She squinted as she thought back since Mary had arrived there. “Since when has Mary ever been plugged?” she asked.
“Never,” he replied, and then gave a couple of throaty chuckles that made her realize what his joke was.
Her lip curled up over her teeth in a sneer. “Gross, Peyton. I don’t need to know any of the details concerning your… thing.”
“It’s like a baby’s arm holding an apple,” he described teasingly, enjoying her disgust as he adjusted her comfortably on his lap.
“Oh, gag!” she whined, and then twitched when she felt Peyton’s fingers under the rim of the plug.
“A little sensitive today?” he implored, apparently noticing her twitch. After a second, he asked, scandalized, “Wait—are you aroused?”
“Only to the idea of death,” she whimpered.
“You’re aroused. You’re… wet,” he noted, appalled.
She ground her teeth. “Can you not torture me?” she demanded.
“Torture’s kind of the program,” he explained, twisting the plug around slightly and then tugging it back and forth. “I’m taking it out the easy way, rather than just ripping it out of you.”
It was impossible not to pay attention to every movement Peyton was making. Ellie moaned—not groaned, but moaned. She clapped her hands over her mouth, horrified.
“Whoa…” Peyton noticed, obviously feeling a little awkward at this point. “What’s got you in the mood?” Suddenly he demanded, “You’ve been away from the supply room door, right?”
“Oh dear lord, duh!” she snapped. “I’ve been in the prison the whole time with the Swarii prisoners. Then something happened. I think I was electrocuted or something by a wire. I’ve been feeling weird ever since.”
“I think you liked being electrocuted,” was his reply.
“Urgh, Peyton,” she nagged, kicking her feet uncomfortably. “Shut up already. But seriously—some of them spoke English down there, and we were just chatting, and then all of the sudden I got zapped, and one of them started acting really strangely, and he even tried to attack one of the others, and—”
“I love a good story poorly described,” Peyton grunted curtly. “It’s like when you were describing that movie with that guy who was in love with that girl from that other movie and there was this evil guy after them that’d once played that doctor on that one TV show.”
“Christ, what do I look like?” she retorted tersely. “A poet?”
“So what’d they say to you in English when you were down there?” he asked, continuing to play with the plug.
She nearly didn’t want to describe the event any further. The thought of Graham made her hot all over again. “The Swarii commander—and oh!”
Peyton’s actions all stopped. “Are you about to come?” he asked, his legs feeling frozen stiff under her. “Mary would not like this at all…”
Enough was enough. This had to end already, she decided. “Stop being so damn nice, then, Peyton!” she snapped. “Take this goddamn thing out of me, or I swear to God I will be the one ripping your nuts off!”
She didn’t know what she was asking for, but she swore she saw stars after Peyton did exactly what he was told and yanked the plug out of her tender rectum without any further ado. “Sweet baby Jesus!” she hissed.
“Yeah,” he said, acknowledging her discomfort, as if it wasn’t enough that she was currently writhing and digging her toes into the floor, trying to deal with the startling amount of soreness. “Ass sex is not a good option for you, apparently. Wuss.” He gave a laugh. “Now, what the hell is it with this commander guy?”
“Never mind,” she simpered miserably. She remembered that Peyton was paranoid about men, and there was probably nothing about what had happened that wouldn’t get Peyton’s hackles up, especially if she told the truth and explained the passion that she had felt, or the animal urge to mate with Graham. Peyton would just gladly step in the way of her ever seeing him again and figuring out just what had happened down there.
She picked herself back up on her feet and pulled up her panties swiftly. “It was just weird that they spoke English at all. I guess they were holed up with a bunch of slaves on some sort of mining planet. I didn’t even know that there were mining planets.” She grabbed her jumpsuit and stepped back into it.
She glanced over and saw Peyton looking thoughtful. “I think I heard something about it. I’ve heard some slaves on the outside tell us we have it easy. I couldn’t imagine things being any harder, but who knows?” He grunted. “Keep me in the loop. They say anything else interesting?”
“Nah, we didn’t talk a whole lot. I was mostly just working,” she lied dismissively, zipping her suit back up.
“You’re not… attracted to them, are you?” Peyton drawled out suspiciously, lifting an eyebrow. Damn, he was good at guessing.
She snorted. “What? Gross,” she replied. “They’re not even human, Peyton. Be serious, here.” She grabbed her utility belt and started to strap it on her waist. “Besides, the guards are right there, watching. Even if I wanted to have a romantic picnic with one of them, it’s not quite the venue,” she added with extra sarcasm.
He gave a small chuckle and agreed. “Right. Just… be careful down there, okay? You don’t have to talk to them. It’s probably better if you didn’t,” he said. “Keep as much distance as you can.”
“As much as I can manage,” she promised. Luckily, he couldn’t see her fingers crossed behind her back. She had already bought a ticket down this particular rabbit hole. Peyton didn’t have to know it.
Chapter Two
“It’s okay, Commander. You’re going to get through this,” Braum said, patting Graham consolingly on the shoulder. Braum was the only mated man on his crew, so Graham knew he probably had an inkling about how horrible he felt, inside and out.
