Tyranns, and they’d quickly taken over the entire group. Their mission was now so far from the origins of the group that six separate departments existed within the Ministry dedicated to dealing with the atrocities the Tyranns were committing against Earth and its people.
“Petroff … what an unexpected surprise. I thought you were still on Addo.”
Gia had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing at Honora’s fake smile and her patronizing tone of voice. She was such an idiot. No people skills at all.
“It wouldn’t be a surprise if you read memos.” He turned his dark eyes toward Gia and smiled. “I have a proposition for you.”
Gia came out from behind her desk and sat in one of four chairs that ringed a table in the corner of her office. “Please, let’s talk about it.”
She ignored Honora as Petroff took a seat across from her. He leaned forward, his eyes dancing with a secret. “First of all, you’re doing a fabulous job in this department. I’m so pleased with your work.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you know who Fallon Myers is?”
“I’ve heard her name come up, but I’ve never met her.”
“She’s an Earth woman who was taken about eighteen months ago and sent to the Zoo.”
Gia shivered and hugged herself. The Zoo was an establishment the extreme faction of Tyranns had built on Voyeur Moon to house political prisoners from all three planets. Two or more men to one Earth woman shared lavish quarters, but the décor was merely a backdrop.
The idea was to make a fool out of their prisoners by forcing them to put on sex shows for paying customers. Their performances weren’t voluntary, and they were locked inside those quarters at all times. The men were encouraged to be as rough with the women as they wanted. It was a life sentence for all of them, and if the women refused, they were sent to the holding cells.
Gia couldn’t wrap her mind around how the Zoo could be any better than the holding cells where she’d first been sent. Two years later, she still had nightmares about her experiences there.
“Fallon has worked in the Ministry right here on Sera with the two men who escaped from the Zoo with her.”
“I’m sorry. What? She escaped from the Zoo?” Had she heard him right?
“Yes. All three of them did.”
“Oh…” Now Gia remembered. She had heard about that over a year ago, but hadn’t paid much attention at the time because she didn’t want to relive her own experiences. Two prisoners from Addo named Cord and Arlo, plus Fallon, were the only prisoners ever to escape the Zoo. They’d had help from a Second Order Regum named Cortez, who’d used his contacts inside the Tyranns to cause an electrical outage one night inside the Zoo. Two additional contacts posing as guards had helped the three escape.
“You remember the story now?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Cord, Arlo, and Fallon went to work in the Department of Reclaiming Voyeur Moon, and now they run the branch that is responsible for writing and disseminating information to our people. Imagine that. Two Addonians and an Earth woman running a Ministry department branch.” Petroff smiled and shook his head. “And our people say we aren’t progressive.”
Gia smiled, but said nothing. She’d learned early on not to argue politics with anyone inside the Ministry, and especially not with her boss’s boss. He’d been born a Regum, and while she knew he didn’t agree with all their particular laws, he stood by them in public.
“You wouldn’t know this, but Cortez and I are old friends. Cortez is Cord’s cousin, but I only met Cord once, as a youth. I ran into Cortez a few weeks ago, and he told me that Cord, Arlo, and Fallon were looking to expand their branch. They want representatives from the Addonians, as well as Earth women who have your unique experiences.”
Goosebumps broke out over her arms. “Which experiences are those?”
His face took on a look of sympathy. “You escaped, too. From the holding cells. Do you know how rare that is?”
She swallowed hard. “I’ve been told it is, yes.”
Petroff wasn’t a touchy-feely sort of alien, but he placed a warm hand over her suddenly cold one. All the aliens felt overly warm to her when she had occasion to touch them, so the h
eat didn’t surprise her. But the tender look on his face did. He wasn’t an emotional man.
“I won’t pretend to know what you went through. But you can help others because of it. They need firsthand accounts for propaganda. Convincing our own people of what’s still going on over there is proving difficult. They don’t want to believe it. Now that we no longer control the planet, they’d rather simply forget it exists. But the more we allow the Tyranns to take, the easier it will be for them to invade Sera or Addo one day.”
