Never Submit!

The Swarii Brides, Book One

By

Korey Mae Johnson

©2012 by Blushing Books® and Korey Mae Johnson

Copyright © 2012 by Blushing Books® and Korey Mae Johnson

All rights reserved.  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Blushing Books®,

a subsidiary of

ABCD Graphics and Design

977 Seminole Trail #233

Charlottesville, VA 22901

The trademark Blushing Books® is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Never Submit!

The Swarii Brides, Book One

Johnson, Korey

eBook ISBN: 9 978-1-60968-569-0

Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

Images Provided by

© Can Stock Photo Inc. / kovalvs

© Can Stock Photo Inc. / denisov

Blushing Publications thanks you whole-heartedly for your purchase with us!

There are plenty more stories such as the one you’ve purchased from Blushing Books!  Visit our online store to view our might selection!

http://www.blushingbooks.com

This book is intended for adults only.  Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.  Nothing in this book should be interpreted as advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

Chapter One

The first time Ellie met a Swarii, it just happened to be Commander Graham Masterson. At that time she had been Jazeel’s prima, his favorite servant girl, for only a week. She had been his servant for much longer—ever since she was abducted from Earth, right out of her bed. Before then, she knew nothing of the Swarii, or Frians, or of any other alien culture, for that matter.

Earthlings didn’t believe the universe revolved around them exactly, but they did have a deep-seated yet unfounded belief that the universe as they knew it was only as old as their planet, and more than likely revolved around their sun. They also had come to believe that other species existing in the universe was surely on the impossible side of improbable, and that the probability of seeing one alien species, let alone MORE than one of them, was so astronomically minuscule it wasn’t worth mentioning, let alone preparing for.

Not that Ellie could have ever mentally prepared herself for the life of a prima, nor for a life as a simple maid. The moment she saw what she was expected to wear, she had wanted to crawl into a bag and die.

She had worked in her father’s garage most of her life, and quit high school to do it. She wore jumpsuits every day—it was all about comfort. Even her panties were larger than need be, mostly because she’d known nobody would ever see them.

Wearing what was all but a thong was something she knew she’d have trouble getting used to. It wasn’t actually a thong, but in Ellie’s mind the two types of clothing were close kin to one another. Her breasts were covered by light, white fabric, but her stomach area was completely exposed, her bare skin showing well below the top of her hips. Her only other garment was a gold-chain belt from which cloth panels hung down to cover both her front and her backside.

The outfit was humiliating, to say the least, to anyone born outside of ancient Egypt. And even there it might have been considered indecent.

She had been primped all morning—she had been scrubbed hard in a basin full of perfumed water by the other maidens. Her hair was conditioned, and all of her pubic hair was completely and most permanently removed, leaving her feeling more naked than she ever had before. And as if to intensify that awkward feeling, they even rubbed a soft layer of oil on her skin to make it glisten.

It was the first time in her life that she actually felt attractive, and what an unfortunate time it was for that.

She had seen her master before—he was tall, probably eight-feet in height, and he was humanoid, but he was also quite reptilian. He looked like something people were fighting in a video game somewhere. He had picked her right out of the line coming off of the merchant spaceship that very morning. She was actually frightened by all the deafening engine noise in the hanger. She could barely hear, only watch, and what she saw wasn’t any consolation. Her new master, Jazeel, had her led back to the palace by guards just as ugly as himself.

She didn’t know why the lizard wanted her to dress so sexy, but she was determined to put her foot down about it.

“Get into your clothes, lil’ girl,” the prime—the head man-servant, Peyton, told her when he opened the door and saw her wrapped in so many towels after her bath that he could barely see a bit of skin. “Jazeel wants to see you.” He walked to the nearby counter to pour himself a glass of water from a pitcher.

“Tell him to go screw himself,” she grumbled. “I’m not wearing that. Lots of the other girls are wearing more.”

He heaved a frustrated sigh, knowing that the girl was going to have a very rude awakening if that continued to be her attitude. Jazeel, nor any Frian he had ever met, was someone who would accept being told to screw off by anyone. “Those girls aren’t as pretty. Jazeel picked out this outfit for you himself. Wear it,” he ordered brusquely.

“You wear it,” she argued, crossing her arms firmly across her chest. She had been caged for the last month in a pen that even a dog would have felt cramped in, antagonized and poked by a man who looked like he had descended from something the Earth naturally got rid of 20 million years ago. The last thing she was going to fear was a human, not even one like Peyton, who, back on Earth, was not the type you’d want to enter a pig wrestlin’ contest with.

He slammed down his water cup and spun to point a firm finger in her direction. “Do it, little girl, right now. I can’t afford your disobedience.” It was true—he couldn’t. Jazeel wasn’t patient, and any of the girls’ disobedience was considered Peyton’s fault. He had the right and responsibility to force the girls to obey, which was not an easy task, but one that he had yet to fail at. If he wanted to stay in his house and in his privileged station, he needed to trust all the girls to cooperate.

“These are barely clothes,” she cried, waving in the direction of the outfit. “It’s ridiculous. I’m not Princess Leia. What if somebody sees?”

“Someone seein’ is the point. You have to the count of three.” Not that he had to bother counting—it was pretty clear that she was just going to glare at him throughout the countdown, as pointless as it was. Did she think she was going to be able to fight him off? Did she think that if she stuck to her guns, nobody would force her to do anything? Did she expect to get back to Earth this way?

One. Two. Three. To her satisfaction, he turned away from her, seeming like he was going in the direction of the door. Instead, he walked to a closet; he disappeared for a second before he came back out with a leather strap in his hand.

“Peyton…” she warned, her eyes widening with horror as he marched determinedly over to her. She backed up quickly until she hit the wall behind her. “Peyton!” she cried, as if she could wake him up from an evil trance. He grabbed her arm and forced her to the bed, easily plucking the towels from her body despite her struggles and letting them fall to the floor.

After that, she was more concerned about covering her exposed parts than keeping herself from being hauled over Peyton’s tall, sturdy knees. She thought only one thing: no man had ever seen her naked before.

CRACK. The leather came down on the soft, pale flesh of her bare bottom.

She screamed. She couldn’t have imagined leather striking her skin would hurt so much. She twisted around, trying to grab his arm to keep him from swinging the strap again, but he just pinned her wrist uncomfortably down with his other elbow. CRACK!

This stripe seemed to hurt more, somehow, than the one before. And then that nasty leather started smacking her skin in a rhythmic procession. She fought and screamed until she was suddenly struck by the pure hopelessness of her situation—she was not anywhere near as strong as Peyton. She was hundreds of thousands of light years away from her home. She was a slave. And there was nothing she could do about it other than to submit.

Whether because of this fact, or because of the pain, she began to cry heartfelt sobs.

Still, Peyton continued on for a while, despite the sobs and despite the shrieks. He was driving a point home—she needed to learn to shut up and obey for her own good.

It did end eventually. When it was over, he pushed her off of his lap and, grabbing her arm before she could nurse herself, shoved her in the direction of her outfit. “Dress,” he ordered. When she reached behind her to nurse her swollen cheeks, he snapped, “Don’t nurse yourself. Dress.”

He wet a washcloth and brought it to her. It certainly didn’t take long before she dressed—there was hardly anything to dress with. When she was done, he was standing next to her with the washcloth. “Wipe your face,” he told her. His tone was hard, but not cruel. It almost sounded exasperated. “If you didn’t like that,” he continued simply, “then I suggest you do as you’re told, an’ right quick! I’m told that Jazeel has a far heavier hand than I do, and he will punish you if you misbehave in his presence.”

His face softened a little as she sobbed. A true Texan, he didn’t like to see a crying woman; even if she did bring it on herself. “Wipe your face, don’t create new tears,” he specified. Then, after a moment of watching, he said, “It’s not as bad as all that. The workers in the mines barely see daylight, and don’t get to eat so well. The women in workshops are chained to tables. The farmers are sent out into the sun with no protection, and very small rations. We’re the lucky ones.”

That didn’t seem like much solace. But there was nothing to be done. She did stop crying, and as soon as she did, Peyton dragged her by her arm in the direction of Jazeel’s chamber as fast as he could walk.

“Peyton,” Jazeel drawled, looking annoyed as soon as the two entered. “I was beginning to worry that you’d forgotten my request.”

‘Maybe I should get rid of him. I’ve seen how the girls look at him—I should check their virginities again… It’s about that time, anyway, to see if he’s coupling with any of them. Though killing him would be too much of a waste—I’ll make him a bathhouse eunuch.’

Although she wasn’t positive, she was sure she hadn’t seen the alien’s mouth move. Yet she was certain that the voice just speaking came from him. The words came very quickly, but they were exceptionally clear… “I’m sorry,” she said as Peyton was looking uncomfortable. “I was being difficult, my lord.” She thought about what someone in Star Wars, or StarGate, Star Trek, or even Prince of Egypt would say. Surely, his species wasn’t beyond flattering.

‘My lord! I like that—respect comes with that title, I believe. Like their royalty. Perfect. I shall have all my servants address me as such. The words were coming so quickly, she wasn’t sure she caught them right, but she did feel like Jazeel didn’t know she could hear them.

Could she? Was she imagining it?

“Difficult, were you?” Jazeel looked quite interested about this. ‘Hopefully he had to give her a spanking. I love it when he uses force on the girls… I love watching their little legs kick, their faces blush... Something about it is so gratifying.’

“Yes, Sir…” she said, looking unsure. Her confusion was misinterpreted as torturous humiliation.

“Do explain,” he drawled, nearly sounding like he was purring.

“I…” She swallowed and made eye contact with Peyton, who looked aghast at her announcement, and how well Jazeel was reacting to her. “I wouldn’t put on my dress,” she admitted, lowering her head.

‘Look at her… Look at how remorseful she is. What a lovely sight.’

“This dress… Is a little more revealing than I’m used to, and it was too humiliating to put on.” She looked at Peyton again; he looked like he was about to pass out. “So he spanked me with a strap of leather,” she went on. “That’s why I made him late on bringing me here.” She wiped an old tear out of her eye. 

“Did he spank you hard, my little pet?” he teased, still purring.

‘Oh, I hope she pouts. I love it when they pout.’

“Yes, Sir…” She pouted prettily.

‘Delicious.’

“He left marks.”

The words coming into her head were so easy to hear now; she didn’t even consciously have to listen to them. It was as if they nestled comfortably through her ear and into her mind with such smoothness that they no longer had to make a sound. It was instantaneous, but not an actual voice. She seemed to know what he was thinking, and what Jazeel was going to do before he did it.

He patted his knee. “Come let me see, my poor little pet,” he cooed.

She hesitated—knowing how much Jazeel was going to enjoy this. The other maids had told her that the Frians loved to play sexually with their female slaves, and liked to ogle them because humans were strangely arousing to them, but they never had intercourse with their slaves. This was, the maids had guessed, because they didn’t have the same plumbing as the humans did, forcing them to only have sexual relations with their own species, much to the Frians’ obvious annoyance.

Peyton put a hand on her back as if to remind her to respond to Jazeel’s order. Slowly, she put one foot in front of the other until she was standing in front of Jazeel’s alien body. He gently took her arm in his silky, reptilian hand and pulled her across his lap. Jazeel’s race was very slender and very tall, and as soon as she was across his knees, she felt like her toes were constantly reaching for the floor.

He brushed the cloth panel which covered her bottom to the side and clicked his tongue with satisfaction. He dragged a finger across one of her welts, as if to judge how swollen it was. “Ooh, I bet that hurt.” He continued to trace along her bottom with his fingers.

“It still hurts,” she replied miserably, knowing it was what he wanted to hear.

“Mmm, yes, yes. I can see Peyton has kept you well in line. Very good, very good. I am very pleased, Peyton,” he congratulated sincerely, looking up at Peyton, who had been trembling mere seconds ago—Peyton was sure he was going to be punished for leaving marks on her flesh, thinking that the sight of it would not be pleasing to Jazeel. “I was beginning to think you were loosening your grip upon my house, not tightening it. I see that I was mistaken.” He put his hand across her bottom, luxuriating in the radiating heat.

Slowly, he began to play with her bottom hole. Her toes pointed and her mouth formed into an “O” as he quickly stuck his index finger up her bottom to the hilt.

She shrieked. “Please, stop…” Her face brightened red and she looked around. She avoided reaching back to stop him, although she knew he wanted badly for her to do so, to give him an excuse to spank her again. She hugged her arms pathetically around his knee. “Please, my lord! That hurts…” she whined, squinting her eyes so she wouldn’t even have to look at Peyton, who merely looked on, knowing there was nothing he could do.

Jazeel was practically chuckling with his new-found glee. “Responsive little thing,” he noticed, dipping his fingers towards her cunt, feeling the body on his lap cringe when he did so.

She began to sob again.

Jazeel merely laughed and finally let her up. “I will tell you what, my dear little pet,” he cooed, enjoying her tears immensely. He pulled the girl down to sit on his knee, and she winced as her sore bottom was pressed onto his hard thighs. “You can wear anything you’d like… But you must remove your clothing for punishment, always, and for me whenever I wish it, with no complaint.” He looked over at Peyton as he petted Ellie’s head and purred, “See that she gets whatever she desires, and that she learns how to serve all my meals to me.”

Peyton’s face was unmoving. He didn’t want to show any surprise, and was doing a good job of it. He bowed his head. “Yes, Sir.”

“Say yes, my lord from now on,” Jazeel said off-handedly, a small smile appearing on his reptilian mouth. “Direct the others to, as well. It does seem more appropriate.”

“Yes, my lord.” Peyton bowed again. “I will do so promptly.”

“Take my little pet with you,” he said, gently pulling Ellie off of his lap. “And make sure the seamstress makes her anything her heart desires. But remember, my dear,” he added, reaching up and petting her long hair. “The longer the rope I give you, the harder the jerk back will feel when corrected.” He was counting on this. Ellie could see the situations and scenarios already appearing in his mind—he wanted her to always blush, to never get used to punishments. He didn’t want to tame her.

“You are most gracious, my lord,” she said softly, knowing the words would please him, and they did.

“I know,” he agreed loftily, waving her away from him with his hand. She walked back to Peyton quickly and let him guide her out of the room.

The two didn’t say anything until they rounded the corner towards the kitchens. “I don’t know what that was about,” Peyton muttered. Ellie couldn’t tell if he was angry, incredulous, or amazed.

She rubbed her eyes, wondering whether or not she was dreaming what had just happened. It was too weird for words. “I know, it’s really hard to concentrate with all of that going on,” she agreed, hoping to hear some advice.

“With all of what goin’ on?” Peyton asked.

“You know…” she said, following him closely. “The voice… The one he doesn’t use his mouth to make.”

Peyton turned to her slowly, his eyebrows lowered. “What are you talkin’ about?”

“Don’t you hear it? You can hear what he’s thinking…” her words faded out as Peyton’s face grew darker and darker. “I guess… you don’t?”

“You heard… voices,” Peyton echoed.

For a moment, she thought that Peyton might take her in hand just for talking like a crazy person—or simply for being crazy. “No… Only one voice. Jazeel’s… You didn’t hear the part about making you into a… eunuch?”

Peyton’s eyes widened in horror at the mere prospect.

“That he thought you might be… you know… coupling… with the maids,” she went on, twiddling her fingers nervously. “He’ll be checking their virginities soon, something like that? No?” She swallowed hard. “Okay. Maybe I imagined it.” The look Peyton was giving her was so intense, she winced.

Only just then, another serving girl shuffled up to them from behind. “Peyton,” she breathed. “The master wants to check all of the girls to make sure we’ll all pure…” Her cheeks were blushing. “One by one. Before supper.”

Peyton looked slowly over at the girl, gave a singular nod and said, “Very well—inform the girls.”

The girl scurried down the hall quickly. Peyton slowly turned back to Ellie. “You—come with me,” he said, taking her by her forearm and pulling her, hard and fast, through the nearby kitchen and into a pantry. He closed the door behind them and began to speak with a very low, quiet voice. “You can hear Jazeel’s thoughts, then.” It didn’t seem like a question, so Ellie didn’t answer. “So… So am I safe, then?”

“Jazeel seems happy with you, now,” Ellie said, her voice even quieter than Peyton’s. “He likes it when you punish the girls… So, you can’t hear the voices?”

“No,” Peyton hissed. “Nobody can. Humans don’t have shal’ta!”

Ellie blinked a couple of times, confused. “Shal’ta?”

Peyton looked back and forth, as if to double-check they were alone. “When Frians speak to each other, they don’t use words or sounds. They use Shal’ta, they call it. Supposedly their thoughts naturally fly through the air, like words. If they want to, they can keep thoughts silent—so it’s sort of like…”

“Telepathy,” Ellie whispered, nodding. She cocked her head to the side, now looking more confused than ever. “Then why can I…”

“I don’t know, but if you don’t want your brain put under a Frian microscope, don’t tell him that you can hear him. Don’t let anyone know. You never know who’s listenin’, and you don’t want anyone to tell on you to get out of somethin.’ Keep this between you and me,” Peyton demanded, wagging his finger at her face.

“Why would I even want to read his mind?” Ellie asked. Really, she was disturbed by what she had heard already.

“I just saw you use it to your advantage! I’ve never seen him take such a likin’ to a girl before. You did everythin’ perfectly. I’ve been servin’ for four years now, and I couldn’t have done so well. He normally doesn’t give gifts to anyone. Besides, if you tell me what he wants, there will be less severe punishments. The best we can do is please him. If he’s pleased, we get rewarded, if he’s pissed, he takes it out on us. You can’t even begin to understand what the Frians are capable of. They’re soulless. We aren’t even slaves to them—we’re livestock.”

Peyton’s lip was curled with disgust, but Ellie could tell he was still excited. With reason—her freakishness was going to save his balls, literally. She was going to help him look around the corner, and make his life easier and less fearful. She could only hope she wouldn’t screw up.

* * *

After that day—really, after her first punishment—Peyton and she became friends… As much as one could become friends with Peyton, who ran the palace as if it was a war zone under attack. They both had one objective in mind—to do anything to keep Jazeel happy with them.

Ellie was ever-listening to his thoughts and his conversations. Jazeel was very powerful, she recognized, even where other Frians were concerned. It seemed the Frian kingdom wasn’t broken into provinces, like on earth, but by planets, and Jazeel was the High Ruler of his own—everything she could see from the windows was his. She served Jazeel however she could, pretending it was a game. He liked her looks, he liked her spirit, and occasionally he liked to nitpick her in order to have her spanked, which he greatly enjoyed as if it was a spectator sport. Peyton was on her team; when he spanked her in front of Jazeel, as Jazeel would have him do from time to time, he didn’t give Ellie more than she could handle, and she kicked and screamed and cried like an Oscar-winning actress. Ellie was never spanked by Jazeel’s hand. He simply never got angry enough with her; she never gave him the opportunity.

Peyton’s planned worked, as well—the servant girls were getting punished less and less by Jazeel. Peyton was finally able to understand Jazeel’s sadistic tendencies as if they were a sexual inclination, and acting on that, Peyton was able to constantly put on a show of the girls’ discipline without them actually coming to any harm. There were no more whippings. There were no more harsh punishments.

Jazeel enjoyed Ellie more than anyone else, and even made her prima—the head female servant—within the year.

* * *

There was a parade outside of the palace one morning—it showed up all of the sudden, and Peyton hadn’t mentioned anything about it. For a moment, Ellie feared that it was for the arrival of Lady Galaal, who was Jazeel’s betrothed, and who had the same sexual tastes for humans as Jazeel did—it was why he chose Lady Galaal for his mate, in fact. Yet Ellie thought she wasn’t expected to arrive for another few days.

