Never Submit! The Swarii Brides, Book One

by Korey Mae Johnson

  “Nothing,” Ellie said, her head snapping in his direction.

  Peyton squinted at her as if she had to be up to mischief. “Are you lying to me, now?” Peyton asked, marching dangerously close to her.

  Mary put a calming hand on Peyton’s chest. “You need to chill out, Sugar,” she told him. “We were just talking—woman issues. Besides, you need to give her a break. She didn’t anger Jazeel on purpose. Believe me. And she’s entitled to screw up every now and then. She’s only human!”

  He grunted, but seemed to calm. “You need to get back to work, Ellie.” He watched her mouth open in protest, but he put a finger on her lips, which silenced her. “I don’t care how sore you are. There’re lots of jobs that need doin’—Mary’s sewin’ machine needs to be fixed, the oven’s having troubles, the air conditioner on level two is off…” She sighed as he continued the list.

  What she would do for a car to repair! Just a car! She missed being up to her elbows in grease, listening to her uncle and her father’s cursing or her cousin’s tools blare and shrill from across the room… With the duties Peyton liked to give her, she might as well have been just an electrician.

  “Are you listening?” Peyton snapped.

  Nope, she wasn’t. Her eyes climbed to his face so she could stare wearily at him.

  “First thing I want you to do, Little Girl, is go downstairs and fix the damn locking mechanism in the prison cell.”

  Her eyes popped wide with interest. “I thought that there’re Swarii down there?” she replied.

  “The guards will let you in there. They know it needs fixin,’” Peyton shrugged. “Just told me this mornin’ about it. Though, if you’re nervous, go ahead and wait. The Swarii are gonna be executed on Wednesday, anyway.”

  “Jazeel’s getting married on Wednesday,” Ellie replied flatly. “Right?”

  “I know. He’s a real romantic,” he snorted sarcastically. “Thinks a Swarii execution will be a real nice weddin’ gift. Besides, the crowd will already be in town for it, and he wants the event to have an audience. Jazeel just told me about it.” He pointed 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…”

  Peyton raised his hand to silence her. “We’re not having a movie night right now. Did you want to get that job done, or should I call down to the guards and tell them to suck it until the cell’s clean?”

  “I’ll go,” Ellie said lightly, wanting, on second thought, to get another good look at the creatures. They were doomed to die, but she knew she’d be up all night if she didn’t have another look at them, to see if she could spot something that made them indisputably alien. “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 looked over longingly at Mary, who blushed knowingly at the look. “I need to talk to Mary about a thing or two—real fast. In her empty workshop…” He took Mary’s hand and pulled her playfully out to the hallway while Ellie groaned and rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah. I bet.” She stuck a finger down her throat to illustrate a gag before the door shut the couple out of her sight.

  Suddenly, the thought of her and the commander doing exactly what she’d seen Peyton and Mary doing that morning (and probably what they were doing right now) slammed into her head, jarring her. “Whoa, Ellie,” she warned herself, walking from the room to get her tools and to change into her working clothes. “Don’t start fantasying about a dead man. There’s nothing good at the end of that tunnel!”

  Chapter Three

  By the time Ellie made it down to the prison (which was really a ‘dungeon’ as it was on the lowest floor, was cold and not very well lit, and had absolutely no comforts for the prisoners), she looked very different than she had earlier that morning. She was constantly changing clothes when it didn’t look like she would have to be in Jazeel’s company for a couple of hours. She wore panties, a bra, and work pants comparable to what she used to wear at her family’s garage back home.

  Ellie, simply put, looked far more comfortable than she really was. She actually had to walk down some stairs to get to the cell, and during that process she thought she was going to die.

  “You guys need something fixed?” she said brightly to the guards posted outside, who sat all day in something that looked to her like comfortable La-Z-Boy recliners. They looked at her with disdain, checking out her utility belt.

  One of the guards finally began to speak in what she could only guess was an attempt at English. It was horrible, but she did make out a couple of words and choice phrases like, ‘you stupid human cunt’ and ‘don’t know what a full day of work is’… She hoped he was talking mainly to himself. Finally, he stretched, got himself out of his chair, and walked to the door to open it for her. The door only opened halfway, and the lock took at least seven tries before it worked at all.

  She walked in and turned around, watching the same guard attempting to close the door. “You’re… not coming in here with me?” she asked, confused. She quickly looked at the Swarii, who were on the far side of the cell, huddled together, and glaring suspiciously at her.

  “No. Go fuck yourself. Pound on the door for a while and we might let you out,” is what she believed he grumbled before he slammed the door in her face.

  “Dick,” she muttered before she slowly turned around and looked back in the Swarii’s direction. She expected them to be where they had been the first time she had looked, but now they were much closer; they had very quietly snuck up on her. “Hi,” she greeted, trying her best not to gulp and give her nervousness away. She cleared her throat and focused back on her work.

  She pulled out a key from her belt loop that helped her uncap the locking panel, which was close enough to the floor that she had to get down on her knees to work on it.