“The combined armies of Sera and Addo could wipe out the Tyranns in a day.”
He nodded. “Probably true, but we want to find another way to stop them.”
He moved his hand, but even if he hadn’t, Gia would have pulled hers away. She knew all this. She listened to the talk inside the Ministry every day. And she agreed with him. But what could she do about it? She was only an Earth woman. They’d given her shelter and work, but she had no influence at all with their people.
“You want me to work for Cord, Arlo, and Fallon, don’t you?”
“Gia, I don’t want to lose you here, but your talents are wasted in this department.”
Honora made a sound halfway between a gasp and a snort. Gia had forgotten she was still in the office. Petroff turned his gaze on her. “Would you give us some privacy, please?”
Honora looked like Petroff had just asked her to strip naked. She turned on her heel and stormed from the room while Gia tried not to laugh. Then Petroff turned his attention back to Gia. “Do you really enjoy working for her?”
His tone was conspiratorial, and the humor in his eyes told her it was okay to speak honestly. “No. I hate it. She treats me like shit.”
Petroff nodded. “Exactly. And she always will. She hates Earth people. Thinks it’s the worst kind of insult that we allowed any of you inside this hallowed building to begin with.”
Now Gia laughed softly. Petroff was so unassuming, and that’s why she respected him and enjoyed working for him. “I’d miss you as my boss’s boss.”
“And I would miss you, but it’s only one floor below this one. And you won’t be treated like shit, as you say. You’d be valued, and you’d have another Earth woman to talk to.”
“That would be nice. But what is it they want me to do there?”
“Translate your experiences into written and electronic media for distribution to our people.”
But that means I’d have to relive them. “I don’t need to work for them in order to do that.”
“No, but I don’t imagine that will be the summation of your duties there. Gia, we need to stop the Tyranns.”
His face grew cold and hard, just that quickly, and the tone of his voice sent shivers down her spine once again.
“What they’re doing is unconscionable. It must be stopped. Most of the Regum are even willing to work with the Addonians to see this accomplished.”
The Addonians were a newer group, formed of people from Sera, Addo, and even those who had formerly identified with the Tyranns. “I can see that must be true, since you’re allowing them to work here in the Ministry now.”
The Addonians wanted to bridge the gap between the strict laws of the Regum and the out-of-control ways of the Tyranns. They weren’t looking to take over, merely to find an alternative solution to the wars that went on when the Tyranns were first formed. Too many people had already died for their cause, and the Addonians wanted no part of that. They weren’t looking to wage war, but rather only wanted to keep the peace, and offer the people of Sera and Addo another way of life than the strict Regum way.
When Gia first came to this planet, any group that opposed the Regum, no matter what their intentions, would never have been tolerated, let alone given work and shelter on Sera. But the Regum were so desperate now to put an end to the Tyranns and take back Voyeur Moon, that they overlooked the fact that the Addonians opposed their laws, as well.
“It’s not anything I thought I’d see in my lifetime,” he said. “We never should have given Voyeur Moon to the Tyranns. We were wrong to do so.”
“Why did that happen in the first place?” She wasn’t as up on their history as she should be, but that was because she’d chosen to ignore a lot of it. Even something as simple as thinking about Voyeur Moon made the nightmares worse.
He waved a hand in the air in an all encompassing gesture. “We thought it was a good idea at the time. Let them have the planet we didn’t want to colonize, and put an end to the wars. You weren’t here yet, obviously. But ask anyone over the age of five and they’ll tell you what it was like before the wars finally stopped.”
“So when you decided to give Voyeur Moon over to the Tyranns the wars on Sera and Addo did stop?”
“Yes. But it took all those years for the highest order of Regum to make the decision to simply give them the planet. And they were mostly in control of it by then, anyway. Yours wasn’t the first planet from which they took women for sexual pleasure, you know. They’ve been using Voyeur Moon for their own purposes for a while now.”