She put on her best, figuring it was some special day or special celebration she didn’t know about, but hoping that Jazeel would be in a good mood because of it. A good mood for Jazeel normally meant gifts and rewards to the servants for doing the smallest of things for him. She nearly hoped to be called into his chambers that day—she could please him better than anyone.

She woke up and did her hair in a twisted up braid as it was how Jazeel best liked it, and wore pants that actually went to her ankles, but she knew Jazeel liked them, anyway. They were white, light, and flowy. And they were open in slits on the outer sides, which gave Jazeel just enough skin to satisfy him. She rarely was asked to take off her clothing anymore; she knew what his alien eyes liked to see even better than her skin.

She walked into the kitchens and found them empty of people. For a moment, she was certain that she had woken up earlier than she thought. She walked into the pantry to begin preparing Jazeel’s breakfast. 

“GOOD LORD!” she cried, walking right back out of the pantry.

Peyton had been in there, with Mary, who had joined their house in the last six months, and who he had instantly become infatuated with. Ellie had only looked for a second, but that second was enough. She saw that Peyton’s fingers were pressed into her hips and she was pressing back against his groin to take his member more fully into her bottom, moaning with a mixture of pain and pleasure.

It took a moment before Mary scurried out of the pantry, adjusting her short skirt back into position. “I’m sorry, Ellie!” she pleaded, her face beet-red with embarrassment.

“Oh, God! My eyes BURN!” Ellie cried, rubbing her palms over her eyes.

“Shh!” Peyton hushed fiercely, following Mary into the kitchen, buttoning up the front of his pants. “Shut up, Ellie! Are you tryin’ to inform the whole palace?”

“Don’t get angry at me because you were doing the nasty in the pantry,” Ellie scolded back, putting her hands on her hips to face down the burly-armed human. “Gross, Peyton! Gross.”

He sighed and looked at the ceiling with exasperation. “Grow up. You know we have trouble finding a place. And everybody’s out watching the parade.” He shrugged unapologetically and hoisted himself up on the counter.

“What’s the parade about?” Ellie asked, her lip curling. “Nobody tells me anything!”

“It only happened last night. The Frians are celebrating the destruction of a nearby enemy base on Playana,” Mary explained innocently. “Supposedly there’ll be fireworks and everything tonight. It’s almost a holiday.”

Ellie knew better than to expect a holiday in the sense that she knew it on Earth. There was always work to do, and they were expected to do it. But the prospect of any sort of entertainment was exciting. Especially to Ellie, who was a bit of a partier back on Earth. 

“Don’t get too excited,” Peyton grumped. “You’ve got work to do, lil’ girl.” He pointed his finger into Ellie’s chest. “Jazeel will want his breakfast the same as usual. I think he’s speaking with the leader of the prisoners in there now, or soon… Whenever they get here. I sorta lost track of time.”

“I can see how that could have happened.” Ellie nodded, her face deadpan. “And I know that you don’t like my advice, but you know what would happen if you stuck your thing in the wrong hole… errr... the right hole. Right is wrong,” she clarified. “I just don’t think you’d be the Peyton we’ve all come to love once you’d been neutered.”

She was right; he didn’t like her advice. Possibly because he didn’t think Ellie understood his suffering. He needed relief, and he loved Mary… Making love to her seemed natural; fooling around never seemed like enough. Anal sex was a nice respite, but Peyton knew he had to wait before he took Mary’s actual virginity—Jazeel loved checking to make sure the girls’ hymens were still attached, making everybody just as sexually frustrated as he was.

“Trust me,” Mary answered for him as both of them ambled over to the sink to wash their hands. “His balls are constantly in the forefront of both of our minds.”

“Oh, mine too,” Ellie assured sarcastically. She began to prepare Jazeel’s breakfast. The Frians, despite the fact that they looked incredibly different than humans, ate very similar fare: coffee, pastries, eggs, hams… And while she prepared it, she would eat her own breakfast from his platter. 

“So,” Ellie said, noticing that Peyton was lingering about, staring down Mary’s blouse as she began to work alongside her, “why would he want to talk to the leader of the prisoners?”

“He wants information on other bases,” Peyton said as if it was obvious, sitting back up on the counter and comfortably sipping on his coffee and then munching on a couple of large slices of bread and ham. “It’s sort of ‘his way’ to ask nicely for information, and then bribe, and then torture. And then kill them, of course. There’re only a small handful of them that didn’t get killed during the raid on the base. If we’re lucky, the Swarii leader won’t do anything to piss Jazeel off. I don’t like cleaning up bodies.”

“The master’s in a good mood this morning,” Mary said in her usual chipper, sing-songish voice. “I don’t think he will kill anyone. It will be a good day, a beautiful morning!” Her optimism earned her a kiss on the neck from Peyton, who walked over just to hold her in his arms for a long moment.

“Oh, what a beautiful morning….” Ellie sang, mostly to make fun of Mary, causing the others to laugh as she picked up her silver platter of food and began to carry it out. “Oh what a beautiful day… Peyton, get the door.” He obliged with a grin on his lips that he couldn’t repress. She continued to sing out into the hallway, “I’ve got a beautiful feeling eve-ry-thing’s go-in’ my way!”

She walked down the hallway and stood outside of the doors to Jazeel’s largest chamber hall with the heavy tray in hand. She wasn’t singing anymore, she was humming; blissfully unaware of what was being discussed on the other side of the door until the two Frian guards let her into the room.

‘Fuck you.’ Was the alien, unrecognized shal’ta voice that strangely sounded to her as if it had an Irish accent. It was alarming to walk through the door just in time to catch a curse spit at Jazeel, though, true to Mary’s prediction, he had a wide, sharp smile on his face. Ellie stood in her tracks for a moment. 

Her eyes looked straight toward the five prisoners that were now chained together and kneeling on the floor. It looked like they weren’t permitted to stand—they were being held to the floor by the rods the Frian guards had with them—the rods, she knew, would send a fierce electrical shot through them. 

Still, because of what she saw, she did not move. She stood still, unable to breathe.

‘You’re a fool, Commander Masterson,’ Jazeel replied flippantly. ‘Your race is done for, anyway. Why drag out this process? Why don’t you all try to live as comfortably as you can?’ He looked straight at Ellie and broke into a wider smile. “Oh, my dearest Pet. Do not be afraid of these creatures. They cannot hurt you,” he said, beckoning her to approach him by crooking his finger.

The Swarii commander turned around and looked straight at her as she walked into his line of sight, and his body froze the same ways hers had. They stared at each other, hers with more surprise. She was looking into a large, yet brilliantly handsome, nearly human face.

Chapter Two

These were the Swarii? She wasn’t prepared at all for how much like her own race they would look. Possibly the only thing different might have been the shal’ta he had used, which most humans—except her—couldn’t understand, or possibly the way he hadn’t seemed to need to blink over the course of the last minute, or maybe the fact that he, and the other prisoners, were all about seven feet tall.  They were walls of men, and would have formed quite a mean defensive line for any American football team.

The eyes that were staring at her were a milky brown, his hair was a wonderful chestnut, his arms, chest and shoulders looked strong, his eyebrows and other features were chiseled marvelously into his face.

He was possibly the most masculine, wonderful thing she had ever seen before in her life. She had to force herself to look at Jazeel, who was interpreting her dazzlement as fear. She put his food on the table next to him and began to pour his coffee with shaking hands. “Tisk, tisk!” he chirped at her. “Don’t be so nervous, Pet.”

“I am never nervous in my master’s presence, my lord,” she responded, raising her chin up high. “I only live to serve you.”

As the words came out, they didn’t sound as clever as she normally thought they did. They sounded anxious, submissive. She didn’t like being so distracted—she needed to concentrate when she was around Jazeel to protect herself.

When she finished fixing his coffee, which she did as carefully as she could, she knelt and served it as he preferred.

His eyes casually dropped until Jazeel was looking at the hardened nipples peaking through the fabric of her flowy blouse. “Sit on my lap,” he told her, patting his knee.

She closed her eyes for a moment. She didn’t want to sit on his lap—it was embarrassing, especially in front of company. With an embarrassed glance at the commander, who was still making a study of her, she got up from her knees and turned around to let Jazeel easily lift her onto his lap.

In moments, Jazeel positioned himself so she was straddling his large leg. ‘I grow tired of you, Commander,’ Jazeel continued in shal’ta, as if he was an evil villain in a movie with a cat on his lap. ‘I know you have the information I need. Must I take it from you by force?’

“Afraid so,’ the commander straightened his shoulders. He squinted with hatred. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, lizard.’

Jazeel merely looked at the guard next to the commander, who, on that cue, gave the commander a zap with his rod. Lightning seemed to shoot out the end of the rod to hit the commander square in the middle of his shoulders. He grimaced and made a sharp sucking noise with his teeth as he fell forward for a bit.

Ellie jumped and flailed a little bit in place, nearly trying to step back with her feet, which weren’t even touching the floor. Jazeel put his arm firmly around her waist and, with the other hand, slapped one of her thighs, hard, through the cloth. She squeaked from the pain, but got the message—she stilled.

Grumbling, he untied her shirt, which was wrapped together in the front, ignoring her soft whines of protest. The commander still was wheezing with his forehead nearly resting on the floor, but the other four prisoners watched carefully as Jazeel pulled her shirt off her shoulders, revealing young, soft pink nipples.

She barely stood for it, but the slap on her thigh still stung. She wasn’t used to this level of humiliation, but she was used to him playing and toying with her nipples. She closed her eyes and pretended that there weren’t men staring at her, ogling.

Besides, with the Swarii in the room, knowing shal’ta was not helping Ellie read Jazeel’s thoughts. He was keeping his inner thoughts secret from the rest of the room. He was only using it to communicate.

Her body began to shake. Partially from the cold air in the room, partially because she had never felt so put-on-display in her life.

‘Ah, looking at my pet, are you?’ Jazeel chuckled aloud. ‘These humans are little beasts they seem, but very similar to yourselves. Stupid as a brick, but they have something that may appeal to you… You could use them for your own sick pleasures. They have the same breasts…” He pinched her nipple extra-hard; her body twitched and she gave a chirp of protest. “The same wet, delicious little cunnies… I cannot use them to their full extent myself, unfortunately… But you probably could. And they are extremely obedient… Surely, one would feel nice in your bed?”  He smiled widely as he added, “Especially since your female population has so dwindled as of late…”

The other Swarii growled, but the Commander launched himself violently at Jazeel.

Horrified by his quick movement, she let out a shrill scream. Again, he was knocked to the ground just below their feet by the guard’s rod.

She felt Jazeel’s chest heave a heavy laugh from under her. ‘I can see that that’s still a tender issue.’

‘I swear to God, I will tear you apart,’ the commander growled from the ground. 

Jazeel was still grinning as he motioned for the guard nearest to him to give him a pistol. He shrugged coldly. ‘Very well. Don’t say I didn’t try.’

Ellie heard the pistol—a blaster, really—heat up with a whirr. Ellie gasped; one thing she definitely wasn’t prepared for was seeing such a handsome man get his face blasted off two feet away from her.

“No!” Ellie screamed, just as Jazeel pulled the trigger, reached out with both hands and pushed the gun towards the ground.  The shot left a large burnt mark on the marble floor.

A very silent second passed. Probably nobody was as surprised about what had happened as Ellie was. The next thing she knew, she and the gun were both thrown violently onto the floor. “You insolent little brat!” Jazeel shouted at her.

He reached down, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her up on her toes. With his own hand, he peppered a volley of sharp blows upon her too-thinly covered bottom. The pain was discombobulating—she still could barely believe what she had done, or what she could do to prevent further assault.

She was suddenly hideously aware of how light Peyton had been on her. When he spanked her in front of Jazeel, he would do it until her bottom was so red that there was nothing for it but to later whine at him and stomp her feet about her mistreatment, saying that he had ‘taken it too seriously.’ Little did she know, Peyton wasn’t taking it seriously at all. He was a diligent artist at the craft of making her bottom look like it was in more pain than it was. He never created bruises at all—not since that first day. Even if he gave her a motivational slap on the behind, it was more the noise that scared her, and the act itself, than the pain.

This was quite the opposite. It felt like Jazeel, who was easily eight feet tall, was strong but lanky. Strong enough to pick her up without any strain, and he was always picking her up as if she was a little Chihuahua. She, in turn, had always pretended to like it. But she never really thought of him as ‘really strong,’ but he very much was, and it seemed like he was using all the strength in his arm to tan her.

If she was told beforehand that this would take place, she would have worried about the embarrassment of being spanked standing up, trying to escape the whole time, and about how embarrassing a spanking in front of so many others would be. Strange enough, with the spanking actually happening, she didn’t give two craps about the people watching. They had nearly gotten their faces blown off, and she was still horrified by that reality, but right now, she was focused on trying to avoid Jazeel’s hand, which was easily painting her bottom a black-and-bluish color underneath her white, flowy wrap pants.

It didn’t seem to be enough for him, though. He quickly tired of his hand hitting clothing.

“Take off your pants,” he said, beginning to unbuckle his belt with resolve.

“I’m sorry, my lord! Violence frightens me!” she whimpered miserably. “I couldn’t bear it! I didn’t mean to anger you! Have mercy on my stupidity!” She got to her knees and grabbed at his pant leg. “But show your mercy upon their stupidity too! They don’t know yet the great leader that you are! Please!” She was sure she had heard a similar buttering-up technique in the movies, and if memory had served her right, it had worked. 

And it worked again. Jazeel stopped taking off his belt and sighed with frustration. ‘See how you’ve frightened my pet?’ he blamed the commander, whose mouth just hung open. If possible, the Swarii commander seemed more disturbed by watching her being beaten than she had been when watching a gun get pointed at him!

Jazeel looked down at Ellie, who was still tightly grabbing at his pant leg as she broke into a frightened sob. After looking at her with frustration for a moment, he finally petted her head, and then reached down to pick her up and put her on his hip, holding her like a scared animal. ‘Take them away for now,’ he told his guards, waving at the prisoners. ‘Let them think upon my offer for a bit.’

The room cleared quickly, leaving only Jazeel and Ellie. He put her down on the floor, finally, and then turned to his chair and his breakfast. “Prime!” he shouted, taking a seat.

Ellie knelt at Jazeel’s feet, feeling awkward. She pressed her forehead against his knee, trying her best to appear remorseful.

Peyton was quick to answer, as usual. “My lord?” Peyton asked with a bow of his head.

“This floor needs to be repaired,” Jazeel said with a wave toward the blackened and scorched piece of marble in front of him. “See to it that it’s done within the next day or so. Also, my little pet here, I think, needs a reminder of her place. Bring me the plug.”

She was already wincing—she had never received the plug before, but she had stood by and watched it done to the other maids who didn’t have the privilege of reading Jazeel’s mind. It didn’t seem like the highlight of anyone’s week, to say the least.

She didn’t argue like she knew Jazeel wanted her to. He wanted to spank her again. Her action, though sudden and not pre-meditated, had embarrassed him. She would have enjoyed his embarrassment if it had been created by anyone else, but now that it was her facing the fire—or rather, her bottom was—she humbled herself immediately. She buried her face into his lap, trying to look sad and pathetic. “Please forgive me,” she pleaded. “I didn’t think.”

“Oh, my poor pet.” Jazeel sighed and raised her head up with his hands so that she looked at him. “I swear sometimes you have me wrapped around your finger, far more than you are wrapped around mine,” he gently chided. “Don’t you see? I’m teaching you to serve me better. Don’t you want to?”

She said what he most wanted her to say with a dry throat and a monotonous voice, “Yes, my lord. Thank you for the opportunity to serve you better.” But she didn’t mean it; her eyes dropped with misery, her chest still bare and heaving with anger.

Peyton soon stood behind her, dutifully passing over to his master what looked like a short ivory phallus, only one that was flat at the end. She turned her head towards him, just to glare, and to call him a traitor with her eyes. But Peyton looked quite angry himself. His eye seemed to twitch as he stared back at her.

“Undress and lay over my knee, my beauty,” Jazeel ordered calmly.

She dropped her upper body from Jazeel’s knees, falling back on her heels with depression. She then proceeded to move at the speed of a snail, hating every movement that led her towards this inevitable end. Jazeel, on the other hand, was exhilarated by her loathing of the plug. It wasn’t as if she could even pretend that she was going to like it.

She unhooked her pants from around her waist and let them drop to the floor, and then she slowly stepped out of them, leaving her standing before Jazeel, completely naked.  With her bottom now properly exposed, she approached the side of Jazeel’s knees and then was guided over his lap. She whimpered as she felt Jazeel pet her bottom roughly for a while.  Then he began to stick one of his thin, long fingers up her cunny, just to see her squirm. “You have to relax,” he cooed with a grin.

As her body dangled over his knee, she put her face in her hands. She was so ashamed by the idea of the plug that she hadn’t been listening to his thoughts. Now, she had a new reason to be mortified. He was actually going to try to play with her.

He adjusted her on his lap so that her legs splayed more comfortably apart, rubbing his fingers everywhere she wished he wouldn’t until he found her little nub and started to play with it.

The strangest thing happened then—her body began to betray her. Her mind wasn’t filled up with images of Jazeel, of course. In fact, it was as if some part of her had decided that in order to get through the moment, she had to pretend she was somewhere else, with someone else.

That “someone else” was one who had very recently witnessed her humiliation—the Swarii commander, of all people. Despite his roughed-up look, the man was quite attractive, in a mature-looking way. She couldn’t tell exactly how old he was—he had one of those faces that could have belonged to a man in his late twenties, or a man who was pushing forty. His features were incredibly defined, even with a nose that looked like it had been broken a couple of times, and she actually quite liked his size. His arms weren’t quite as huge as Peyton’s (whose were?) but they looked strong—like he worked with them often. He also had a very chiseled jaw line, broad shoulders, and a broad chest.

She imagined this man being her master, and that she was a new harem girl who was willful and naughty. It was his knees she was bent over, it was his fingers teasing her, fingering her clit, running his finger around her bottom hole in circles until he put one of his already-wet fingers in. “Oh!” she panted, her cheeks flushed as she felt the small penetration, the small amount of discomfort that went along with it.

She began to make soft mewling sounds, wiggling her bottom shamelessly. Jazeel, who had never seen such a reaction, was confused at first. He had read about reactions such as these, but had never seen it. With a scientist-like interest, he played with her, dipping the plug slightly into her vagina, and in moments it was completely wet with her juices. She writhed her bottom as he settled the plug close to her anus.

With one swift motion from him, however, she came out of her fantasy and back to the real world. “Eeeek!” she screamed shrilly as he pushed the plug all the way in with a single thrust—stretching her opening to the one-and-a-half inch diameter it had at its thickest. Her posture suddenly became a singular straight line from her shoulders to her toes. “Eeek!” she continued to shriek as the pain, she realized, was still there.  The plug was spreading her anus to the circumference of an inch at its neck. “Please, please take it out,” she panted desperately, even reaching behind her, her eyes stinging with tears. “Master, please! It hurts!”

“Relax,” he cooed, grinning as he pushed her hand away back towards the ground. “It’s meant to hurt a little. But it will fade in time.” He watched her muscles try their best to release the uncomfortable item, to no avail. Eventually, her body realized it, and she laid limp and crying over his lap. “That’s a good girl,” he praised, patting her bottom.

