“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 exp
ression… 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 ha
d 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?”
His Untamed Mate (Swarii Mates Book 1) Page 7