“I know. I was told about the Velone women.”
The women of Velone, a planet closer to Alpha Centauri than Earth, had been brought to Voyeur Moon about fifteen years ago to become courtesans for the people of all three planets. The Regum had raised their daughters from ancient times to believe that sex was painful, dirty, and nothing more than an unpleasant duty so they could bear their husbands children one day.
As a consequence, there had been revolts throughout their history, but not only to do with the laws surrounding sex. This recent revolt was the most pronounced in their history, from what she’d been told.
The Tyranns had formed about fifty years ago, but the original group’s intention was never to simply invade a planet, annihilate it, and take its inhabitants captive. They only wanted to be able to enjoy the sexual freedoms they’d been denied because of the Regum laws.
They built facilities for the Velone women that were said to be more lavish even than the quarters at the Zoo, and the women weren’t treated like prisoners. They were given every material comfort, and no one abused them or gang-raped them. They were paid well for their sexual services and had come to Voyeur Moon from Velone voluntarily.
“The Velone women were given jobs here in the Ministry,” he said. “After their star exploded.”
She knew that, too. The star around which Velone revolved had exploded a few years after the Velone women started coming to Voyeur Moon. The Regum had then retracted their policies concerning those facilities, and closed them all down. They used the star’s explosion as a way to prove that what the Tyranns had done was evil.
Gia decided not to point that out to Petroff at the moment.
“And that’s when the extreme faction began to take over,” he said. “After we took those women off Voyeur Moon and closed down the facilities.”
“Well, you did go back on your word to them.”
He sighed out loud. “I know we did. But you have to understand, Gia. We’re fighting centuries of tradition. It’s not an easy thing to turn one’s back on one’s upbringing.”
“I suppose not. But it’s good to hear a Regum say he understands this from the point of view of the men who simply wanted to be able to enjoy sex with a woman.”
Petroff colored, as she knew he would. “Most of us deny those urges. Again, it’s our upbringing.”
She’d denied her own urges for over two years now, but not because she’d had any other choice. The idea of making love for pleasure no longer felt possible. Not after what she’d been through. Gia tried to mentally force away the memories one more time. Maybe having another Earth woman to work with every day and talk to was the perfect solution? Fallon would understand. So would Cord and Arlo, for that matter. They’d been there, at least for a short while.
“While I can understand your upbringing and how difficult it is to get around it,” she said. “I do not and never will agree with what the Tyranns are now doing.”
“None of us do, either. Invading your planet because of some misguided notion that all of your women are porn stars and would be willing to have sex with anyone and everyone … it’s preposterous.”
Gia nodded. She couldn’t speak right now. At his words, the memories came fast and furious. There was no way to stop them this time.
“And then they realized their mistake. Oh how magnanimous of them. So instead of taking steps to return your women and fix your dying planet, they formed an extreme faction that now does even worse atrocities. Idiots.”
Petroff didn’t know the extent of what Gia had endured during her brief stay in the holding cells. She’d never told anyone the entire story. She wiped the sweat off her forehead and then clasped her hands in her lap, under the table, and tried to keep breathing.
“Apparently, this faction didn’t care that they’d misjudged the Earth women. They built the holding cells, and as if allowing men of all three planets to simply take your women from them and use them in any way they wanted to, without rules or restrictions wasn’t bad enough, they sent your men to the mines on Addo and denied them enough food or water to survive the grueling work.”
Gia nodded. Her entire family had been taken at the same time, and it was only by sheer luck she’d found out what had happened to the rest of them. Mercifully, her sisters and mother had died from becoming sick in the close confines of the holding cells, but without having first gone through what she had. Her father and two brothers had been sent to the mines and were all dead within months.
Gia swallowed hard as tears threatened. Petroff knew what had happened to her family, but he was on a roll now. She knew he didn’t mean to bring up painful memories for her by reiterating all this. He was simply very passionate about the subject, and for that she was grateful. Having a sympathetic leader was what had kept her safe and hidden here for two years.