Finally, he had her get off his lap. Every movement was uncomfortable, sending a numbing ache coursing through her.

“Have her carry out her duties, as usual. You may remove it before she goes to sleep tonight,” he told Peyton.

She blanched. “Master… That’s all day.”

Jazeel’s head turned towards her slowly. “Yes. It is.” He cocked his head to the side. “You’ve been an extremely whiny pet all day today. It makes me feel like I’ve neglected you.”

She was already shaking her head, ‘no.’

“Perhaps I should put you on a punishment regimen, so that you become properly aware of what happens when little pets argue with their masters.” He watched her closely to see how she’d react to that threat.

Finally becoming wise, she simply hung her head and said the most appropriate lines that came to her mind, “Only if it would please you, Master.”

He squinted indecisively. “It may. I will have to think on it. In the meantime, I think it would be wise if you act more like the prima you are,” he stated, then turned to Peyton and waved him off.

“Thank you for your discipline, my lord,” she finally said, bowing her head. Finally, she slowly gathered her clothing and then gently turned her body and let Peyton guide her out, still naked.

As soon as the guards closed the door behind them, Peyton let go of her arm and gave her a firm spank. “What’s the matter with you?” he charged. “What did you do in there to make him upset with you? Have you lost your mind?” Though she tried to cower away from him, he grabbed her and spun her around so he could spank her again.

She dropped the clump of her clothing so that she could cover her tender bottom with both hands. “Peyton,” she whined. “You don’t even know what happened!”

“I know what should have happened. You needed to be your usual charming self—he was in perfectly good spirits when I had last left him! Instead, I’m sent for your plug.” He snorted, bending over and picking up her clothes for her. “Well, fine day for us all,” he grumbled ruefully. “I hope that feels as uncomfortable as I think it does. Not that you didn’t writhe like a bitch in heat while he put it in.”

She stopped in her steps for a moment, her cheeks flushed red. She gasped at the sting of his words. “You can be such an ass, Peyton,” she hissed. “How many times have I saved your neck? Or your balls, should I say? If it wasn’t for me, my friend, you would be sponging off women and not even having the ability to enjoy it.”

“What was I supposed to do? Not obey?” he asked, as if the idea was ludicrous. “If the day ever comes, Ellie, that I step between you and Jazeel, it will mean that your life is at stake, and not your ass.” He pushed her clothing into her arms.

Still in the hallway of the palace, she quickly tried to dress herself while trying not to move her bottom—a very delicate task that proved impossible. “Well, you could not spank me afterwards,” she advised haughtily, wincing every time her bottom twitched. “Do you know how a spank feels with one of these inside of you? Breathing hurts right now! Besides, what time period were you born in? With all this spanking nonsense? I know you were born in Texas, but… Holy Pete!” she nagged miserably.

Peyton shook his head ever so slightly, looking like he was suddenly getting a headache. “I have over a hundred and fifty women under my command and twenty eunuchs. I have to keep human men out of the palace at all costs. I have nearly fifty Frians to feed, clothe, and wait upon. You only have Jazeel to keep happy. Now, get to work or you’ll find out what it feels like to be strapped with the butt plug in,” he threatened darkly. He shook his head. “I don’t have time for you.”

She pressed her lips tightly in a pout. “Fine. Go, enjoy being a slave, you ungrateful ass,” she muttered.

Peyton turned and raised his eyebrows. “You want to throw a little more attitude my way, little girl?” he asked impatiently.

She swallowed. “No,” she grumbled softly, avoiding eye contact, her bottom tingling enough as it was from Jazeel’s quick punishment.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, then grabbed an incredibly large trey full of food and took it out of the kitchens.

Mary suddenly appeared at her side. “You okay, kiddo?” she asked, filled with sympathy.

Ellie forced a brave smile. “I’ll get by. Your boyfriend there’s a brute and a half, though.”

“Tell me about it,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Sometimes I think he’s on the verge of an ulcer. He needs to learn to relax. When he’s less stressed, he’s actually very funny.”

“Peyton?” Ellie drawled. “Funny?” She snorted at the thought. “Sure…”

“You should be nice,” Mary lectured, putting her hands on her hips briefly before she grabbed a freshly-baked scone and buttered it for herself. “If you only knew how highly he thinks of you. He loves you like a sister.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ellie waved Mary off, leaning wearily upon the counter. “He’s a saint. Whatever.” She tapped her fingers with thoughtful frustration upon the counter.  There was no position to stand in that was comfortable. She looked over at Mary, whose eyebrows were lowered, obviously not liking being waved off by anyone nine years younger than herself.

“Sorry,” Ellie said, heaving a sigh. “I was…” She cleared her throat. “Plugged.”

Mary gasped in horrified shock, “No! Are you serious?”

Ellie blushed and nodded. “By Jazeel,” she added, since Peyton occasionally plugged a girl or two that was flirting with human men through the peep-hole near the kitchens, where the supplies were delivered. As Peyton would be blamed for the loss of any of the girls’ virginities, he didn’t allow any non-eunuchs anywhere on the premises, and so the small face-wide opening in the door there was the only place where girls could see any new men. Ellie would tease Peyton about it and call him a bouncer, but she still never considered even looking outside the peephole after seeing the consequences.

Ellie jutted her bottom lip sadly out. “It’s put me in a mood.”

“What could you possibly have done?” Mary asked, still shaking her head incredulously. She never would have thought Ellie could do anything to earn Jazeel’s displeasure—Ellie was always put up on a pedestal as an example of how to serve him!

“He was about to shoot this Swarii in the face.” Ellie shrugged. “And I sort of… hampered him. Look,” she said, changing the subject. “Have you ever seen a Swarii, Mary?”

Mary nodded. “Yes, my old master had captured a couple of them once and tortured them to death.”

Ellie, now knowing what they looked like, seemed disturbed by that forward explanation. “They look like… humans,” she noted, confused as to how Mary didn’t seem to notice. 

“But they’re not,” Mary was quick to correct, her voice almost stern.

“But they look like…” Ellie continued.

“They’re not human, Ellie,” Mary told her, cutting her hand through the air. “Don’t let yourself become confused by the coincidence that they, in some way, look like us. They’re far more advanced than us. They’re also, like… I don’t know, eight feet tall, some of them.”

“I didn’t see one of them that was eight feet—at least not most of them,” Ellie argued. “Seven feet, maybe, but… Peyton’s like… six and a half, about. That’s not too weird. You obviously like tall men…”

“So, is that why you saved them? Because you thought they were human?” Mary raised an eyebrow, looking like Ellie had just said that grass was purple and that up was down.

Ellie shrugged. “Well…”

“Look, Ellie,” Mary sighed. “We have enough of a time protecting our own skin. The last thing we need is to lay ourselves down for a whole other species.”

Peyton walked back into the kitchen, his eyes quickly focusing on the two girls. Mary’s expression was far darker than it normally was, and Ellie looked like she was facing turmoil by the way her expression seemed twisted. “What are you both talking about?”

“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 singular, 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.

“Hey, if you can get those assholes outside to turn off the power and make it safer, be my guest. They won’t, though. I’m an affront to their high standards of laziness. They wouldn’t go so far as to reach all the way into their pocket to lend me a pen if my life depended on it.” She efficiently twisted two hot wires together and then cut a new line of wire off her belt.

He watched her work with a subtle look of curiosity. “You do this often?” he asked. She had heard that same sort of incredulous tone before. It had the same tone as the question, ‘you’re a woman, shouldn’t you be off baking a pie somewhere?’

“Yeah,” she replied. “When I’m not wiggling my ass for Jazeel, I’m normally knee deep in wires. I used to sit around eating cookies all day under the air conditioning until that started to piss Peyton-the-Prime off, and then he learned what I used to do on Earth. Before you know it, the holiday’s over and I’m knee-deep in washing machine parts. What I can’t stand is crystal technology. That crap is as alien as it gets.”

“Like what they use on their ships? Neither do we,” he admitted. “Just because if something breaks, it can really create problems. You just can’t wire something together, and…”

ZZPOP! A spark flew out of the panel she was working on—something bright, something that would have laid her on her ass again if Graham hadn’t grabbed her arm and pulled her to his body and away from the panel. In the next moment, as more sparks flew out of the panel after them, he pressed himself against the nearby wall with her at his chest.

It was then that she fell in love with Graham Masterson, and vice versa.

Actually, she didn’t fall. It was like electricity—like something grabbed both of them and held them close to each other until they melded together, whether they liked it or not. They were very still for a long moment, nearly paralyzed by unwelcomed warmth that seemed to fill them down to their toes.

She didn’t hear anything for a second; it was like a blaring noise had deafened her. She was wondering if she actually had been electrocuted, except that she wasn’t in pain. Quite the contrary; she had never been so aroused in her life, and she was getting more so, it seemed, by the second.

Graham’s chest, she noticed instantly, was heaving, like he had been running as fast as he could for as long as he could.

The other Swarii finally approached, beginning to talk to him in their language, their faces concerned. Graham suddenly snapped at them, sounding angry, not releasing Ellie for even a moment. The Swarii silently stared on at them, anxious.

“I guess I should put the gloves back on, huh?” she finally said, breaking what she thought was awkward silence.

Graham still made no sounds and no movements.

Finally, she began to squirm. She was beginning to feel flushed, to say the least, and pushed against Graham’s arm to try to get him to release her from his vice-like hold.

“Don’t move,” he ordered in a raspy voice, his arm pressed her more firmly to his chest.

Now, she couldn’t move if she wanted to. She was beginning to feel pretty vulnerable, not to mention alienated. This was odd. She shouldn’t feel this way, especially the arousal which had hit her like a damn fire hose.  Furthermore, the fact that she was being tightly held by a seven-foot-tall gorgeous alien commander was something that Peyton would certainly frown upon, if he were to walk in.

The moment the traveling heat in her body started to fade was the exact same moment Graham let her go. She got up to her feet then and straightened herself out.  He stood up, looking like he was in sudden agony.

“Are you okay?” she asked him. The man definitely looked emotionally compromised.

He was quiet for such a long time, that she had to take it as a ‘no.’

“What was that? Were we shocked? I’d been shocked before,” she blabbered. “And that was weird. That was almost pleasant! Did you feel it, or am I nuts?”

He continued to be silent.

She turned to the other Swarii, who continued to stare. “Any commentary? Did any of you see what happened?”

One of the Swarii, who was short for their race (he was only Peyton’s size), cleared his throat awkwardly. “You should give him a minute,” he advised.  His accent was thicker, and was actually quite Irish, even more so than Graham’s.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked, pointing to the practically catatonic man leaning up against the wall, looking deeply disturbed.

“He’s trying not to rape you,” another one offered. This Swarii was larger than Graham, and blonde. He stepped forward and pushed her behind his shoulder to protect her. “I’d step back, Sweetheart.”

She jumped back, but then looked at that Swarii like he must have been kidding. “What?”

“You both just… Um… If I’m not mistaken…” he began to explain, but the short Swarii cut him off.

“There’s no way he can do that with a human,” the smaller one said, swiping his hand through the air with clarity. He looked at her and hedged immediately, “No offense.”

“She’s not human,” Graham finally growled, looking not like himself. His expression was animalistic—primal. After he said the words, his expression looked like it was warring again, and he looked away from all of them, huddling his body closer to the wall, as if the coolness of the metal wall was somehow soothing when pressed against his face.

“Okay, I need an explanation. This is weird. I feel… Weird.” There were no other descriptors. She didn’t want to add that what she really wanted to do was take off her clothes and get on all fours, so that Graham could properly mount her. The idea didn’t seem to match up with her conservative background.

“Of course you do. You just felt the union,” the large, apparently more open-minded Swarii explained delicately. “I think so, anyway…”

“Riiight,” she drawled, having no idea what he was talking about. Apparently, he thought he was using a word she should know.

The large Swarii sighed and looked wearily at the ceiling as if he was trying to explain something amazingly simple to a seven-year-old. “You chose each other as mates.”

“What?” she cried incredulously, immediately embarrassed by the idea. “I most certainly did not!”

“You didn’t consciously choose it. That’s not how it works! Criminy, what do they do on your planet?”

“Um…” She had wondered about that many a time herself.  “Not that,” she said, definitely sure of that much. “What the hell happened?”

“It happens when two Swarii touch naked skin—Swarii that are genetically compatible, that is. It can only happen once in a lifetime,” the short Swarii replied, looking confused as he watched Graham press his body even harder against the wall. “That’s why it’s weird. How the holy hell would he even be compatible with you?” Again, he added after that, “No offense. You’ve got nice boobs and all, but you’re just a tiny, weak, weird-looking little…”

“Shut the fuck up, Thorton!” Graham snapped, suddenly pushing himself away from the wall and launching himself at the smaller Swarii, who wasn’t quite through insulting her.

The two Swarii who, it appeared, did not speak English, held Graham back, although it looked like he greatly wanted to rip off one of Thorton’s arms and beat him to death with it. Thorton stood back, looking quite stunned, and then he hummed in his throat. “Huh.”

She backed away. This was a little much for her to handle. Two seconds ago, Graham was being nearly charming. Now, he was like a wild animal. She walked to the door and pounded on it with her fist until the guard finally answered by pulling the door apart manually from the wall. He looked quite cantankerous, as if she woke him from a nap. “What?” he looked at the pile of wires on the floor before he looked up and saw Graham still on a quest to destroy one of his friends. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know. I’ll come back when he’s cooled off,” she replied. “I’ll serve Lord Jazeel his lunch, and then I’ll come and finish.”

“You’d better,” the guard replied, glaring at her, then mumbled something that sounded like a rant on how humans were so entirely incompetent that they probably assumed a door would fix itself.

She scurried as fast as she could up to the main floor of the palace, where it looked like Peyton was about to serve lunch to Jazeel for her. She stopped him in the hallway by getting in his path.

“You done already?” he asked her.  Then, he looked at the strange glow on her, which made her look feverish. “Hey—you okay, kiddo?” he asked, suddenly concerned.

“No,” she replied simply, rubbing her sleeve against her forehead. “Can I serve lunch to Jazeel?”

“You look like hell,” he said, shaking his head, rejecting her request.

“I’m gonna continue looking like it if I don’t get the plug out,” she replied tersely, reaching up to grab the tray away from him.

“Fine,” he said, rolling his eyes at her as if he had decided she was the biggest wuss in the world. “I’ll go in with you,” he offered, carefully handing her the tray and following her to the chamber in question, where he opened the door for her.

She quickly served Jazeel, who was in the middle of an intergalactic highly-technological phone call, and then got to her knees and rubbed her face on his boot.

Finally, distracted by her patheticness, he sighed and shal’taed to the Frian in the hologram in front of him. ‘I’ll give you a call back, Colonel. My pet needs attention, it seems.’ He hit a button within a small panel strapped to his forearm. “Yes, my pet?” he asked her, sounding somewhat annoyed. “How’s your bottom feeling?” he added coyly.

“I fell, Master. And I’m dying,” she whined miserably, letting out a fake sob.

He sighed again. “I have never known a pet that took a punishment less well. And what you’re wearing, by the way, is horrid.”

“I’ve been working as you ordered, my lord,” she replied. “It’s how I fell... Now I’m dying,” she repeated, raising her face to him.

“You’re not dying, you’re—” he suddenly noticed the misting on her forehead. “Are you…” He put his long-fingered hand to her raised head. “Are you ill, my poor pet? You have a high fever…”

“I’m dying,” she repeated again miserably, resting her head dramatically in his lap.

“Peyton! Why haven’t you cared for this poor little beast?” he accused, looking up at his prime crossly.

Peyton shifted his weight nervously, knowing he’d have to hedge his words perfectly to keep himself from being whipped. “Master, I could never disobey you… Besides, other girls have survived this punishment fine enough.”

“The other girls aren’t as fragile as my little rose,” he retorted crisply. “Fine then, I forgive you,” he decreed to Peyton. “See she is given what is required, and discontinue her punishment immediately.” He raised up Ellie’s sad, pouting face. “My poor, sweet little pet. Enjoy this now—my wife will have a stricter hand, you know.”

Ellie knew. She didn’t smile at all—she continued looking pathetic until she was properly dismissed, at which time she let Peyton guide her gently from the room. He closed the heavy chamber door behind them, and then took her firmly by her forearm and practically dragged her to her room.

“You are ridiculous,” Peyton told her, slapping her on the ass as he grabbed a chair from her vanity and moved it to the center of the room. “Take off your pants.”

She began to unfasten her utility belt until she looked up at Peyton’s expression. “You’re not going to spank me, are you?” she felt she had to ask. “Because I didn’t know Jazeel was going to get angry with you.”

“Well, he ain’t gonna get angry with himself,” Peyton sighed, then visibly calmed. “No, I’m not gonna spank you.” He added with a grin, “Much. But one of these days you’re gonna get me whipped, and you’d better believe I will share some of that pain with you.” He patted his knee to signal for her to bend over it.

She pulled her pants and panties quickly to her knees and bent uncomfortably over his lap. She was never going to get used to this position, even though she should have been by now. “You know, this isn’t even a big one,” he told her. “There are bigger. Mary gets something like this up her bottom with no complaints, and it’s twice this size—at least. And she likes it.”

“Since when has Mary ever been plugged?” she snapped.

“Never.”

Suddenly, she realized what he was saying. Her lip curled over her teeth. “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 added 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 asked, watching as her other orifice writhed slightly at his touch, glistening in the light of the room. “Wait a second… Are you aroused?”

“Only to the idea of death,” she whimpered. “Can you not torture me?”

“Torture’s kind of the program,” Peyton explained simply, playing with the plug by moving it slightly—tugging it back and forth. “I’m actually taking this out the easy way, rather than just ripping it out of you.”

Suddenly, paying far too close of attention to his movements, Ellie moaned—not groaned, but moaned. Immediately, she put her hands over her mouth.

“Whoa…” Peyton noticed, surprised. “What’s got you in the mood?” Suddenly he demanded, “You’ve been away from the supply room, right?”

“Dear lord, of course!” she replied. “I’ve been in the prison the whole time with those Swarii. Then something weird happened. I think I was electrocuted.”

“I think you liked it,” was his reply.

“Weird, Peyton,” she nagged, kicking her feet uncomfortably. “But no—it wasn’t like that. Graham and I just—I don’t know—but then he became—well, acted—really odd, and…”

“I love a good story poorly described,” Peyton said 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.”

“I’m not a poet, Peyton,” she retorted tersely.

“Who’s Graham, then?” he asked, continuing to play with the plug.

She nearly didn’t want to describe him—the thought of Graham made her hot all over again. “The Swarii commander, and oh!”

Peyton quickly stopped doing what he was doing. “Are you about to cum?” he asked, watching her writhing with open eyes. He felt himself actually getting aroused by this, and didn’t like it. “Mary would not like this at all…”

“Stop being so damn nice, 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 could see stars when Peyton quickly did what he was told and yanked the plug out of her body. “Sweet baby Jesus!” she hissed.

“Hey, no blasphemy,” he reminded frankly as she writhed and dug her toes into the ground, trying to deal with the startling amount of soreness. “Ass sex is not a good option for you, you wuss,” he added. “Now, what the hell is it with this commander?”

“Never mind,” she simpered miserably. There was no way to explain Graham without the risk that something even more embarrassing—if that was possible—could transpire. Besides, Peyton was paranoid—if she explained the passion she had felt, the animal urge to mate with him, then Peyton would gladly step in the way of her seeing him ever again.

She picked herself back up on her feet and quickly pulled up her panties and pants swiftly. “Their conversation was interesting, is all.” she lied. “They speak English.”