Graham was no stranger to getting out of bad situations. He’d been captured seven times before, and had escaped seven times, and nothing about this situation had seemed more hopeless than any of the times he had been captured before.
Except now he had a short timeframe to think of an escape plan, and his mind and heart weren’t set on escape. All he could think about was the tiny, goddess-like slave girl who had saved his life that morning.
His mate.
How he could have possibly found a mate in the depths of a Frian dungeon system was either part of his streak of good luck, or the beginning of a new strain of bad luck. It was impossible to tell. He found himself wanting to be angry about finding her as a mate. She wasn’t a Swarii; it shouldn’t have been possible to mate with her in the first place.
Still, he was obviously battling ‘the sickness.’ It felt like his men could easily cook an egg on his forehead, and he was sporting a raging hard-on that ached like it was set to explode.
Worst of all was the twitchy restlessness he felt in his every nerve. The others were moving gingerly around him, knowing that he was on edge, but they couldn’t have an idea what was going through his mind. His mind couldn’t let go of the fact that his mate was somewhere in the building, completely unguarded and vulnerable, and he was down in a locked dungeon, unable to protect her. He tried to think of anything else, and he couldn’t. He could barely remember what the mission was that had landed them here to begin with.
“How’s he doing?” Fie asked, crossing his arms in front of his chest as he jerked his chin in Graham’s direction.
“He’s…” Braum attempted to respond, but apparently the news wasn’t good. “Uh, surviving. If we can get the little thing down here again, he’d start to snap out of it a little. If he can just mate with her, that would take a lot of the pressure off, obviously. These are not ideal conditions for this to have happened.”
“Are we sure that it did?” Jio, the youngest of them, asked as he stepped forward. “I mean, she’s human. We know quite a bit about humans, right? This hasn’t come up in research before.”
Fie, the doctor on the crew, nodded and stretche
d the blond goatee that was beginning to grow. “True,” he admitted. “Our species are very close, but not so close that we’d have Mak-Tah with one of them. So, my guess is that she’s a whole different species that’s human-like and even closer to ours than the actual humans are. A species our scientists simply haven’t come across before. It’s not that unthinkable. After all, we find similar species that live in the same environment all the time. Sure, that’s normally not with intelligent lifeforms… but I have two very close types of honeybee in my gardens at home… So…”
“Wow,” Jio said with an appreciative whistle. “This could be huge. I mean, with the female shortage… if there was another species that we could breed with that would fill that necessity, then—?”
“Well, let’s not build the dam hoping for a river, here,” Braum said, snapping his fingers to get the others’ attention. “Right now, we have a few things we need to think about first. Escaping is one of them. Next, we need to facilitate a rescue mission for that female, because if this is the real thing, he’s only going to get worse.”
“Well, she left a big bag of tools,” Thorton said with a shrug of his shoulders before running his tongue over his lip, which was newly fattened from one of Graham’s recent attacks. “If we can’t figure out an escape with all that stuff, then we’re too worthless to live. We’ve done a lot more with a lot less. As long as we can get him back in sorts, we’re gonna be golden,” he announced, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in Graham’s direction.
“Just give him some time. He’ll come around a bit,” Braum assured.
“I don’t see how,” Thorton replied doubtfully. “I mean, think about it—she’s a slave girl. For all we know, she’s getting raped and manhandled even as we speak, and he’s gotta know that. Imagine what that’d do to a guy’s psyche? We have no idea what she goes through on a daily basis, but from what we saw this morning, I can tell you that her life ain’t ideal.”
Graham shuddered at Thorton’s words, wanting to rip his own hair out from the roots. He was right—Graham was so useless to her right now. What could he do for her? Why would fate curse her with such a worthless mate?
Braum smacked the back of Thorton’s head. “Shut up, Thorton! Don’t you know when to just keep your yap shut for two seconds! He can hear us, you know. He’s sick, not dead.”
All conversation ceased when they heard something outside the door. Graham shot to his feet and was already to the entrance by the time the door opened and revealed his tiny mate, looking around pensively.
She looked feverish, but actually a little better than she had when he’d seen her last. She was wearing a different suit, this one in two pieces rather than one, and her hair was pulled up off her neck. Her movements were much sleeker and smoother than they had been before, as well, and she walked without any hint of tenderness.
When the door shut behind her, locking her in with them once again, he came up to her. “Hello,” he grated to her. His voice sounded as broken as his mind.
She was looking up at him wearily, as if she wasn’t sure if being as close to him as she was now was actually safe. “Feeling better?” she asked suspiciously.
He hadn’t been seconds ago—all he’d wanted to do then was curl into a ball and press himself against the cold wall. But now that she was here, in front of him, safe and in one piece, he felt enough of his tension ease to actually function. “Yes,” he replied, trying to work up a smile rather than a grimace. “I’m sorry about before. I sort of lost control for a moment—I’m just glad it was more on Thorton than on you. But I apologize if I made you nervous or afraid of me,” he told her sincerely. “I wouldn’t want that.”
As if he could ever hurt her. Every cell in his body was crying for him to hold her close and never let her go.
“What happened, anyway?” she asked, her face pinching with confusion and cynicism. She went back to the control panel, looking like she was planning to go right back to work.