  Her ears were open, hoping she would hear them use shal’ta. Instead, she heard whispers made in a completely different language which sounded, to her untrained ears, pretty akin to Gaelic. This was surprising… She had always figured that speakers of shal’ta—like the Frians—would never have felt the need to develop their own spoken language.

  She looked into the panel and immediately cursed her rotten luck. The panel was, as Peyton would have put it, ‘fucked up.’ It needed to be completely rewired, completely reprogrammed. It was going to take her hours.

  She sighed in sympathy for her throbbing rectum which, even though science probably would have assured her differently, was not feeling like it would ever get accustomed to having the plug in it.

  Suddenly, there was English being spoken above her head. “Are you okay?”

  Startled, she looked up—way up— and saw the Commander himself, leaning up against the wall above her, his arms crossed, looking nearly like he was trying to be cool on purpose.

  He spoke English? How…? She found herself getting excited; she loved listening to her own language when it wasn’t insulting her, or ordering her, or cooing at her to stay still while her nipples or bottom were played with.

  She wanted to lament about the butt plug, and she wanted to further lament how much trouble she’d be in if she took it out, she wanted so much to get some sympathy about it—but she didn’t mention it. It was, after all, mortifying. So, instead, she simply pointed to the wall and said, “Yeah, this is just gonna take me forever.”

  “No, I mean… You’re not too bruised, I hope?” he asked, his tone actually sounded soft and concerned. “You look like you’re still in pain.”

  “I don’t normally talk about my bottom with strangers,” she replied coyly, blushing as she took her electrical gloves out of a pocket in her utility belt. “You’re not going to… kill me, or rape me, or anything I should be worried about, right?”

  He looked surprised for a moment, but then he gave a sing
ular, quiet laugh. “No. Not you. Not at all. I owe you, actually—you know… For making Jazeel miss his mark…”

  “You don’t owe me,” she informed frankly, shaking her head as she pulled out the electrical pliers. “I probably just gave you three extra days, tops. Jazeel plans to kill you at his wedding ceremony.”

  She looked up at him to see his reaction. It certainly wasn’t one of surprise; it was much more like amusement. He slid down the wall and sat down next to her. With her kneeling, and him sitting, he was still easily taller than her. “You don’t say? I thought he wanted to tempt us into a deal…”

  She shrugged. “I wouldn’t trust my master as far as I could toss him.” She looked at him, her eyebrows raised. “Why? Were you hoping for a deal?”

  He shook his head. “No, but normally pretending like we are buys us about three days more to get out of these situations.” He motioned to the room around them. “The game is to avoid torture during these little visits. But, if we have three more days, anyway, we won’t bother. They normally like to have their victims in non-tortured wellness before they cut their heads off. They’re odd that way.”

  She snorted with disbelief. “Don’t even pretend you’ve been captured before.”

  “This will be our seventh time,” he admitted with a sincere nod of his head.

  “If it was, you wouldn’t be telling me,” she said, cutting a couple of wires with a small pair of scissors then ripping 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 apt escape artists. Have him kill you in five minutes rather than three days. See how you get out of that. Lots of humans will do that, you know—sell you out for the clothes on your dead body.” And that much was true. She had seen one servant girl sell out another girl into a whipping to get a second cookie after dinner.

  “I don’t think you will,” he replied, shrugging carelessly.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because you hate your master and because you’re not really human.” He said this so sing-songishly, that the wording didn’t actually settle into her mind for a couple of seconds.

  Not really human. As if. Ridiculous! Still, it was unnerving that she had so easily given away her true feelings for Jazeel. She had not acted well enough—what had she given away? “Why do you say that?” she asked, trying to be as calm as possible.

  “I can give you two reasons. One—your eyes are far too pretty to be a human’s,” he told her. “I’ve met a lot of human servants while in dungeons. Enough to learn your most common language,” he explained. “And you don’t look like any of them.”

  “We’re all as unique as snowflakes,” she educated, continuing to cut and pull out wires until they were massing into a giant pile next to her. “Of course you haven’t seen one like me.”

  “Or one that smelled so sweet.” He smiled a smile that could have knocked her socks off—it was dazzling.

  She blushed. “Thanks.” She hadn’t ever been hit on before… When she was working in the garage, she repelled men—probably because her hair normally was such a mess or she had big, black goops of mud or grease on her face, in her fingernails, in her hair, and on her clothes. Not much of a catch. But if she HAD ever been hit on, she was sure it wouldn’t have been by a man so attractive.

  “It’s not a compliment. 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 I can tell the difference in the way they smell, and the way we do, and you don’t smell like them. It’s subtle, but…”

  “Creepy. Humans have the decency not to go around smelling each other,” she nagged, raising her head aloofly. “Then what do I smell like, then, Mr. Smartypants?”

  “I’m not sure. And its Masterson, actually,” he corrected. “Commander Graham Masterson.”