Peyton seemed confused by this. “Really?” Suddenly his eyes darkened. “They’re not talking to you, right?”

“As much as you talk to a human electrician, I suppose,” she said ruefully.

“Are you attracted to one of them?” Damn, Peyton was good at guessing.

“Well, the commander’s pretty…” She caught herself mid-sentence and decided to throw him off the scent of where her mind was going. “Does it matter? The guards are paying super-close attention, anyway. So don’t worry yourself into an ulcer,” she lied easily, grabbing for her utility belt.

When she looked back towards him, his expression was extremely dark. “If I hear any more of you talking to those guys, little girl…” he threatened, then shook his head. “I’m gonna tan your hide for you, so help me. Ignore them, you hear?”

“Oh, I hear,” she told him. She just didn’t agree.

* * *

She was annoyed by the fact that she was still walking a bit bow-legged, despite her best efforts. Still, compared to how she felt earlier, she was practically ready to do cartwheels into the prison. The guards seemed to be annoyed by the fact that she was far more cheerful than she was earlier. They called her a few names and shoved her back into the cell without much ado.

When she was in the cell again, she looked awkwardly at the Swarii, who looked very on-alert because of her presence. She waved at them timidly and then crouched down to the electrical panel.

Suddenly, before she noticed that anyone had approached, her rubber gloves were hanging in front of her nose. “Hello,” Graham said to her. His voice was velvety, breathy. He sounded tired—more specifically, he sounded like the sort of tired she imagined a boxer would feel after going up against Ali. “Can you wear these, please, this time? You left them.”

She smiled awkwardly at him and thanked him. She put the gloves back on her hands, and let him just stare at her in silence for awhile. She couldn’t help but feel that he viewed her as ‘bad news’ he was going to have to ‘fix’. If she glanced up for a moment, she could see the gears rolling behind his eyes.

“Sorry about before,” he continued. “I sort of lost control for a moment. I’m just glad it was more on Thorton than on you, but I could see how you might think less of me.”

“Or more of you,” she corrected. “But not in a good way. Are you saying that you could have lost control on me?” She found that quite unnerving. When she’d left, it looked like he was a stone’s throw away from ripping Thorton’s tongue out of his mouth. “Why? I didn’t do anything.”

“It’s not about what you did. It’s about what we did,” he explained gently, and reached out his hand as if he wanted to touch her, if just to rub her shoulder. But he thought better of it—he closed his fingers into a fist and withdrew his hand.

“And what did we do? Besides freak out over a couple of sparks?”

“A couple of sparks?” he guffawed. “A couple of…” His jaw locked. “There was goddamned lightning shooting out of there! You were this close to being crispy-crittered.” He tried to illustrate this ‘closeness’ by pinching his thumb and forefinger so closely together that a flea would have suffocated.

“Sure, whatever,” she doubted. The memory of the near-miss was foggy to her at this point. She remembered the aftermath much better.

He put his hands over his eyes. “Whatever?”

“Yeah.” She nodded, her expression vacant. “Don’t care.” She raised her shoulders up in a defensive shrug. “You’re exaggerating.”

He pursed his lips, wanting to threaten her—to do anything that would make her take him seriously. She needed to go over his knee, and she would eventually—obviously, she needed a little bit of hand-taming. But now was not the time.  He had to make sure she realized, first, that he was her mate; that she was his now, fully and completely.

“You’re very frustrating. That attitude won’t serve you well in the future,” he informed simply. “Now, to your question about what happened: didn’t you feel it?”

“Feel what? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied, knowing she didn’t want to answer in the affirmative. What would she say to that? Oh, you mean that deep sense of arousal I felt, and am still feeling? The urge to take off your pants? Yeah, right!

“You’re lying,” he said flatly. “I can see the effects on your face. In your eyes.”

Suddenly, his eyes widened. For a moment, she thought he was horrified by something. In the next, she was certain that she had seen the same look when she was watching a Sherlock Holmes movie, when everything suddenly became clear to the hero before he ran off somewhere, leaving an irritated Watson in his wake. “Of course!”

She hesitated for a second, but asked anyway, “What?”

“You’re not something else. You’re a Swarii!”

Chapter Four

She sighed and looked back at her work.

He sensed her skepticism. “Look—we almost colonized your planet, did you know? Not even a hundred years ago! We sent a squad out to bring back military intel for the maneuver, and then, when the commander came back, he said that your planet could not be colonized; that you were infected with a contagious disease. None of his team came back with him, supposedly they died!

“Of course, we didn’t know he was lying through his teeth until just after he died. About fifty years ago, the Frians started grabbing you in batches for their slave force, and reported no similar troubles in their own intel. There was even a scandal about it—when we tried to access our commander’s personal files, they were encoded. Nobody could access the info that would allow us to figure out what really happened on Earth…”

“Nice bedtime story,” she replied, looking like she was barely listening as she continued to twist wires up together.

“Don’t you get it? There was a whole team of Swarii that stayed on that planet, probably settling in with the locals! So well, in fact, that they didn’t want to return! And I told you that we consider you close-cousins, maybe you’re closer than we’ve even considered. What if we’re actually more like two different breeds than species—one where we can create offspring?”

“You mean, that our species are so close we can actually create… an in-between?” She shook her head. “Yeah, right. What are the chances?”

“Ellie, you are an in-between!” he exclaimed. “Think about it—don’t you have a suspicious number of similarities to our species? Yet many suspiciously similar to theirs? There’s no other explanation!”

She found herself chuckling at this claim. “But look at me—I’m smaller than most humans!” 

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s because you’re female. What do the men in your family look like?”

“Oh, they’re HUGE. In fact, my brother’s a line-backer for the University of Tex…” She stopped herself short. “Huh.” She hadn’t really thought of it before, but come to think of it, her size was much more the exception than the rule. She was her mother’s size, who married into the family… the idea was still ludicrous. She may have never completely finished a biology class in her life, but she watched enough of the discovery channel to realize how crazy it was. “So, you think because we’re the same species—sort of—that I was able to do this… onion thing with you?”

“Union,” he corrected fervently, “is the best translation. We call it Mak-Tah, but…”

“But you wanted to call it something lame. I got it. We call it ‘voodoo’ back on Earth. That’s the best translation for ‘bullshit’.” She snorted at her own joke. “Get out of here, Crazy,” she chuckled. “I got work to do.”

He rubbed his hand over his face, frustrated and weary. “Look here—whether I’m right or not makes no difference. We DID have a union—which means that you and I are together for life, which you’d better start getting used to. You’re mine, little girl.”

She had still been chuckling at the idea that she was an alien when he said this. Suddenly, all signs of humor ever being present on Eleanor Jonas’ face disappeared. “Excuse me? I’m not anybody’s. Particularly not yours. You’re in a prison cell. You’ll be lucky if you see the light of day again before you’re decapitated by Jazeel.”

“I won’t be executed,” he assured with a sigh. “You need to have a little faith in me. I’ll get us out easy enough—I’m a professional.”

“Well, have a good life, then.” She stuck her nose back in her work to finish up before he said anything else too crazy. Yet, she had to admit, she was strangely relieved by his confidence. “I’m almost done here.”

He turned his head and said something in his native language to a Swarii across the room, who looked over and ambled up with a grin. “Hey, little lady.” She remembered him—it was Thorton—much friendlier and warmer towards her than he was not two hours ago. “May I step in there for a moment? Kick you out?”

“If these doors don’t work right, they won’t let me finish,” Ellie warned, glancing towards the doors, which she was sure the Frian guards were on the other side of, napping.

“They’ll work alright,” Thorton said, smiling a wide, toothy grin. “You love birds can just argue a few feet away, for now. I know what I’m doing.”

She blushed and glanced ruefully at Graham, but found herself giving in. She took off her gloves. “I don’t think these will fit you,” she warned.

“Gloves are miserable, anyway,” Thorton commiserated.

“Do you want my pliers?”

“I like using my fingers.”

She looked at Graham, who helped her up to her feet with a blank expression. “So... HE’S allowed to go in there without gloves or ANYTHING, and I can’t?” she complained to Graham, causing Thorton to chuckle as he got to his knees.

Graham led her into the farthest, darkest corner in the room, obviously under the illusion that they would have more privacy there to argue. “Thorton’s a grown man. He can do what he wants. He’s not my wife.”

“Neither am I!” she cried, leaning against the corner. “What can I do to get you to understand that? You don’t even know my name!”

Graham’s posture froze at that realization. She was right. He never learned her name, and he could stake his life on the fact that her name wasn’t ‘Pet’, which was the only thing Jazeel had called her that morning.

It didn’t matter, however. She was his universe—he probably wouldn’t have chosen her to be that for him, and if he had, it definitely wouldn’t have been during a time like this. Still, it was not extremely tactful not to have asked by now, but every time he looked at her, he couldn’t help but think he needed to call her, ‘Young Lady’ or ‘Little Girl’. “I am sorry about that, my sweet. Please, what’s your name?”

She rolled her eyes and said flatly, “Ellie.” She leaned her back up against the wall, glaring grumpily at him.

He leaned over her, bracing his body only by putting a hand on the wall over her head. “That’s a beautiful name,” he hummed. “Short for something?” He leaned down and breathed deeply. Lord, she smelt fantastic.

She looked a little nervous at this and tried to sink lower to the ground, hoping to give the distance between their faces a little bit more space. “Eleanor. Eleanor Jonas.”

“Eleanor Jonas Masterson,” he corrected shortly, raising his finger like a teacher would after she mistakenly called an adverb an adjective.

Her face turned beat red with anger. “Why on Earth would I put on your last name onto mine?” she growled.

He grinned, looking somewhat surprised. “You’re actually pretty damn adorable when you’re angry,” he mentioned.

“I must be nearly unbearable right now, then,” she seethed. “Look, on Earth we marry—you know, in front of… the community, and God, and our family, and… There’s a courting process, normally…”

“Yes, and that’s very cute, but God knows who He chose for me. This is pre-approved! A union is sacred—it only happens once in our entire lives! I mean, scientists think it’s just a hormonal exchange with people who are genetically compatible, BUT everyone who has a fingernail of religion in their blood knows there’s more to it! We don’t need the community to approve. We don’t need parents to approve—there’s no happiness anywhere else than with each other—maybe if we didn’t meet there would have been chance of something else, or you could have felt the union with someone else. I don’t know—I never have, obviously. But it doesn’t matter. It happened to US—now. And the more you push against that fact, the more miserable you’re going to be; you’ve already got the sickness. It’s only going to get worse if you don’t have intercourse. With me. It’s the only cure.”

At this point, she was light-headed. She nearly felt intoxicated by being so close by him. He smelt so good—so manly. His body was so close that if she took a deep breath, she would bump her breasts against him. 

“That’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard in my life! You’re insane!” she exclaimed, putting her hand to her hot forehead. “I’m fine. I don’t have the sickness, whatever the hell that is! We didn’t have the union! I’m not your mate, your wife, your ANYTHING. I hate your guts! You’re egotistical, pushy, domineering, insulting, thoughtless…” She spit out every word, but then she looked right at him.

And her body took over. She didn’t know who made the check-mate move first, but it was as if two magnets were finally tired of repelling against each other and slammed together with force. He kissed her mouth deeply, pressing her firmly against the wall. She reached out for him, putting her arms around his neck, allowing him to rip her buttoned shirt open, revealing her lacy bra, which still did nothing to keep back her obviously stone-hard nipples. “I hate you.” She growled when his mouth released hers, and started to kiss along her neck.

“And you’re a brat,” he rasped. “Stubborn! Foul-mouthed! Whiny!” He might have had more descriptors, but he was too busy suckling one of her little, pink nipples which he had broken free from its lacy confines. “…And covered with too many god damned layers!” he continued, his hands shaking as his hands fumbled about to pull off her utility belt.

She wasn’t the type of girl who would normally allow herself to lose her virginity in the middle of a dank, poorly-lit prison cell with four spectators trying to ignore what was going on –with little success—just on the other side of the room. But she didn’t care right now. All she cared about was Graham and the heat rising from her loins. Something told her that if he could only bring her to release, if he would only release inside of her, then everything would be normal again. Everything would be alright…

Suddenly, there was the sound of the door opening. She heard it, even though it was apparent that Graham didn’t, because he was two seconds away from ripping her belt in half. It was her gasping that stopped the movement, and Thorton coming to get in Peyton’s way.

Peyton had seen what was happening through the small window on the cell’s door, and was now marching towards them with purpose. Graham turned his body around to shield her after Thorton was thrown literally aside; obviously not expecting Peyton to be anywhere near as strong as he was. “Peyton, wait. Chill out!” she squeaked, trying to rearrange herself, but quickly noticing that her shirt’s buttons were everywhere but on her shirt.

Graham growled, exposing his teeth which, she had never noticed before, actually had some sharp K9s. Wow. They were alien! Peyton obviously wasn’t intimidated, however, and marched up to Graham as if he merely presented a much-desired challenge, despite Graham, unlike Thorton, being larger than Peyton by over half of a foot.

“Graham! Peyton! Don’t!” She jutted in front of Graham, pushing her arms against Peyton’s chest. “Shh! Just don’t. I’m done here, we can go.”

It looked like the two men were going to launch themselves at each other, but Graham’s men quickly came along and pushed Graham safely back just as he stepped forward to attack. A Swarii gently pushed Ellie in Peyton’s direction and then put up his hands, as if to show that he had no quarrel, and that there was no need to inform anybody about anything that was going on.

Peyton took off his coat and tossed it violently to Ellie. “Put that on,” he said in a low growl—she knew he’d probably be barking at her if he wasn’t afraid to make the guards get off of their chairs and come investigate. “You and I are going to have a long discussion.”

She would have gulped, but her mouth was too dry. Mostly, she was embarrassed—and was becoming more and more so as she put on Peyton’s thin overcoat obediently over her exposed skin—shame had returned, and it wasn’t pretty.

“You’re not gonna touch her,” Graham growled from behind his men, still trying to claw his way past them. “She’s mine.”

“She’s mine,” assured Peyton, his dark blue eyes were piercing. “I’m prime. You’re chopped liver. I see her down here again; I will bring your world to a quicker close. Ellie,” he grabbed her hand and yanked her towards the door, “let’s go.”

* * *

It wasn’t much of a discussion. It was more like a begging ceremony, where Ellie tried her best to keep Peyton from taking the skin off her after he dragged her by the scruff of the neck of the coat he’d lent her to the gardens to snap a fresh switch. She’d never been switched before, but she still had bruises from earlier, and thus, she didn’t really want to find out what the combination would be like.

“Now, Peyton, if you just hear me out—” she said, her eyes following the switch’s every movement as he quickly tested his choice on his thigh.

Peyton didn’t hear her out. In another moment, he had grabbed her upper arm and wheeled her down to her bedroom.

“I know what I saw,” he retorted. “And what I saw was you lose your mind. I’m gonna tan the brains back into you, girl!”

She tried to grab at the door frame of her room as he tried to yank her in, knowing as soon as the door closed behind them, she was in for a world of hurt. “Well, I can kind of explain that if you—Ack!” She forgot how strong Peyton could be if he wanted to—she was surprised she didn’t take a chunk of the door with her when he pulled her in and shut the door behind them.

He started stripping the bark off the switch he’d found as Ellie regained her footing. “Alright, before you go nuts—I told you that the whole thing downstairs was weird. Maybe I did lose my mind! I don’t know. I couldn’t help it, though, Peyton. I mean, Graham’s actually kind of an ass, but I was still…”

“Lettin’ him in between your legs like a lil’ hussy? Yeah. I saw,” Peyton assured grimly.

She blushed profusely before she opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. “I’m not a hussy, Peyton,” she finally said, feeling small. “I know I put you at risk, though, and I AM super-sorry.”

“Risk? Risk? You were about to screw me—and not in the good way!” he blared. “May I remind you of what would happen if you…”

“I wasn’t thinking about you…” she admitted. “I just… forgot.”

Peyton looked at her with a very intimidating, very offended expression. “Yeah? Well, consider this your reminder, kiddo. Pants off.”

She, instead, put her hands on her pants like she was determined to hold them onto her hips at all costs. “I have something important to talk to you about!”

“Alright,” he said, tapping the switch impatiently against the side of his leg. “Talk. It better be REAL educational.”

She shifted her weight foot to foot, staring at the switch. “I can’t talk when you have that… thing in your hand,” she told him.

“Talk,” he ordered.

“Okay…” She bit her lip for a moment, and then unleashed everything. She basically recited everything word-for-word, but in the end, Peyton just looked more pissed than he was. He didn’t say anything, though, just locked his jaw and stared at her.

She got goose bumps over her arms as she realized that the reason he didn’t say anything, or move, is because if he did, he was afraid of hurting her.

“Can I change my shirt, at least?” she said, her posture an illustration of capitulation.

“Strip,” he ordered, but it was a short, controlled word.

“Peyton…” Peyton hadn’t seen her completely naked since her first day at the palace, when he ripped about a thousand towels off her body so that he would be able to leather her bottom, resulting in a lesson that she thought she wouldn’t have to learn twice: Never blatantly disobey Peyton. She couldn’t believe that she would be forced to be naked now. Now they knew each other.

Peyton wasn’t in the mood to be whined at, or to wait as she pretended to still have shame left. He stepped toward her, and she covered her body as if she was already nude. He made short work of undressing her against her will—although Ellie was strong in spirit, she wasn’t particularly strong in any other way. Especially up against a powerhouse-type like Peyton.

And she didn’t try that hard, anyway. By the time he took his own jacket from her, her eyes welled up with tears.

She was wailing by the time he ripped her pants down to her ankles.

“Stop your bellyachin’,” he snapped. “We haven’t even begun yet, Princess.”

Somehow, that wasn’t reassuring enough to get her to stop wailing and begging him until he grabbed her arm and pulled her to her bed, forcing her down on it. She was helpless—pinned by the small of her back.

And then he began to switch her.

It certainly didn’t feel like how she feared. No, no—it felt a million times worse. It turned out that she wasn’t very creative. Her mind hadn’t even begun to FATHOM the type of pain that went along with a switching. Mostly because she had never equated itching with pain—or was it itching? The way her skin seemed to quiver after a switching was uncomfortable enough to make her want to soothe the hot, inflamed welts it left behind, but it was a pain that couldn’t be scratched away.

It was surely possible that the entire palace could hear her caterwauling; it was as if she was trying to get her vengeance on Peyton by making his ears bleed. But he didn’t stop—he bit the switch into her flanks with such skill, you’d think he was a professional.

He even was able to lecture her, audible around her sobs. “Oh, this could get SO much worse,” he promised. “I told you NOT to talk to them, and then what do you do? Blatantly disobey me and WORSE. Do you know—do you have any idea—what could happen to you if you allowed that to happen? If I didn’t come in just in that second? How could you be so thoughtless? So selfish? So goldarn stupid? After all we’ve been through, you go behind my back and do that… There’s no excuse! None whatsoever!”

He wasn’t interested in just scorching her bottom for her, either. He switched her all the way down to the bend of her knees, until she brought up her feet protectively, and then he grabbed them both in turn until each pad of her foot had a couple of stripes across each of them.

“Spread your legs wider,” he ordered above her sobs.

She wanted to call out, ‘Are you crazy?’ but she wouldn’t dare. Still, she knew if she spread her legs wide, which she had taken great care to keep from doing thus far in the punishment it would only give him new, tender targets.