He spun around, looking for the pair of electrical gloves that he had seen Thorton throw out of the bag minutes before when he was making a list of materials they could potentially use to escape. He found the gloves—now forgotten on the floor—and picked them up and walked them over to her. “Here,” he said, before she could reach her fingers into the box filled with wires again. With the way his luck was going right now, he wouldn’t be surprised if this time the wires succeeded in frying her to death. “Can you wear these this time, please?” he asked her. “You forgot them.”
She looked up at him and then smiled awkwardly. She pulled the gloves from his hand but admitted as she was taking them, “I don’t really use them.”
“Maybe you should start,” he replied crisply. As if his mate working wasn’t bad enough, she was set to do it as unsafely as she could. Of course, fate would match him up with a woman as stubborn as he was. It figured.
She looked up at him as if she was going to fight about it, but then rolled her eyes. Apparently, the fight wasn’t worth it to her, because she unhappily slid the gloves on. “Fine. Can we go back to important stuff now? Like explain to me what happened,” she demanded, just as tersely. “Except this time don’t freak out over a couple of sparks…” she added dismissively.
“A couple of sparks?” he guffawed. “A couple of…” He locked his jaw, trying to calm himself. His nerves were too on edge, and he knew his patience was nearly nonexistent. “There was lightning shooting out of there!” he argued, pointing at the control box. He put up his thumb and forefinger together so closely that a flea would have suffocated. “You were this close to being crispy-crittered,” he reminded.
“Whatever,” she doubted, rolling her eyes again at him.
“Whatever?” he echoed, putting his hands over his eyes.
“Yeah. I—don’t—care,” she enunciated pedantically. “So whatever you say. I’m trying to get to the bottom of something here, and you keep trying to derail the conversation.”
She couldn’t be any more frustrating if she tried. Maybe she was trying to be difficult on purpose; he couldn’t quite tell. Either way, this attitude wasn’t going to serve her well in the future.
“We don’t feel strange because of the near-death experience,” he finally said, gathering his patience. “We feel strange because we touched skin-to-skin. Perhaps that was my fault—I had merely reacted at the time in a natural way, to get you away from harm, but we did touch, and I’m as surprised as anyone about the connection that happened afterward.”
She just blinked at him in a very judgmental way, as if she was deciding whether or not he was being silly or stupid.
The look made him further explain, “It’s hard to explain. Humans don’t have anything like it—if I remember correctly, they choose their mates at random. If they like someone’s face, that’s really all it takes, and then they follow around that person until they tire of it.”
“Everything you think is wrong, but continue,” she said suspiciously.
“Well,” he continued, not stopping to have a cultural heart-to-heart, “Swarii do not do that. We have fated matches. When you touch your fated match, it will spark Mak-Tah. Very roughly translated, ‘the Union.’ It sparks a physical, biological need to be with and mate with that particular person, and no one else.”
“And that’s what those guys think happened?” she asked, gesturing to his crew, who had taken their seats against the far wall and were watching their conversation much like one might attend a play.
“No,” he said, frowning. “That’s what happened between us. I’m answering the question of what happened. The Union happened. To us,” he clarified, pointing to him, then to her, then to himself again, trying to illustrate an attachment. “Don’t you… feel that?” he asked, beginning to worry after she just gazed blankly at him for a few long seconds.
“I don’t know,” she merely said, dubious. “What happens if we just… you know… ignore it?”
“Ignore it?” he echoed.
“Yeah
. You know, you stay on your side of the cell, I stay on mine, and we ignore the fact that we’re suffering some sort of shell-shock from being electrocuted without tying any Swarii voodoo to the incident.”
He didn’t know the word ‘voodoo’ yet, but he had a feeling she thought he was talking about nonsense. She was the most stubborn person alive. It was clear she was feverish, she had to feel the sickness as well! Why was she so set against facing fact?
He supposed he could just take her. They were mates, for God’s sake, it was his right to mate with her as often as he wanted. But he didn’t want her to fear him, either, which put them both in a bind. He couldn’t force her to mate with him—that would lead to a very poor start to their bond, to say the very least. “You can’t ignore it!” he found himself snapping at her on behalf of his aching member. “Like it or not, you are my mate, and I am yours, and nothing will change that. If we don’t mate together, we will become overcome with this sickness we already feel. It will only get worse until we are both completely out of our senses. Some people don’t even live long after their mates die! They die from the withdrawal! Our blood is drugged with the need for each other. Pretending it never happened is not an option!”
“Look, Crazy,” she said, jabbing her small index finger against his chest. “I’m not your mate. You don’t mean anything to me. You’re Jazeel’s party favor and I’m his favorite slave. We’ve got no future, and nothing in common. You don’t even know my name!”
He was going to argue this point very firmly at first, but then he realized that he didn’t know her name yet. She hadn’t offered it. After staring at her for a long moment, he sighed and asked, defeated, “What is your name?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she sneered.
“Of course it matters!” he snapped. “Stop being so unreasonable! I know your name isn’t ‘Pet,’ or whatever it was Jazeel calls you.”
His Untamed Mate (Swarii Mates Book 1) Page 9