  “I was insulting you, Commander Graham Masterson,” she mocked. When she saw a small flash of hurt appear on his face, she added, “Lightly insulting.” She grinned at him until he grinned back. She couldn’t believe she was trying to hedge her words so she didn’t hurt his feelings. “So, what do you think I am, then?”

  “I don’t know. Not human,” he replied.

  “I was born and raised on Earth,” she assured.

  “Good for you. You’re still not human.” He looked pleasantly sure of himself as he stared at her, and the more he looked at her, the surer he seemed.

  “And you got this from my eyes and my smell?” she chuckled, shaking her head skeptically.

  “Yes. And the fact that you can hear shal’ta and are keeping that from your master,” he added austerely, as a side note. “That’s also how I know you have no loyalty to him.”

  Her face went white in a flash, and she dropped her pliers. She took a moment, took a breath, and then decided to try to play this cool. There was no way she could make such a crazy mistake that would let him know that. He simply had to have pulled the idea out of the air. He couldn’t have picked up on it! She picked up the pliers and tried to play it cool, as much as she could when her hands were basically shaking from excitement—not the kind of excitement that one gets at the circus, mind you, but the kind 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 said monotonously, twisting a couple of wires loose and trying to ignore him.

  “Which is why I don’t think you’re hu—” he went on to say, but she cut him off by punching him in the arm, as quick and as hard as she could. His bicep felt like steel, and it certainly hurt her knuckles far more than she hurt him.

  She rubbed her hand through her electrical glove and hissed, “Stop saying that. I don’t know shal’ta. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Shut up. Don’t talk to me.”

  “You know, half of our conversation has been with shal’ta,” he informed. “You just weren’t paying attention. You only thought I was speaking.”

  She put her pliers down, locking her jaw angrily at this. 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 began to threaten, brandishing her pliers at him as if they were a kitchen knife.

  He looked down at the pliers and began to laugh. “I was just kidding. I was speaking the whole time. I just wanted you to admit it.”

  She threw the pliers as hard as she could at his head, smacking him square in the nose. Which surprised her—not that she was pissed enough to do it, but because she was aiming for his shoulder and missed that badly at that short of distance. It still did what it was supposed to do—it made him stop laughing. The downside was that the pliers had given him a fresh scratch across the bridge of his nose, and he looked pissed, as if it had indeed occurred to him how close that was to taking out one of his eyes.

  She scrambled to get away from him, and when she did, she fell right onto her ass and, with the resulting pain, her body froze until she sucked in air through her teeth. He was hovering over her, looking at the blood on his fingers. He wiped the blood on his pants efficiently, swearing, she was sure, in his native language as the soldiers nearby laughed.

  He was practically spitting he was so angry, “You ever throw something at my head again, little girl, 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. “You okay?”

  “No,” she wheezed, then winced and finally changed her mind. “Yes.”

  “No, you’re not,” he argued, watching her lay flat against the floor as if she wanted a bulldozer to rip through the wall and run her cleanly over. “I’m bleeding and not in so much pain.”

  “More like… Discomfort to a high degree,” she corrected. Finally, she sighed, and merely said, “Don’t press me. It’s embarrassing. I’m just going to… lay on the floor here for a moment in misery. Then I�
��ll get up and finish this job in misery. And then, I don’t know… I’ll go lick Jazeel’s feet or do some serious kissing up, which will be miserable, but worth it if I can get something out of it.”

  He shook his head, completely lost. “I’m still confused.”

  “Good. Help me up.” She stuck her gloved hand in the air. Immediately, and with extremely little effort, he helped her into a standing position without her even having to use her muscles at all. She adjusted her twisted clothes, impressed at the level of obvious strength she felt in his arm. “Thank you,” she said, lifting up her shirt collar and groaning as she moved back down to her knees.

  “Are you…”

  “Stop asking,” she snapped, and then reached to grab her pliers again. “Okay, so, how’d you know I speak shal’ta, then, if you didn’t learn that through blatant trickery? What even gave you that stupid idea?”

  “You mean, that correct presumption? The completely unvacant expression on your face. You have to get far better at pretending to be stupid. Your eyes reacted to everything you heard,” he lectured, his voice surprisingly stern. “I know an eavesdropper when I see one.”

  “Luckily Jazeel doesn’t,” she said with a sigh, feeling foolish and ungraceful. She always thought she was so damned clever. “You’re still wrong, by the way. I’m human. I’m just a freak.”

  “How many coincidences need to surround you before you stop calling yourself human?” he grinned, shaking his head at her stubbornness.

  “A lot,” she assured definitely, dismissing the whole idea as she started popping off her gloves in order to put in a couple of new wires without the rubber fingers of the glove getting in her way.

  The commander just watched her with the sort of expression people have when they watch a cat they like try to cross a busy street. “Isn’t that… extremely dangerous?” he drawled, looking like he was about to grab her back at any second, but was worrying that if he moved too quickly she would get zapped by some severe wattage.