Still, it didn’t look like the switching would end until she did it, so, slowly, she began to edge of her feet carefully away from each other. Peyton grabbed her inner thigh with his large hand and forced them wider before he leaned over and issued blows to that area and then—

SWISH-SWICK! He hit the tender, swollen lips of her labia with the flexible wand.

She thought she was going to die.

To keep this short; she began to make promises and apologies. All sorts! She promised eternal obedience, she apologized for talking to the Swarii, she apologized for looking at them, she apologized for being born, and she promised that she would stay a virgin for the rest of her life.

She would have promised to turn into a pink elephant, too, if she thought that would make any difference.

Finally, it stopped. She continued to cry, but her throat hurt too much to even speak, after all her yelping. There wasn’t much to say on her behalf—she had been thoroughly punished; she had gone against Peyton’s wishes and his trust and risked his life, and probably her own. She did feel stupid.

She didn’t move. Peyton dropped the switch to her side and announced that she would stay in her room all night, and would go without dinner. She didn’t want it, anyway. How could she eat, or move around the palace, after that? All she wanted to do when Peyton left the room and locked the door behind him as if she was a naughty little girl, was to crawl up to her bed and cry into her pillow until she went to sleep, and that’s exactly what she did.

* * *

By the time Peyton entered Mary’s room, which was right next to Ellie’s, she was waiting for him, situated with her hands on her hips. He opened the door, walked in, saw her posture, and then quickly turned as if to make a smooth escape.

“Peyton Zachary Jones!” Mary snapped. “What on God’s green earth were you doing in there? Killing her?”

Peyton sighed and turned to face her. He locked his jaw with resolve. “We’re not on God’s green earth anymore, Mary,” he reminded in a low growl. “We’re in Hell. And Ellie lost her damn mind is what happened!”

Mary raised an eyebrow, obviously doubting this. She crossed her arms and settled her feet as if she expected to stand where she was for quite a while. “Explain.”

Peyton looked up at the ceiling, exasperated. “I don’t need to explain,” he told her, swiping his hand through the air. “I have a job to do, and I do it.”

“You do have to explain, because even though Eleanor’s a huge pain in the ass, and a brat, and a stupid idiot most times, she has turned back and pulled us both out of the fire numerous times. I’ve never been in Jazeel’s chamber other than during an inspection—and why? Because you asked her to make sure it never happened! Now; what could she have done that was so wrong not to warrant a little leniency?”

Peyton didn’t think he had time for a full explanation, but before he could say ‘angry wife’, he found himself telling the story of what happened, and then reiterating everything Ellie had told him about the Swarii.

Mary looked at him, her calmness reminding him of the sky before a storm.

“She could have gotten me killed! I mean, her tit was out of her bra, for God Sakes! She was being a skank!” he found himself defending, throwing his arms in the air with frustration.

“She might have lost her mind, yes. But Ellie’s NOT a skank,” Mary lectured, folding her arms impatiently and looking soured by the Peyton’s word choice. “At least she wasn’t this morning. When I met her, she still called a penis ‘a peepers’ for God’s sake. I’ve never met a more immature nineteen-year-old in my life. Which means something must have happened between this Swarii guy and her, and she’s telling the truth. Perhaps she did mate with the Swarii…”

Peyton made a guffawing noise in his throat.

“And if that’s so, and they plan to escape with her…”

“But that’s impossible…” Peyton grumbled.

“They’ve done it six times, Peyton,” reminded Mary frankly, plucking a fact that she had heard from Ellie’s retold theory. “Why is it so impossible?”

“Mary,” Peyton sighed. “The reason we haven’t escaped isn’t because I’ve been chicken. Humans can’t use Frian weapons, we can’t fly Frian ships. We aren’t able to use their crystal technology!”

“But are the Swarii able to use crystal technology?” Mary posed, waving her hand as if she was physically putting the question out there.

Peyton’s body stilled, his eyes darkened with thought. Suddenly, his eyebrows rose. “I don’t know…” Suddenly, he waved off the thought. “Say they can, I mean, could we possibly trust them? They’re aliens!”

“Peyton!” Mary groaned, frustrated. She stepped towards him and put her hands on his strong upper arms. “I don’t want to be your virgin wife forever. I want to be your real wife. I want to have sex. With my vagina. I want to have children—your children. And you know Jazeel’s betrothed likes human children; she’ll likely start breeding us. And what if we’re not lucky enough for us to breed with each other—maybe you and some other girl! Maybe you and Ellie together? Or maybe Lady Galaal’s prime and myself! Is that what you want? Peyton… This might be our last chance!”

Peyton sighed; he hated when his wife was right. It seemed like he was always trying to be the head-of-household, the fearless leader. Unfortunately, it was very possible that she was smarter than him. Or, after being kidnapped for only about two years, even combined with her service under a different master, she still had a sense of optimism about her situation.

Either way, she was right. The thought of another man breeding with Mary was simply unbearable—he’d rather die than to see such a thing happen. And it was possible—Frians bred humans constantly, and the new mistress had fine, multi-ribbon studs at her disposal. It was just a matter of time that he would be fighting for the girl’s virginities for their own sake rather than his.

He nodded. “I’ll go learn more, Mary,” he assured, kissing her cheek. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Then you better make nice with them. Try not to intimidate them,” she added, pleadingly.

“Who?” he grinned mischievously. “Me?”

* * *

“So let me get this straight…” Graham was leaning up against the wall at this point, his face vacant of all expression as he stared at Peyton. Graham was much calmer than he had been, but he looked uncomfortable, and ill. The room was cold, yet he was sporting the same feverish look that Ellie had about her. “You switched my wife half to death, and then you come down here and want me to include you in some sort of escape plan?”

“I didn’t switch her half to death,” Peyton assured with a frustrated sigh. “I might have tanned her hide for her, but I came out about it to you—gave it to you straight despite me going out on a limb to trust an alien like you. I thought Ellie had lost her mind—Jazeel LOVES his surprise inspections around here, mostly because he likes the way the girls squirm when he shoves a finger up them. BUT if he finds a girl without a hymen, I’m responsible. And if he’s angry enough with me—or BLAMES me, then it’s snip-snip.”

Peyton scissored his fingers through the air to illustrate, causing the two other Swarii and Graham to grimace at the imagery.

Graham looked indecisive, but another Swarii began to speak up, in English so he could be overheard by Peyton. “Look, Boss—you have to admit, it would be nice to have someone set off a diversion while we secured a ship on the West Dock.”

Graham slowly looked over to the Swarii who was speaking. Suddenly, he smacked him upside of his head. “Why don’t you just tell the human the whole plan? Why don’t you show him a goddamned map, Thorton!” He rolled his eyes and looked up at Peyton. “Fine. But if you slow us down, we leave you behind.” He rolled his fingers in his direction, beckoning Peyton closer. “Alright, Muscles—here’s what you do…”

* * *

Ellie slept on her belly, and when she woke up with a surprised jerk, she was immediately still conscious about the pain in her flanks. She was still naked, but didn’t care—her legs certainly weren’t bothered by the coolness in the room.

Her face was still buried into her pillow when she felt two thick, long fingers trace along the side of a welt. For a second, she felt like she was still dreaming. In the next moment, however, as the welt began to sting at the touch, she snapped her head up and looked straight into Graham’s eyes, who was, for some reason, kneeling right next to her.

Her brain couldn’t piece it together fast enough and she gasped in air to let out a scream of terror. He moved faster than her, however, and quickly covered her mouth with his hand, sufficiently gagging her. “Shh,” he shushed. “You okay?”

She nodded, her eyes still wide.

“I’m letting go of your mouth now,” he warned. “Be quiet.”

She nodded again.

He let go, and her expression immediately went from surprised to annoyed as she grabbed her pillow and tried to put that in front of her more private parts, sitting very quickly up and ignoring the uncomfortable sting in her backside. “What are you doing here? How’d you get here? How’d you know where to find me?”

“That’s a lot of questions, little lady,” he replied, lowering his face to hers. “But… I’m a professional.”

“Don’t kiss me. Don’t even start,” she threatened, getting a good, firm grip on her own self-control and tightening the pillow to her body.

He looked like he went through a metamorphosis of expressions—from anger all the way to embarrassment, even horror. “You’re right. God help me, I must be losing my mind…” He took her arm and pulled her into standing, which she didn’t do easily. “Get dressed, we have to go.”

“Go?” she echoed, her face twisted with confusion. “Go where?”

“There’s a landing dock about two klicks from the palace. We have to use the emergency tunnels. The boys are securing us a ship, but they’ll leave without us if we’re not there in fifteen minutes, so you need to move your ass.”

Yes—fifteen minutes to run two kilometers? She better put a move on; especially with welts on her feet. She jumped up from the bed. “We can’t just go,” she explained, jumping behind her changing curtain and quickly grabbing the first clothing items she could find.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Peyton and Mary-ah!” she yelped as she slid on pants—the panties weren’t quite as bad. “I can’t just leave them here.”

“Sorry, sweetheart—no time to deviate from the plan.” Truthfully, he hadn’t seen Peyton yet and he was beginning to think he wasn’t going to make it. “I wish we could take your friends.”

“But…” she came behind the curtain, wearing a flowy pair of pants and a thin blouse.

Graham felt himself stiffen again, but tried his best to ignore it and stepped forward to grab her hand. “I’m sorry, Sweet One. But we have to go.”

She stepped backwards, suddenly resisting. Her heart was beating rapidly—she couldn’t imagine just leaving Peyton and Mary, despite the fact that she wanted to see Peyton in enormous pain not ten minutes ago. “I’m not going without—”

She stopped when she saw the resolved look in Graham’s eye. Without saying words, it quite nicely got across that there was an ‘easy way’ and a ‘hard way’, but either way she chose, it was going to happen.

She didn’t have a chance to feel disappointed—things were beginning to move too quickly. She saw him pull a blaster off his utility belt—he was wearing that earlier, but there hadn’t been any sort of gun on it. He clicked it on and charged it up.

“Sorry,” Graham declined when he looked and saw her panicked and pleading expression.  He opened the door and tugged her with him out into the hallway.

She understood why Graham was able to so freely move about the palace: he was extremely stealthy; his feet made no sound whatsoever when they hit the ground, it seemed, while nearly every step she made onto the marble floors with her bare feet sounded like she was lightly clapping her hands.

When he led her straight into a dead-end, she had to admit that she was surprised. He didn’t seem like the screw-up type. Though, suddenly he bent down and plucked a grating off of a vent. “Here we go,” he told her quietly. “Ladies first…”

Then, suddenly, they heard another blaster behind them charge up. Graham sighed, cursed something in his own language, and put his hands up to turn around… Just in time to see a pair of human hands come up behind a particularly un-lazy Frian guard and snap his neck quietly to the side, breaking the neck instantly. The body was lowered to the ground, and Peyton’s firm, bulky body stood proud and straight in the middle of the hallway.

Peyton put his finger to his lips and then went around the corner, reappearing with Mary in-hand. Ellie looked completely dazzled by all of this.

“Peyton!” she cried, though as whisperish as she could.

“Shh!” Graham said anyway, and bent her down into the vent. “Careful of the drop. Feet first.” He took her hand and lowered her down where, she was surprised to see, there was a dark, empty, long tunnel. When he lowered her in until her feet touched the ground, Graham offered his hand to Mary, who, though reluctant, accepted and was also lowered down.

“I was beginning to think you weren’t gonna make it. Too busy painting your toenails?” was all Graham said when they were alone together.

“Funny, Dick. Next time you set off the decoy and I’ll rescue Ellie,” Peyton replied aloofly, climbing down into the tunnel himself, leaving Graham with his eyebrows knitted together and a victorious grin on his face.

Graham climbed down and replaced the vent grating behind him. “Can you make two klicks in nine minutes?” he asked Peyton.

“Can you?” Peyton challenged.

“I can’t,” admitted Ellie promptly, wondering what they were going to do now. She had never done a seven minute mile in her life, let alone done two kilometers in nine.

Graham picked up Ellie as if she were a doll, not even thinking twice. Peyton mirrored his movement. It wasn’t comfortable—all the skin on the entire surface of her backside felt raw. Still—despite being uncomfortable, she had to admit—she was happy that Peyton and Mary were with her.

“Let’s kick this pig,” Peyton said, beginning to run extremely quickly.

Graham also took off with an odd, thoughtful expression on his face. “Humans and their crazy euphemisms. Hopefully there’s a book somewhere. I need to catch up.”

Chapter Five

“Gee, Boss, I was beginning to think you weren’t gonna make it!” Thorton grinned as he stepped out of the lowered entry ramp, gun in hand, ready to return fire if any Frians popped out anywhere. It was unlikely—it was dead, in the middle of the night. The ship was noisily taking off, and still there didn’t seem to be any pursuers. This was surprising to Ellie.

“Just keeping you on your toes,” replied Graham, slinking by him. Thorton followed him and the ramp rose into the ship again as they went.

Thorton looked at Peyton, who was setting Mary down on the floor. “So, looks like you brought lunch.” He grinned maniacally for a second, until Peyton sufficiently glared at him. Thorton waved, “I’m just kiddin’.”

Graham finally put her down on the way to the control room, but he brushed right by her as soon as he did. She spun around and looked at Peyton and Mary. “What’s going on? How did you get in on all of this?” she asked, gesturing at the ship around her.

“Peyton’s a moron,” Mary explained shortly.

“I know, that’s why I’m confused,” Ellie replied with a shrug.

Peyton rolled his eyes and led both girls by their arms towards the control room. “The commander and I have an understanding. He had me launch Jazeel’s emergency ship into orbit. That way, we had more time to make a clean get away. It should take a few more minutes for them to figure out that the emergency ship is unmanned, and that we escaped another way.”

“Isn’t Jazeel’s emergency vessel able to be remote-controlled?” Ellie asked, knowing quite a bit about the ship Peyton was referring to—she had done a lot of work on it.

“Yeah, that’s why we’re not on it,” Thorton replied, breezing by.

She hummed in response and walked up to Graham, who was typing something quickly into the main system. “What can I do to help?” she offered, still feeling ridiculous after being carried two kilometers. Not that Graham even broke a sweat.

“Sit down and be quiet,” he directed, pointing to a nearby chair.

“Yeah, right,” she looked at the chair as if it was an instrument of pain. Even her clothes she found irritating; sitting would kill her, she was sure.

“You’re distracting,” he added, leaning over the control panel she was next to, reading a screen before taking a seat there. He suddenly gave her bottom a hard smack. “Get.”

Her jaw dropped. Was she just swatted? She grabbed her bottom with both hands and glared at him with an indignant look.

He typed a few things into a nearby keyboard. “Are you still there?” he asked, obviously noticing her in his peripheral vision, because he didn’t turn to glance at her.

She flicked him off, not that he could get the full gravity of that, as he was from a different planet, but it made her feel slightly better for a moment until suddenly all the lights on the panel started flashing red, just as the ship was taking off.

“I didn’t do it!” she held up her hands to show that she wasn’t touching a goldarned thing.

Graham cursed in his own language, and then continued to mutter in it.

She saw the panel next to her light up, and it began to say that wire 119 was a dead wire; not that she could read a word of Frian; but she helped fix enough electrical problems that she knew most problems on site, and could recognize numbers.

She knew exactly where to find wire 119, however, which she continued to do as the horizon continued to darken as the ship elevated through the planet’s atmospheres. She scooted underneath the dashboard. “One nineteen, one nineteen…” she grumbled, her mood further dampened by the lack of light.

Suddenly, in the monitors overhead, she heard a Frian shal’ta travel through the specialized intercom, and it was, like the Frians themselves, not very hard to understand.

You do not have permission to enter orbit or hyper speed, the Frian on the other end noted. You didn’t have permission to take off. All aircraft must be landed immediately. If you do not comply within three minutes, you will be shot.

Thorton was suddenly crawling next to her under the dashboard. “I found wire 119,” she told him, as if it was a greeting. “Do you have some spare line?”

“Yeah,” he replied, sounding out-of-breath for some reason.

“Eleanor! What the hell are you doing under there? Go buckle up, or I’ll buckle YOU,” the threat in Graham’s tone above-head was undeniable; she didn’t have to see his expression.

“Graham, fuck off. Leave me alone and drive!” she growled, cutting the wire out with the pliers Thorton had handed her. “That man’s pushy,” she explained to Thorton, whose dark expression now seemed a little anxious.

Her fingers worked fast—this was actually child’s play. Though, most wiring jobs were child’s play to her. She had wired up more complicated speaker systems into the trunks of old Dodge Chargers that had given her more flak.

“It’s working now,” she heard Thorton say, who scooted his head up to the dashboard to check. “Good job, Kitten,” he said with a wink.

A voice above them clucked something in Swarii, and she could only assume it was that they needed to enter hyperspace right NOW, because Thorton swore again, and disappeared. Just as she was wondering what the hell his rush was, her foot was dragged immediately out from under the control dock and Graham hauled to her feet and sat down in his chair with her so fast, that it made her head spin.

Just as she realized that Graham was holding her down in his lap, they went into hyper drive.

She was drugged most of the journey between Earth and Jazeel’s planet, so she hadn’t remembered the awing sensation of hyper drive. It sucked. Nearly literally—it felt like she was literally getting sucked through a straw like a piece of strawberry at the bottom of a glass of lemonade, and then got spat back out a rocket-speeds.

There was no similar roller coaster ride that could describe it, except that it felt like, for a full minute, that not even gravity itself knew what was going on.

And then everything returned to normal.

She found herself clinging to Graham like a wild yet frightened animal. She was nearly ashamed of herself for her display, and would have slowly gotten off him if he hadn’t put his hand under her chin to keep her head up and focused on his own eyes. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she wheezed.

He stood up quickly, and she nearly fell to the floor because of it. “Good,” he said brusquely. He looked around the room and announced. “Good job, men. Now, if anybody bugs me for the next hour, it had better be about life and death.” Suddenly, he took her hand and began to wheel her out of the control room.

“Wait—” Peyton was a few feet behind them, trying to unbuckle himself. “Where are you going with her?” he demanded. But he knew—the expression on Graham’s face was undeniable. He was going to have his way with Ellie; but the thought of it bothered Peyton—watching someone that he had taken under his wing like a sister about to let an alien between her legs with no formal wedding, no dating.

Graham barely took the time to glance at Peyton as he walked by him. “Believe me; it is none of your business where we’re going or what we do when we get there, got it?”

Peyton obviously didn’t like to be shrugged off. He finally got the harness unfastened and quickly went to block the door. “Where she goes, I go.”

“You have your own woman,” reminded Graham, nodding towards Mary. “This one is mine.”

Peyton didn’t move.

Graham suddenly grabbed the blaster off his utility belt and powered it on. He pointed it at Peyton’s head.

“Graham! Stop it!” Ellie said, trying to break free of his grasp.

“Step away, Muscles,” Graham growled threateningly. “I’m not in the mood to explain myself, and I’m not in the mood to dance with you.”

Peyton’s eyes shifted nervously, and he stepped aside and let them through the door.

“That was stupid!” Ellie lectured as Graham dragged her through the hallway.

Graham opened a door, looked in, and then closed it. “Is there ever a time where you are silent?” he asked her, then opened another door, looked in, and then tugged her into the room with him, shutting and locking the door behind him before he let her go and turned on the lights.

She looked around. They were in a bedroom. She suddenly felt a stinging paralysis in her legs. Heat rose to her cheeks as she decided the best place to look was Graham’s boots.

She halfway expected him to act out what they had done in the prison; where he would tear her shirt into two pieces and start moving his lips down her neck.

Instead, he spun her around and bent her over his arm, which he had wrapped around her waist. Her toes were suddenly barely touching the ground as he, very sharply and very deliberately, delivered five smacks to the back of her pants.

She shrieked in surprise, and then in the startling pain caused by him affronting such a tender area. She was going to yelp, ‘why?’, but he began carrying out a very seething lecture unprompted.

“If you EVER talk to me like that in front of my crew again, I will take the hide off of you, do you understand me? And then I swear to GOD I will wash your mouth out with soap until that’s all you taste for a week. Did you think I don’t understand what you were saying? That your language is far too intricate to pick up subtle nuances?” He was spanking her harder at the end of the speech than at the beginning, as if he had only made himself angrier.

“I was helping, though!” she gasped. “And you were being a… not nice person!” she caught herself before she said, ‘asshole’. She thought she could get away with cursing, but apparently not.

He stopped spanking her and wheeled her around to face him before she could sufficiently rub her affronted cheeks through the miserable excuse for fabric that were her pants. “I’m not a nice person,” he informed her. “Not when I’m working, not when I’m trying to get us out of gun-range, and not when I’m dying with ‘the sickness’. I’m just trying to keep sane. If you know what’s good for you, you will learn to at least not embarrass me further and speak to me respectfully. Do you know what respectful means? Or do I need to write out the definition on your bottom for you?”

“I didn’t ask for this, you know,” she reminded curtly. “I didn’t ask to have anything to do with you. I didn’t even ask you to rescue me from Jazeel. I was prima! I was doing fine.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s what it looked like,” he doubted sarcastically, pulling off his black shirt, exposing his well-chiseled, though beat-up frame. He had deep blue, purple, and green bruises everywhere, scratches were also everywhere. “REAL fine. I bet you loved getting your tits squeezed in public and then beaten for anything.”

“What’s the difference between there and here?” she countered, putting her hands on her hips.

That question seemed to enrage him. “Because you’re my universe! I would never allow anything bad to happen to you no matter how angry I became with you! You’re my soul mate; without you, I’d go wallow about the universe, lonely and miserable my entire life. But to Jazeel, you’re on level with a favorite goldfish. If he found you floating dead at the top of a bowl, he wouldn’t think twice about throwing you out and replacing you. No tears, no remorse, no nothing. You’re an animal to him; even as a prima.”

She didn’t respond to his fiery monologue, just turned her head away from him as he continued to undress, clumsily ripping the boots off of his feet and then unbuckling and pulling off his pants.

She simply didn’t believe him. She couldn’t believe that any scientific anomaly would ever make anyone feel that way. She didn’t even feel that way, as far as she could tell. She wanted sex; but more like a respite than for emotional connection. He had to be wrong.

“Do you need help undressing?” he asked, cutting impatiently through the silence.

“No.” She lifted her head and faced him, hoping her frustration with him was obvious. “I just… HOLY!” She jumped away from him, realizing that he was already completely naked and that his… manhood… was staring right at her at full size and full height, rigid and stiff.

She closed her hands over her eyes, shocked. She just realized that she had never seen a real-live version of a man’s penis. She hadn’t even seen one on television or in the movies more than a glimpse-worth. So this monstrous thing in front of her, that she was surely supposed to take into her body, was quite a surprise.

She didn’t know exactly how long or wide it was, mostly because her mind blanked out when she saw it. Her brain simply shot her the message: TOO BIG. It was rare that a porn star would be so well-armed.

She was hoping the thing would just disappear when she took her hands away from her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he sounded exasperated.

“This ain’t happenin’,” she said flatly, trying to feel her way to the door with her eyes shut tight. “I’m sorry, but… This isn’t even possible, I don’t think, so… Have fun… Without me...”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he sighed, making sure he was standing in the way of her exit. “Of course it’s possible.”

“Even if it’s possible, I don’t think it’s worth it.” She gasped when, reaching blindly out, she ran into his naked, slightly hairy stomach.

After she gasped, he simply grunted and picked her up, letting her writhe uncomfortably in his arms. “I don’t want this!” she told him. “Really—when we came close earlier today—or yesterday, whenever it was—I obviously didn’t know what I was heading for!”

“The union would have never happened if it was dangerous for you to mate with me,” he assured confidently, carefully laying her on the bed then he carefully tried to pry her hands from her eyes. “Only people that are completely compatible ever…”

“I don’t buy it!”

He sighed and said calmly, leaning over her, “Can you not be so deliberately horrible about this? I mean, I’ve looked forward to this moment my entire life; I’ll go slowly. I won’t hurt you. Can’t you just relax and enjoy this?”

“I looked forward to this, too, but like—with a guy I knew and had dated for awhile, and who had a REALLY nice, shiny red car, and who wouldn’t be scared off by my Dad’s shotgun… And, you know… One who wasn’t hung quite like a moose.”

“What’s a moose?” he feared he had to ask.

“An animal with a gigantic… you know...”

His face twisted with confusion for a second and then, the reason for her sudden extreme hesitation finally settled into his mind, and he laughed. “You think it’s larger than usual, then?” He waggled his eyebrows playfully, but continued to laugh.

“Stop teasing me,” she pouted. “It’s horrifying.”

She was adorable and innocent, he decided, even though she was extremely immature. Still, he guessed he was mature enough for the both of them. He grinned and put his mouth on hers. It was just as delicious as before, if not more so. It felt like every nerve in his body was reeling.

He began to fish his hand down to start unbuttoning her pants. She looked down to see how he was doing, and as soon as her neck twitched, he tilted her head back up at him. “Just don’t look down.” He grinned mischievously.

He kissed her again, longer and harder as he accomplished his goal and slid her pants down. He continued to undress her, her shirt, her bra… everything. Despite how ‘horrifying’ he was going to be, he could easily detect the pure desire within her, and not just by the firming of her nipples, but in her eyes, and her breathing.

“I’ll make up for not having the car—whatever the hell that is,” he added as he climbed onto the bed next to her, rotating his calloused fingers around a swollen nipple.

It didn’t take him playing with her for very long before she was pressing her face into his chest. Slowly, delicately, she ventured her lips out and started to kiss his chest. She licked her lips. He tasted good.

And his fingers were absolutely magical as one traveled slowly down past her belly button and started to massage her inner thighs. She wanted so much more; she was panting for his touch. But he was playing with her.

He slowly put a finger into her damp, tender orifice. She gasped in response. “Hm, you are tight…” He let her writhe against his hand, dipping his finger into her over and over again.

Suddenly, a look of concern came over her face and her muscles locked tightly on him. His eyes began to twinkle with delight, as hers gleamed with both confusion and embarrassment as she moaned, loudly, uncontrolled and unexpecting of how it was going to feel. She had played with herself for relief in the past, but it was nothing like this.  “Oh, you are going to be so tired by the time we’re done,” he teased with his lusty, velvety voice in her ear. “Especially for someone who claims not to have the sickness. We never had the union? Is that what you were trying to say earlier?”

“Be gentle with me,” she whined, biting her lip as he continued on, picking up the pace with excitement.

And he was—oh, so gentle. So slow, so patient, and never failing to keep her relaxed as she settled upon orgasm after orgasm. By the time he put the mushroom head of his member against her opening, she was already exhausted, yet actually begging for it.

It hurt—oh, Lord! Did it hurt—but at the same time, her body ached for it. She had never felt so fulfilled as it slid inch by inch inside of her.

His expression was delightful—he felt so relieved—like he had been suffering great pain that only now was getting alleviated.

It was nothing she’d seen on any video—this was love making, not sex. This was like the melding together of two bodies, until finally Graham made a noise—a loud groan, just as he spilt his seed into her. At the same moment, as if it had spurred a chemical reaction, she cried out, her whole body clenching down on his member…

And suddenly the world came together again.

She didn’t know what had happened—it was like the warm veil that had been irritating her all day—which seemed like years, now— was suddenly lifted. Her fever was lifting quickly, leaving the chill of the room on her skin. She was Ellie again; she was back to normal; back in control.

Until he brushed her hair away from her face and kissed her ever so gently. “You’re mine,” he told her. It wasn’t said with glee, or with possessiveness. It was fact.

It suddenly felt like her brain was being combed by his words. The words were so simple, but for some reason she could find her brain revolving around it; shooting out signals to her nerves, everything in her brain wanted to shout out:

I AM yours!

But she clenched her teeth, and held back the words she so wanted to say. She pressed her head into his chest, her eyes quickly misting over as she tried to gather her thoughts, wondering why she was so ashamed by them.

Her mind fought a quick battle, almost as if it was letting degenerate thoughts back into the party, thoughts that had been bounced out, but hung stubbornly around the door. And those thoughts surged one thing to her brainstem: she wasn’t Eleanor Masterson—she was Ellie Jonas. She had been a slave for the last year, but she had never stopped being her own person in all that time. She wasn’t anyone’s but her own.

Then why did she feel this way? What was wrong with her?

“Eleanor? Are you alright?” Graham picked her up and leaned further back on his knees, his arms slung tightly around Ellie as he felt her body tremble and then sniffle sadly.

* * *

Ellie would not be held, would not be talked to. She looked and acted like someone who had been molested or betrayed. Graham was finally seeing things normally now—he wasn’t thinking so much with his cock—and he still couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong with her. Frustrated, he hung his clothes up in the ‘freshener’ and then stepped into the shower.

By the time he came out again, Ellie was sleeping. And still sniffling. It was maddening, to say the least.

He changed into his freshly-cleaned clothes and left the room. He felt fantastic—better than he remembered feeling in years, and just yesterday he had been kicked, stomped on, and tasered by over a dozen Frian guards and soldiers.

When he walked into the control room, he was instantly surprised by seeing that Thorton was comically chatting to Peyton, as if he was a long-lost buddy. He stopped mid-laugh when he saw Graham out of the corner of his eye. “You feeling better, Boss? How was it?” He had a mischievous smile on his face.

Graham shrugged uncommitted. “Oh, it was great… Until she started crying and all that.”

“Ha! Nice.” Thorton continued to grin until Graham’s serious expression made him erase it.  “Maybe it’s what humans do,” Thorton shrugged. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”

“It’s not what humans do,” Peyton argued, but he didn’t look too concerned, either. He merely looked aloof. “Trust me.”

Graham stared at the gigantic human, hopefully he’d care to expand into a theory, but it began to look like he wasn’t going to. Peyton merely pretended Graham wasn’t there, as childish as Graham thought that was.

“Look, I’m sorry to be so confrontational before. I wasn’t in my right mind,” Graham apologized, extremely hesitantly. He had a feeling a week aboard the ship was going to go very slowly, indeed, if half of the ship hated his guts.

Peyton’s eyes suddenly rolled over him, seeming surprised by the apology. “Thorton explained the whole union thing in a little more detail, and I wasn’t much less aggressive. I’m just used to cock-blocking, particularly for Ellie. Now, I barely believe all that union crap, but… But, as my wife pointed out, Ellie was acting weird. Maybe there’s something to it.”

“See—why is the union so unbelievable?” Graham asked, looking like he really wanted to know as he sat into the commander’s chair and spun it towards Thorton. “I’ve been arguing with Eleanor for ages about it. What do they do on Earth?”

“Lots of things. There’re thousands of cultures on earth, and they all do somethin’ different when it comes to marriage and sex and datin’,” explained Peyton. “I don’t think Ellie’s thought much about it. She’s never had a boyfriend in her life. She probably had the idea that she would eventually marry a guy who didn’t mind her working on cars all day. If she ever thought two seconds about marriage, then my guess is she was expecting some sort of glorified roommate. One that would cook and clean for her, and let her have control of the relationship and their lives. She’s not quite the traditional female…”

Graham felt incredulous. He could barely believe such a thing—it was hard for him to imagine. “Well, she didn’t get that in me. Swarii women… you know, are more submissive to their husbands. It’s part of the union—she’s supposed to submit to me.”

Peyton laughed, hard. “Well, don’t get your hopes up. Ellie doesn’t submit—not to anybody. That requires respect, and Ellie doesn’t have any.”

“She’ll want to, though,” assured Graham, looking intense.

“She might need to—I don’t know all the intricacies of that voodoo union stuff. But Ellie and I were pretty close for the last year, and I know she won’t want to. She’ll fight against it with every scrap in her. Ten to one that’s why she was cryin’—she was hoping to gain control again, not to lose it.”

Graham hummed thoughtfully. “So, what should I do, in your opinion? Just give her control?”

“Hell no, she’s way too immature to have control,” Peyton snorted. “Give it to her and she’ll just feel alone and miserable, because she won’t know what to do with it.”

Graham rolled his eyes. “Then what?”

Peyton chuckled and shrugged. “Just love her. That’s the only thing you can do. Love her, be patient, and don’t give her enough rope to hang herself with. If I were you, I’d keep a strap on me at all times, because you’re going to be using it all of the time. Don’t let her play you. You want her to actually respect you, not just pretend.”

“Urgh,” Graham put his hands over his eyes and turned to Thorton. “Why is my life so hard?”

“I’d trade you spots,” Thorton shrugged. “She’s half-blood, but she’s got a hot little body. You could have done worse. They didn’t pick your name in the lottery, anyway, Boss. So you’re lucky you got anything at all.”

As Graham shrugged, conceding Thorton’s point, Peyton’s eyebrows went up. “Lottery? What do you mean?”

“We only have fifty percent of our females left—the Frians released a toxin into the atmosphere of our head planet that focused primarily on females about fifteen years ago,” Thorton explained, the laugh lines in his face smoothed instantly, as there was nothing but seriousness in his voice. “By the time we could find an antidote, we had substantial losses. Not to mention the mass-suicides from the men, after their wives died. The union’s strong—it can throw men into depressive fits when they come home and find their wives dead.”

“That took out twenty-five percent of men, as well. So nearly forty percent of our entire population was gone in the course of a couple of weeks,” Graham added. “We had way more males then females afterwards. However, you can only have the union once. So, we were unbalanced—one woman for every two males. And so, they devised the lottery for men who haven’t had the union yet. Not every winner of the lottery would even get chosen—you sort of touch around for your genetic match there and hope you find someone. Happens every year.”

“And you didn’t get your name pulled out of a hat to get chosen to do even THAT?” The idea of it sounded surprisingly cold to Peyton—as did the idea of not remarrying after one’s wife died. He wondered what he would do if he lost Mary—the idea had rotated in his mind since he first saw her. He would probably be among the suicides. It would have been too big of a loss.

“It’s not a hat,” Thorton argued shortly. “It’s an electronic system. And no, he didn’t. I did, though!” Thorton cracked his knuckles proudly. “Next Spring, baby. Next Spring it’ll be my wife who’s complaining that I’m hung like a moose.” He laughed.

Graham’s expression was suddenly blank. “Could you… hear what was going on in there?”

“Not from here,” Thorton replied, lifting his shoulders innocently into a shrug. “But if you were standing in the hallway, there were all sorts of activity. Poor sound cancellation. I’m surprised you couldn’t hear each other.” He waved between him and Peyton.

Graham didn’t know whether or not to be angry. He looked up at Peyton, whose face was heating to red. “Didn’t you have anything better to do,” Peyton asked, “than to listen to me finally have actual sex with my own wife?”

Thorton grinned. “Actually, no. There wasn’t anything better to do.”

“Don’t make him angry,” Graham said, actually finding that he wasn’t angry. He was stifling a laugh. “He snapped a Frian’s neck back at the palace—with his bare hands.”

Thorton raised an eyebrow. “No way,” he doubted.

“Way. He’s not a human,” Graham spun around in his chair and faced the consol, quickly logging into the interface. “He’s a beast.”

* * *

Ellie slept late the next day. She was exhausted beyond description. She was sore, everywhere, inside and out. Raw.

She was nearly expecting to feel a gigantic, smooth phallus rubbing up against her behind when she woke up. But instead she heard a gentle, manly snore. Being very careful, she rolled over and saw a completely clothed Graham sleeping on the outside of the sheets. He had such a tired look about him, that she wouldn’t have been surprised if he had never gotten around to kicking his boots off.

She slowly sat up and looked at him. You should get up and make his breakfast, a voice in her head lectured her. You’re HIS, now. Be good.

It wasn’t a real voice—she was quite sure she didn’t have schizophrenia, but if it was she might have been less concerned. She took a deep breath and resisted the voice’s urging.

All the wives in her family—her grandmother, her mother, her aunt—were submissive women. It was like the men in the family scoured the country to find the most pre-twentieth-century women they could find.

It’s because they were half-Swarii, she realized now. More Swarii than she was—and Swarii liked their women to submit. They felt they needed it. They wanted their women at home with the kids, to cook and to clean, to look adoringly at them when they came home from work. It made them function better, work harder, and be happier.

Funny enough, this was the first time she had even thought of that. She thought her mother and aunt were crazy to not have ever picked up a career. Their career was their husbands, and they were content with it being that way. But Ellie had gifts—gifts her father and uncle saw right away, gifts that made them forget she was female at all. She had even forgotten her own sex from time to time. It didn’t matter—only the puzzles mattered. Making broken things whole, working. Creating new things, new ideas, things that nobody ever thought to do. She liked not only piecing everything together; she liked to do it in a way that amazed people.

That would not end. It would take more than a union, a primal urge, an alien abduction and a dazzling escape to keep her away from her games, and her puzzles.

Graham would come to realize this in time, she told herself. Then the voice in her head would get weaker and quieter, in time. She didn’t want to be away from Graham—she didn’t need a voice to urge her, there. It was basically a magnetic reaction; gravity, even. There was no getting away from him now. She was sure, down to her bones, that she would be miserable without him. He, for better or for worse, was her mate. She could live with that. She was his—yes. But he was hers, too, and hers alone.

She studied what was hers. His face—every piece of skin, his lips, his nose, his eyebrows, eyes… Stubble was beginning to grow into his face, giving him a scruffy look.

She looked up and also noticed that there was a tinge of purple in his hair—the color had looked chestnut under darker light, but in the yellow light radiating from a nearby lamp, she could see violet strands illuminate. She nearly smiled at it, how strange it was, wondering if that’s a normal color of the Swarii—if purple hair was as common as blonde. She couldn’t wait to see.

She looked at his hands, and then squinted at them. Carefully, she put her hands around his wrist and lifted his hands. She put her hands up against it, just in case she was counting incorrectly.

Six fingers. How had she not noticed? Actually, she was almost jealous. She’d always wanted six fingers—since the invention of the keyboard, it didn’t seem like there was ever enough digits. She was amazed, and her amazement continued as she noticed the size of his hand in comparison to hers. Even the smallest digit was the width of her thumb.

Suddenly, the large hand closed around hers, then brought it to his lips. He kissed her knuckles tenderly, and then brought up his other hand to stroke her knuckles. “Are you playing with me, wife?” he grumbled.

She blushed slightly, but he didn’t open his eyes yet to see it. “When did you get dressed?”

“Last night. I wanted to make sure I took my turn at watch. Relieved Thorton so he could get some shut-eye until Brahm woke up and could relieve me.”

The name was unfamiliar. “Do I know Brahm?”

He played with her fingers, his eyes still not open. His voice sounded like a low, rumbly yawn. “My team has Fie, the largest. Thorton— he’s the smart ass who won’t shut up. Jio you haven’t talked to, because he doesn’t speak Human. He’s a rookie; this is his first out-of-ship mission. And Brahm you haven’t talked to, either, because he also doesn’t speak Human, but that’s only because he doesn’t like humans and thus has made it a point NOT to learn it.”

“Why don’t you guys just speak in shal’ta? Why did you develop your own language in the first place?” she asked, sounding a little frustrated.

“Speaking in shal’ta is considered rude,” he replied simply. “It’s a joke that you don’t bother moving your mouth to speak to your enemies. Only the Frians shal’ta as a language. Their species developed on a water-planet. They couldn’t create a language with sounds, since they spent so much time in the water, and so they developed the ability to shal’ta.

“We didn’t develop the ability naturally, either—not the original habitants of my home world, at least. Not until we—the people of Swaraan—started breeding with a race genetically similar to our own called the Libiis. Our species was physically superior to theirs, but they had far more brain capacity and also had telekinetic and telepathic powers. It was their idea to set up a program where the two species merged—that way we could both benefit; them with more physically capable bodies and us with more intelligence. This was only about three thousand years ago.”

“What? Your whole species?”

“And all the Libiis. All the Swaraan and Libiis took one another as mates, and we simply merged. The Libiis had done it far before the Swaraan, my more physically-capable ancestors. It happens every so often. The Libiis were already at war with the Frians at that point. When the Swaraan mixed with the Libiis, we inherited all of their enemies as well, including the Lizards. We’ve been fighting against the Frians ever since. So, actually, the Swarii blending with humans isn’t too odd. We already have blending in our heritage.”

“That’s…” she sputtered, shaking her head. “That’s crazy! That’s Twilight Zone stuff!”

His eyes opened slowly. “Nope. Don’t get it. Don’t get Twilight Zone. What does it mean? And it better not be swearing. I’ll warm your bottom for you.” He pointed a firm finger in her direction.

She slapped his finger out of her face and shook her head. “You’re not supposed to get the Twilight Zone,” she explained shortly. “It’s how they tell us weird and creepy fictional stories.”

“Well, this wasn’t fictional. Truth is always stranger than fiction. It’s been my experience that just when you think things are getting too weird to handle, that just means things are about to get a whole hell of a lot weirder.”

She considered this. “Yes. That would be about my experience, too,” she admitted, then let her lip pout a bit. “So, does the entire universe think spanking humans is okay, or what?”

He groaned and sat up on the bed—obviously, he was not a man who liked a whiny wife. “It’s not a human thing, it’s a bratty, disobedient, or disagreeable woman thing,” he corrected, patiently. “Don’t they do that to their women and children on your planet?”

“Not the civilized countries!”

“Ah, well. Consider the rest of the UNIVERSE uncivilized, then. Sorry to break it to you,” he snorted with disbelief. “Come here, let me see you.” When he said ‘come here’, she sort of thought he meant her to sit on his lap. He didn’t. With a tug of her arm, he had her over his knees, and was beginning to drag his fingers along the welts on her bottom.

“Hey!” she complained, beginning to feel embarrassed at the view he undoubtedly had.

“These look like some human worked into you quite well,” reminded Graham. “So, I’m definitely not the only brute you know. You can blame me all you like, but your problem is cross-species. This looks like the switch,” he noted thoughtfully, fingering another tender welt that stretched across the outsides of her labia. He tsk-tsked when she cringed. “Ooh, poor baby. That looks pretty painful.”

“You spanking me earlier didn’t make it feel any better,” she assured. “Stop playing with me.”

“Are you positive?” he said, his voice turning velvety and mischievous. He dipped one of his large fingers into her wetness.

Her whole body twitched at the evasion. “I’m positive! I’m sore,” she whined. “I’ve had a very rough twenty-four hours.”

He ran his fingers around a small bruise by her rectum. Her rectum, in response, puckered protectively. “Where’d you get this? This bruise?”

“I don’t know,” she lied. She knew it was from the butt plug. It was too familiar of an area. She was sure the outer rim of the plug had bruised her when she fell on her ass.

“You’re not half as good at lying as you think you are,” he told her.

It was too bad; she used to be good at it until he came along. Her face flushed. “It’s embarrassing, Graham! Let me up.” She squirmed but he kept her in place.

“Was it a plug?” he guessed, his voice was hard. She was hoping his frustration wasn’t towards her. “Were you plugged?” He repeated, still quite horrified at how far Jazeel went. Not that Swarii didn’t use plugs. They did constantly—it was just not something he had ever considered a lizard thinking to do. It was hauntingly perverted.

“Are you surprised?” she snipped. “I had one in me half the day yesterday. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“He did this because of us?” he asked incredulously.

“Because of you, specifically. You nearly got your face blown off!” she reminded. “I don’t know how you survived seven captures. I don’t know how you survived one, let alone oh—” She closed her eyes as he reached around to the front and cupped her pubis in his hand.

He pulled her up next to him and rolled over on top of her. “I’m sorry. I wish I'd met you earlier, to get your out of there earlier. If I could have known, you wouldn’t have spent one day in the palace, one day suffering by the lizards,” he told her—and the apology was strangely sincere. And she found herself believing him; he would never let her get captured by Frians again. She never had to fear anyone again.

Again he made love to her. Even though she didn’t have the sickness, it didn’t matter. There was still the union—she still had the magnetic pull towards him, the desire to touch and be touched by him. It felt just about as good as the first time, even though she was so sore already. It was as if putting her in absolute ecstasy was the most important thing he’d ever do, and it was so easy for him.

Afterwards, she didn’t cry this time when they finally lay together sated. She let him cradle her, content, in his large arms. “You’re mine,” she sighed happily, feeling herself falling back asleep.

His chest rumbled with a chuckle. “Yes,” he agreed. “I am.”

Chapter Six

Graham was counting. Ellie obviously just wasn’t aware of it—she was acting as if she was in a glaring contest where the one who moved their eyes to the floor first would lose.

Her face was flushed bright red from embarrassment; and even worse, Peyton had betrayed her. Sure, she wasn’t supposed to work on the motorcycle she found on level two—nor was she supposed to step foot on that level, but she never would have thought that Peyton, of all people, would catch her and drag her to the command room for reckoning. And then he threw salt in the wound by alerting Graham that she needed her mouth washed out, whatever the hell that meant, and proceeded to repeat all the names she had called him when he dragged her down from level two.

Graham’s jaw was set. “Eleanor, I told you not to even GO on level two, didn’t I?”

“You’re not my commander,” she replied, as snotty as humanly possible, crossing her arms casually and sticking her nose aloofly towards the ceiling.

Graham seemed to disagree. “Go to the bedroom, take down your pants, stick your nose in the corner,” he ordered, causing her to flush red, “and wait for me.”

And that’s when Ellie, startled by the order, which he delivered in front of all of his men, shifted her feet as if she planned to stay there for quite a while.

The countdown was over. He stood up and stepped away from the command chair and turned to Brahm and said something in Swarii, it sounded pretty much that he just explained that he was going to have to step out of the room. Brahm just nodded and looked behind him towards Ellie to deliver an expression that clearly stated that he hadn’t an ounce of sympathy for her, and he would not trade places with her for the universe.

Graham marched towards her.

Suddenly, if felt like she had been doused with cold water. She had antagonized her seven-foot-tall husband, and suddenly she couldn’t even remember why.

She turned around and ran. She nearly got to the door, too, but Graham caught her arm and hoisted her under his arm and carried her kicking and screaming out of the control center.

Even from the control room, they could hear Ellie miserably protest all the way to their bedroom. Her voice echoed sharply around the ship. “This is ridiculous! Drop me!” she cried. “You can’t punish me! I’m an adult! I’m your wife!” THAT statement was a first. Obviously she was trying to swing the idea to her advantage. “You can’t bully me like this! Put me down! You’re on watch! We don’t have time for this! Graham! Graaham! Ohhh! I hate you!” After that, the voice became much more muffled as Graham had brought her into the room and shut their door behind him.

Thorton got up from his chair and stretched. “Well, I’m gonna go get a drink of something… or something,” he excused, putting his hands in his pocket as he walked towards the hallway.

Peyton stood up just to stand in Thorton’s way. “No way. You just want to listen in.”

Thorton sighed and said, “Well, I suppose there’s room for both of us…”

“No way, Bro. Give them some privacy.” Peyton couldn’t help but laugh at Thorton’s strange, perverted ways.

Thorton groaned. “But… But this is live entertainment!” he argued. He straightened his coat. Suddenly, his eyes lit up with excitement from an idea. “Wrestle you for it, Beast?”

Peyton smirked and took off his jacket. “Sounds good. You’re gonna be cryin’ louder than her at the end of this, though. For your mother.”

* * *

“Let’s be rational here,” Ellie suggested as soon as her feet hit the floor of their private bathroom. She didn’t know what he planned with her in there, but she didn’t like where this was going. “I think we’ve merely had a misunderstanding…” She put her back up against the sink area, putting her hands protectively against her rear.

Graham’s body seemed to fence her in by the sink area. He reached around her and washed his hands quickly. “The only misunderstanding we’ve had is that you thought you could do and say whatever it is you want to, and that I would let you.” He dispensed some soap on his finger. “Open.”

She’d suddenly recalled this ‘washing your mouth out’ threat. Peyton used to constantly threaten to wash her mouth out, but she always thought it was a turn of phrase. She didn’t actually think there was a punishment featuring soap. She locked her jaw and stubbornly turned her head from him.

“Open now,” he growled.

She shook her head, looking at him like he had lost his mind.

He rinsed off his finger in the sink, his own jaw locked firmly. In the next moment, he spun her around and hoisted her up a foot so that she was bent over the sink, her feet dangling off the floor. He reached around her front as she was struggling to climb back down, and in a flash her pants were dangling at her calves.

She really hoped that this was a sex thing; that his next move was just to free his phallus and insert it into her.

Nope. In the next moment, he lit into her backside with the palm of his hand with a fierceness that made their first night together seem like a couple of pats, not even spanks. She shouted out in protest, furious at this treatment. “You’re hurting me, you asshole!”

It suddenly got worse. She didn’t think it could get worse, but if she thought about it logically, of course it could. He wasn’t using all of the strength in his arm. Probably only a small fraction of it—he was nearly two feet taller than her; she was child-size in comparison to him.

Tears of anger started to stream down her face. He was setting her bottom on fire! And there was nothing dignified about the process of getting wet from sink water, which was still running, with having her bottom exposed like a naughty kid’s… For some reason, when Peyton did it, there was an air of it being part of ‘the business’.

“Are you ready to be compliant?” he finally asked above her cries.

“Yes!”

Suddenly, back she was in the old position, soap was back on his finger, and he looked more determined as ever. “Open,” he said, dismissing the tears on her face, if he even noticed them at all.

Hesitantly, she opened her mouth. She didn’t have much choice in the matter.

As soon as he saw her opening, he shoved his soapy finger into her mouth, efficiently filling her mouth with the burning, disgusting, jarring flavor of the soap. She started to sputter. She tried to yank her head away from him, which worked only for a moment when he grabbed her chin with one hand and continued with the other. “Bite me and you’ll regret it, little girl. Let me tell you,” he said in response to her mutinous glare.

She gagged and sputtered, but he continued to run the soap over every tooth, all her gums, her tongue, and the roof of her mouth. “Swearing in ANY language is not tolerated,” he reminded firmly. “You were warned. On my planet, words actually matter. Get used to taking responsibility.” He turned her around. “Spit.”

She was glad to. She spit the stinging flavor out of her mouth quickly and repeatedly. She grabbed some water into her hand and tried to swish it around in her mouth, but before she could do it more than once, he turned her back around. “Got more filthy language or insults?” he asked.

She shook her head, grinding her teeth together. She was light-headed from the discomfort. She was practically shivering.

“Are you sure?” he asked threateningly. 

She wanted so badly to slap him. Or kick him in the nuts. To unleash any pain—any pain at all—would be a delight. “Positive,” she growled.

“Good.” Without a hesitation, he grabbed her arm and walked her out of the bathroom and to the bed, letting her trip on the pants around her ankles only for a few feet before he stopped, reached down and pulled them the rest of the way off.

She was quickly beginning to worry that he planned to spank her more as he sat down on the side of the bed and began to tug her over hisr knees. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry!” she cried, recognizing the moment as not a good time to be brave.

“I’m sorry,” he told her grimly, positioning her over his knee skillfully. “Obviously I’ve given you the wrong impression of me. When I ask you to do something, I expect you to obey me. You don’t have to like it—but I expect you to obey.”

She gave an angry sob. “I’m not your pet! I don’t have to do what you say!” she immediately regretted it. The skin on her bottom was already tender and burning. He put his hand over her bottom then, and she was able to recognize again how large his hand was. It easily covered most of her bottom and would make his work quick and easy.

“You’re my wife. And if you DON’T learn to be obedient, you’ll find yourself in this position very often, I assure you. There is ONE leader in this relationship, and that’s me. Get that clear.”

“I hate you!” she shouted, defeated and frustrated. There was no getting out of this position—she was no match for him.

“Fine; hate me. But you WILL obey me,” he snapped, his voice sounding actually hurt—and frustrated.

And then the spanking commenced.

She didn’t know how long. Probably for only five more minutes, but it felt like days.

She went through a volley of emotions—anger, certainly, was the first one. She clenched her teeth shut, hoping to play the bad ‘whipping boy’ and suffer in silence. She gave that up after the first twenty seconds, and then she began to kick, cry, and wail.

She was surprised when remorse actually hit. She had felt it before during Peyton’s spanking—hit a moment of reflection when she realized she deserved punishment. But she didn’t expect to feel remorseful about this.

This seemed to hit her like a wall. What was she thinking?! Sure, there was a motorcycle that was jet-propelled, like something out of Return of the Jedi, and that was certainly alluring although ‘against the rules’, but if she was looking for something to fix or to do, there was plenty. The ship had the internet, for cripe’s sake. Tons of information was available of all of Swaraan and many Frian planets. There was even Swarii television available!

But no. She had to go to the second level, where she was specifically told not to go because it was so beat up after years of transport service. There were places where she could fall straight through the floor. So why did she do it?

Because she had WANTED to disobey Graham. She liked the sensation she got when she disobeyed him—that fluttering feeling in the pit of her stomach. The new, submissive part of her triggered it, gave her the excitement from doing something wrong, the thrill. She desired to be put-in-line by him. She wanted this on some strange level.

She wanted a childlike chastisement that would reduce her to tears? No, no—this seemed like a simple case of not thinking things through.

Her tears took on a whole new volume—they were now quieter. Her throat was sore and dry.

“Are you going to be a good girl?” she heard him ask.

She sobbed in response, “Y-y-Yes!”

And finally, the spanks stopped, the pain seared. Her bottom felt like it had been tenderized. She didn’t even want to put her hand back—she knew rubbing wouldn’t make it feel any better. If anything, touch would make it worse. Just after she felt completely healed from the switch, she went and did something stupid like this.

Graham petted the hot-to-the-touch bottom on his knee, considering. This spanking would do for now, he thought, but during the spanking, it had struck him that he didn’t know what her limits were.

He couldn’t spank her even as hard as he might have spanked a Swarii child—humans might be more delicate, and she was putting up quite a fuss… Maybe humans felt more pain. Maybe half-Swarii even felt more pain than a human…

He considered even the puckering rosebud of her anus, which was visible yet obviously very tender to Ellie, as she flinched if his finger ever even went near it. Anal sex was quite popular among the Swarii, but he didn’t dare even attempt it with Ellie. Not yet—even when he had sunk himself deep into her pussy it was excruciatingly tight, and it had been a full week since he had broken her hymen. From sex alone she had been walking sore for a while; she was tender, and because of it they hadn’t had sex for about three days.

Her fever was steadily returning because of it—which was embarrassing. Thorton had already made a couple of snide jokes that Graham had been unable to satiate his wife, and if Thorton was joking about it to his face, than normally the rest of the crew was joking about it behind his back.

Yes, yes. He would order her a medical exam from Fie that afternoon. She could do a full analysis on Ellie and let him know her limits.

Ellie was still sobbing on his lap, making ‘boo hoo hoo’ noises that were actually quite heartbreaking. He had it in mind to make her stand in the corner for an hour, but instead, he found himself arranging her body around until she sat on his lap, where he put his large arms tightly around her.

“Was that so horrible?” he asked softly, becoming disturbed by her amount of crying.

She didn’t reply. She was definitely feeling quite well-chastised, but she didn’t know whether or not to still be angry about being disciplined. She was mostly glad it was over, and to have her head rest up against Graham’s nice, warm, comfortable chest.

She felt like a well-watched over child and fell asleep within moments.

* * *

“Te’ka! Te’ka, boo iki dek!” wheezed Thorton, who felt, for the third time in a row, manhandled.

“Speak HUMAN,” demanded Peyton, increasing pressure on Thorton’s pinned position. “Or do you want more?”

“YOU WIN, you asshole!”

With a victorious grin, Peyton released him, leaving Thorton able to untwist himself. Thorton lay flat on the floor afterwards, looking pretty mangled. “Best six out of eleven,” Thorton finally huffed while rising, trying to find his center of balance again.

“Somebody’s going to get hurt, don’t you think?” Graham finally said from the doorway, playing with his t-shirt as if he was trying to dry out the wet tears on it. “I think the Beast might be going easy on you, Thorton, I hate to tell you. Besides, he just nearly smothered you with your own kneecap.”

Peyton laughed and put his jacket back on as Thorton huffed angrily, “No way am I letting a human beat me.”

“You already have. Five times,” reminded Peyton before he turned around to Graham. “How is she? Is she angry with me?”

“No.” Graham looked behind him towards the hallway. “She actually just fell asleep. She needs to get checked out—hopefully she’s not coming down with something. She sleeps all the time.”

“She fell asleep durin’ the…” Peyton began wide-eyed.

“No, no; after. But seriously—she sleeps like… six hours a day.”

“She’s supposed to be sleeping about eight,” Mary replied from the doorway, rather tersely. “Really—if you’re gonna be married to a human, Commander, you should learn at least a few basics. Even the Frians aren’t so imperceptive.”

Graham’s face flushed red with embarrassment. He huffed, “There’s a lot to learn! The interweb is a very large place, and there isn’t anything written by an actual human on there. And the Frians write human information much like it was a pet owner’s manual, not quite an anatomic encyclopedia.”

Mary shrugged. “What about Swarii? Haven’t the Swarii studied humans at all?”

“We’ve sort have been fighting a pretty tough war. So, we’ve barely studied you—and certainly we haven’t done so very thoroughly. Even the mission where we sent a team to Earth was a failure. Only one member of the team ever came back, and even then—it was limited information; possibly even completely inaccurate. The Frians, unfortunately, are winning this war right now—they have the time on their hands necessary to enslave an alien species properly,” he defended, walking over to plop down into his commander’s chair.

“Well, one thing you should get to know is that grown-women don’t get spanked on Earth.” Mary raised her chin snootily as she said this, planting her feet firmly next to the commander’s chair.

Mary had to admit, she had hated that Peyton would spank so many of the girls, and had always been glad to have never been one of them. She couldn’t really hold it against Peyton then, however—it was an alien planet, and he didn’t have much alternative. But to see grown-women treated like children was something she’d never get used to. “In fact, children don’t even get corporally punished there anymore!”

Although she would be the first to admit that Ellie wasn’t exactly the ‘obedient’ type, or the most intellectual—Ellie had fallen under the ‘salt of the Earth’ category, for sure, and Mary had watched Ellie drive Peyton up the wall on many occasions. But she had also hoped that after a rescue, if it was possible, that Ellie would finally live without fear of punishment… Something unlike what she had heard going on in Ellie’s bedroom.

Graham looked at Mary’s steady expression then slowly turned his head towards Peyton, who was shaking his head and saying, “Maybe in Connecticut they don’t. In Texas, though—”

Mary quickly threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, here we go! Another ‘tough in Texas’ speech! Well, let’s make it clear now, Buster. You’ll never be touching me or our children that way!”

Peyton’s face twisted up to begin to argue, but before he could get a word out, the room was filled with mocking laughter, including from Graham himself, who thought Mary’s resolute expression—and hands-on-the-hips posture was just darling, as was her crazy notions.

Peyton’s face turned bright red. “Just because most of America has forgotten about the proper way for a husband to handle his wife, doesn’t mean I have, Missy! The only reason you’ve never gotten a good hidin’ is because you’ve never given me a reason. Keep up your naggin’, though, and see where you end up!”

Mary sputtered angrily, looking too taken aback by Peyton’s threat to fully contrive words.

“I LOVE humans. I want one!” Thorton finally blurted, looking merrily entertained by the tense energy surging between the couple. “She is SO cute.”

“Learn when to shut up, Thorton,” Mary demanded, turning her head to glare daggers at him.

“What I really hope to see is when she gets to Swaraan and is absolutely shocked by how much goes on there. Hell, the Admiral took a belt to me until I was eighteen!” he continued. Then, thoughtfully, he added, “Which is odd, really—because I don’t think he punished Graham since he was thirteen… And he wasn’t my father….”

“It’s because you never did learn when to shut up,” replied Graham with a laugh. It was true—when he had grown up with Thorton, Graham’s father, the High Admiral, had taken him under-wing as his own, especially because Thorton’s own father was dead, and his mother was small and feeble, even before the plague when she finally passed on.

Graham finally looked over at Mary, who was so upset that she was practically shaking. “You do need to get over it. That’s the way things are: children and naughty wives get punished.”

“Naughty wives?” she replied venomously. “What the Swarii need is to wake up to modern times! Put away all the misogyny,” she decided sternly. “Start acting like an intellectual species!”

“Well, if our culture upsets the little human girl, let’s change!” said Fie, who was normally quite quiet, from across the room where he was at the navigating controls. “Let’s just throw about a hundred years and the heritage of several species of our ancestors out the window—better to do that than to offend your delicacies.”

Graham put up a hand as if to calm Fie, who still looked quite insulted and defensive. “Have patience with her, Fie,” he instructed. “She doesn’t know better.”

“No. I do know better,” assured Mary stubbornly, stomping out of the room. “Troglodytes.”

As she stormed into the hall, all the men looked towards Peyton, who shrugged. “Nope. I don’t know what that meant, either.”

* * *

Even before any of the humans were called in for a medical examination by Fie, the girls were already in a nasty mood. Ellie woke up with the taste of soap still in her mouth and a sore rear end, and, as she was trying to avoid her punisher, had found Mary immediately when she braved leaving the bedroom. She quickly discovered that Mary was all in a huff.

Still, Mary was in the mood to sympathize with Ellie about her chastisement. “It’s not right! None of it!” Mary assured her with fervor. “I want to go back to Earth.”

“Supposedly it’s about a two month trip that way,” Ellie mumbled, pointing towards the back of the ship. “I already asked. And trust me, you have no idea how much I wish we could be home, too. Since I got abducted, it’s been one long train of aliens sticking their fingers up my tush and then abusing it. Now, I have some sort of strange addiction to an alien’s peeper—there’s nothing I can do to get away. Once I think I’m done with this stupid ‘sickness’ of theirs, it comes back! And then I’m at Graham’s feet again!”

“I was about to say—you look pretty feverish,” Mary acknowledged, with a sad smile. “So, I guess you believe all that union stuff now?”

“Believe it? Ha! I live it.” Ellie shook her head. “Maybe I’m not all human.”

“Hell, I could have told you that!” Mary replied immediately, grinning.

Ellie didn’t look amused by the joke. “Seriously—you really have no idea the weird stuff that has been going on in my brain. I really think I’m other. Why else would I be like this? And the thing is: I’m not even very well equipped for sex. I can barely walk afterwards—I swear last time I pulled my groin,” she complained.  “His peepers is, like… BIG.”

Mary made a face of disgust. “Really, I don’t need that much detail.”

Ellie chuckled. “Ah. I get it. So, I get the gory ass-sex details back at the palace, but now that I have a story to share, nobody wants to hear it?”

Mary nodded. “Yep. That’s pretty much right.” She pulled her knees up to her chest, her face still looking angry as she went back to the original topic. “You know, I graduated the first in my class at Harvard. First in my class! I was gonna be something. Someone. I worked my ass off to get my MD! And then, poof! I get abducted and before you can say, ‘Tim Gunn’, I’m a seamstress slave trying to avoid eye contact from my alien masters, being sold, then bought, then bought and sold…”

“Hey, at least you got into OUR palace in the end. Peyton fell head-first when he first looked at you. Know what he did the first time WE met? Strapped me! Hard. And I hadn’t even been spanked before in my life! It was a FINE how-do-you-do, let me tell ya!” Ellie grumped.

Mary looked up at the ceiling, shaking her head. “That man can be a real ogre. And this living on Swaraan isn’t going to help him one bit. It’s already making him more macho then ever!”

“And just when I thought Peyton couldn’t get any more macho...”

“You and I know two different Peytons. I know the sweet, kind, careful, thoughtful-leader Peyton, and you know the brotherly-fatherly, protective, self-righteous, easily-frustrated Peyton,” she noted. “Although, now that the commander’s in the picture, and he doesn’t have you or the other girls anymore to vent to, I’m beginning to see more and more of the Peyton YOU know.”

“Ha!” Ellie gloated in response. “Well, hopefully the sex is good, that’s all I can say.”

Mary’s face blushed. “It’s very good, actually… It was everything I ever hoped it could be.”

“Good, because the brute is all yours.” Ellie’s eyes suddenly squinted into slits. “I still have to get even with him, though, for turning me in. The prick. The traitor!”

“I can’t believe you keep letting them manhandle you—men. I would never let Peyton put a hand on me.”

Ellie sized Mary up—Mary was about four inches taller than her, maybe a tad bit more muscular, about nine years older… But Ellie still raised a doubting eyebrow. “LET doesn’t have a damned thing to do with it, honey. I’m somehow married to a seven-foot Swarii, and YOU’RE married to a six-and-a-half-foot BEAST. You’ll not let him spank you as much as I don’t let them spank me.”

“It just wouldn’t happen,” assured Mary stubbornly, closing her eyes.

“Uh-huh,” Ellie said, slinking away, feeling a little slighted. Was she weak? Is that why she’d been spanked? Or did Mary absolutely have no idea what she was talking about?

During and after the conversation, all Ellie was thinking about was her last spanking; reliving it. She had asked for it, she knew that—it was that submissive new part of her that did it. Did the same part keep her from fighting?

She looked over in Mary’s direction, jealous. She began to think that maybe she had a way to keep spankings from happening; that Mary was right. She’d stick to her guns.

And then she spent the rest of the afternoon getting manhandled by Fie, who—standing even a foot taller than Graham put Andre the Giant to shame—manipulated her fighting movements like she was an angry kitten. He made short work out of his unfortunate task to get x-rays and take blood samples from her, Peyton and Mary.

She left with a glance towards Mary as if to say, “I’d like to see YOU try.”

Mary merely smirked at her and shook her head as if Ellie was just being silly.

Chapter Seven

The next afternoon, Graham was running diagnostics on the engine when he found Fie, who was usually a quiet, calm fellow, running in his direction, shouting with excitement.

Graham prepared himself for bad news, as he always did when someone was running in his direction. “What’s wrong?”

“I finally got your wife’s blood work tested… twice.” He looked a little unsure about himself, then shrugged. “Alright, I tested it three times.” He passed an electronic clipboard toward Graham, who looked more than slightly concerned as he leafed through it.

Graham looked down at the summary. His look of concern morphed into one of confusion. “That can’t be accurate.”

“That was my first and second thought about it,” Fie replied. “She has no robocuffin in her blood. None whatsoever! Now, humans naturally don’t have it; it’s not grown in any food items on earth, and so humans don’t crave it naturally. BUT Ellie is only one-eighth Swarii; ONLY one-eighth, and her genetic makeup still recognizes robocuffin as an essential amino acid. But since it hasn’t had access to it, the part-humans in her family naturally tried to substitute something similar, with only a fraction of robocuffin’s properties, just to stay alive.

“In short, I don’t think she’s functioning anywhere near the level she’s capable of. Her brain patterns should work more like ours, and her lifespan should be equivalent—her systems just need robocuffin to do what they’re designed to do.

“And that’s not all—humans are one of the most contagion-reluctant species I’ve ever come across. You should SEE all the antibodies. In the short amount of time that the race has existed, they have seen probably three times more diseases than we have with all of the races the Swarii are made of, put together. If THEY had been hit with the Frians’ plague fifteen years ago, they probably wouldn’t have even noticed. They already had all the antibodies necessary to resist the virus, for example. All of them.”

“So…” Graham looked through chart after chart, test after test. “That’s why we were able to have the union. She IS a desirable genetic match.”

“Personally, I think a Human-Swarii breeding program would be better suited than when the Libii and the Swaraan melded together. There, both sides had to make sacrifices—the Swaraan got weaker and the Libii got stupider when they both became the Swarii. BUT this would be a straight-up win-win with very few concessions. Especially for male Swarii.”

“If the humans weren’t so naturally stubborn, you mean.” Graham smirked as he passed back the report. “They’re not particularly open-minded, are they?”

Fie shrugged. “Well, genetically speaking it’s a good match. Worth presenting to the federation, at least. If we could start by making an alliance with the humans, they might come around to the idea naturally…”

“Possibly,” Graham granted. “I can pull some strings, get you an audience with some people, if you’d like. I’ll be attaching your findings in our mission report. But personally, I’ve been feeling concerned about more intimate matters. For example, things like how often we are able to have intercourse without hurting her, how hard I’m allowed to discipline her, things of that nature… Also, basic care.”

Fie nodded, realizing that he was eventually going to have to test such things anyway. “I could tell you a thing or two about basic care,” he claimed. “Humans have complex diets, for example, but Ellie even more so, since she has to merge both of our diets together—get all the necessary vitamins. I suggest giving her an injection of robocuffin every month; try to get her up to the right levels. And I suggest for her nine hours of sleep a night, and one or two hours every afternoon…”

“Dear lord, man! She’s not a cat!”  Graham laughed.

“Actually, it’s more on par with a small child. Humans sleep for muscle regeneration, general rest, psychological reasons—reasons more on par with a developing Swarii than an adult, for certain. Every human’s different when it comes to this—Mary and Peyton don’t need as much sleep, as shows from their tests, which were even different than the human data we have on file. That’s just Ellie. Humans are… different. More unique. It’s pretty interesting.

“As for discipline—obviously, she’s female and small. You can’t use all the strength in your arm, of course, but she’s not any more fragile than a Swarii child of her size. You can get a message through, fine enough—it’s not as if she heals slowly. Discipline her as much as is necessary.

“If you’d like me to run some other tests, I can check her anal and vaginal durability and elasticity… She just won’t like it,” Fie offered, grinning a bit at even imagining the scandalous look in Ellie’s face that would appear if told to spend the afternoon getting an enema preceded by being vaginally and anally plugged.

Graham snorted, obviously imagining the same look. “No, I could assure she won’t. I don’t want to put her through that right now, anyway. She had her first disciplinary session with me just yesterday, and she’s still a bit sore about it. Get the injection of robocuffin ready, however.”

“Yes, Sir,” Fie said, bowing his head, watching how the commander walked away toward the engine room with far more spring in his step.

* * *

“No! Noo!” Ellie pulled against Graham enough that he was literally pulling her arm across the floor. “I said no! I gave him blood, isn’t that enough?”

Graham stopped moving and Ellie was suddenly on the floor. “Do I literally have to drag you all the way there?”

“I’m not getting any of your alien tonic injected into my veins,” she insisted with a pout. “I’m fine without it. What the hell is robocuffin anyway? It sounds like what happens when somebody pisses the Terminator off.”

“I’m beginning to think that I didn’t spank you enough yesterday,” he noted, looking down at her with his hands on his hips. “I was too soft.”

“Didn’t seem soft to me,” she replied, but she refrained from moving. “Besides, you can’t solve EVERYTHING with violence, Graham. Didn’t you have a Lamb Chops equivalent to teach you that when you were young?”

“No.”

“I have rights, you know,” she informed.

This was beginning to get embarrassing. He’d seen four-year-olds get dragged to get shots in a more dignified manner. It was safe to say she didn’t trust aliens, but she had to realize by now that she wasn’t completely human herself, so not letting him make any calls in regards to her health were beginning to become offensive.

Graham sighed and picked her up and instead of pulling her this time, he carried her under his arm. She was tiny enough that her toes barely skirted the ground as she flailed. “And do you want me to execute MY rights?” he replied angrily.

“Help! I’m being subjected to dictatorship! My rights are being infringed!” she yelled into Peyton and Mary’s room as they passed by. Peyton was hanging upside down in the doorway by his knees doing curl-ups.

Ellie heard Peyton chuckle and say something to Mary, but needless to say, he didn’t seem to care about the fact that she was being forced into doing something against her will. Of course he didn’t, she fumed. The traitor!

The medical bay was a horrible place, in Ellie’s opinion. It was sterile, white, blaring, and had sharp things everywhere. When Graham put Ellie down on the ground, he flung her easily forward until she ran head-on into Fie’s stomach.

“A little nervous, Kitten?” Fie chuckled in his soothing baritone voice and his normal fatherly tone. “Don’t be. You’ll be just fine.”

Ellie had obviously decided that she was not going to be subdued by Fie’s natural, radiating calm. She tried to make it quickly towards the door, hoping to make it past Graham somehow.

It didn’t work. Fie picked up her struggling body and placed her down over his knee. “I thought you were giving me a shot!” she screeched, not liking the position she was in one bit.

“I am,” he assured, flipping up the hem of her shirt and then gripping the edge of her pants.

She flung her hands both back to keep the pants up. “No! You are not giving me a shot in my ass! Stop it! Put me down!” She held onto the hem of her pants until her knuckles turned white.

“Ellie, behave.” The sternness in Graham’s voice was more demanding than any amount of glaring. “You’re embarrassing me.”

Still, she continued to fight. “I don’t care! I don’t want anything poking me!”

“Did she give you this much trouble yesterday?” Graham worried, watching her struggle with a certain amount of interest.

“Yep,” Fie replied. “Only it wasn’t as easy as this will be.” With one firm tug, her pants and panties were suddenly around her knees, despite her grip. A tearing noise could be heard through the air.

She gasped; her mind rattled with what to complain about now. There was too much. Her face was turning a bright crimson color as she imagined how ridiculous she probably looked over Fie’s lap, scissoring her legs around. Her arms barely even hung down towards the floor in this position. Fie was large even for a Swarii; towered a whole foot over all the others. She felt like a baby when she even stood next to him, let alone was forced to be subdued in this position.  “You broke my pants!” she finally accused shrilly.

Fie pinned her hands at the small of her back with one hand; it was so easy for him that it nearly offended her.

“Fie! I thought we were friends!” she continued, then all of the sudden, her body went frigid as she felt a sharp poke on her left bottom cheek. A burn seeped slowly through her flank—it was painful and reminded her of the way her dentist used to shoot Novocain into her gum as if he was trying to torture her on purpose.

Only this felt worse. “Owie! Ow!” she finally complained, making hissing and spitting noises.

“I know this hurts,” Fie cooed sympathetically. “Just hold on there, little one. Just a couple of seconds longer.”

Graham was having mixed feelings as he watched his wife dangle over Fie’s knees—on one end, he knew that he had to retain his usual serious-business-man exterior, but he knew how hot this was. He had never really thought about how attractive she was during punishments, but the way she lay helpless and submissive was damned sexy.

Her bottom was extremely round and bubbly, and the way it stuck out when she was bent over was delightful. He was undeniably growing harder by the second. He simply hadn’t fully appreciated how sexy her bottom was when he was spanking her yesterday—he hadn’t slowed down for a moment to enjoy it. But in the future, he decided, it would be different. Why shouldn’t her punishments be pleasing to him? Why shouldn’t he savor the moments of it?

“All done,” Fie announced, putting the needle on a tray and then returning his hand to rub her left buttock tenderly.

“That was horrible,” she sniffled.

“You’re getting one every month,” Fie informed her, sounding matter-of-fact and unapologetic. “You need it. Give it a chance, and it will make you feel like a million bucks. You’ll be asking me to give it to you before you know it.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” she admitted. “Can’t you give it to me in the arm?” she pouted, continuing to hate the position she was in. 

Fie grinned. “No, Sweetheart. It needs to go into muscle.”

She groaned.

“Alright, Fie. Let her up,” Graham said, stepping forward with a grin. “You’ve done enough patting and petting and rubbing for one day.”

Fie chuckled and helped her up. As soon as she was on her feet, she stumbled away, doing her best to pull up her pants. She looked down at them. There was a long, wide tear down the front—all of her buttons were gone, but that was as well; there really wasn’t anything for them to attach to anymore. “Awe… Man!” Her bottom lip stuck out. “I don’t have any others, you know. You didn’t exactly give me time to pack a suitcase at Jazeel’s.”

“Mary might be able to fix it,” Graham reminded.

Ellie definitely doubted this. “She’s not exactly my seamstress anymore, Graham. The chances of her doing me any favors are slim to none.”

“We’ll still ask her.” Graham looked Ellie up and down lecherously for a second before he added, “But first, there’s something I want to discuss with you in our bedroom.”

Ellie’s eyes widened with horror she scurried back a couple of feet. “But… But why?”

Graham took a deep breath and shook his head, wondering how anyone could be that poor at reading his intentions. He stepped forward and grabbed her elbow. “Thanks, Fie. Make sure you submit your report into the main console.”

He realized, on the way out of the room, that Ellie was trying to pull back, only she had a bit of a limp. “You okay?” he asked her, lowering an eyebrow.

“No,” she replied back snippily, wishing she had an extra hand to rub her bottom with. “My butt is killing me. I didn’t deserve that. I’ve done everything right for nearly twenty four hours!”

“This wasn’t a punishment, Eleanor,” he tried to explain. When she continued to grumble, he bent down and lifted her playfully over his shoulder. “You are a whiner and a half, Wife,” he noted with a laugh.

“So… You’re not gonna spank me?” she asked, sounding confused as they rounded close to the bedroom.

“No promises,” he said mischievously.

“Then why are we going to the bedro… oh.” She blushed. “Do you think we’re ever going to actually discuss anything in there?” She felt the corners of her mouth twitch upwards as she said it.

“Hopefully not. Discussing is boring,” he replied in time to drop her down onto their bed. He then sat down next to her and grabbed her body to drape her over his own lap. She giggled slightly as he rubbed away the soreness on her bottom—it was working very well.

“How about we discuss never putting me through that again?” she asked hopefully, closing her eyes as she enjoyed the feel of his large, warm hand rubbing her bottom in a circular motion.

“Or we can discuss how sexy this little bottom is,” he replied, grabbing it roughly with his hand.

She moaned slightly, wiggling her bottom up towards his hand. “We can also discuss that,” she allowed, blushing as he kneaded her flesh. She was practically purring before his hand playfully came down upon her skin, making a loud slapping sound.

It didn’t hurt much at all, but it was a bit jarring and it made her body jump slightly. He put his arm around her and continued slapping her bottom in the same manner, with the spanks stinging with no lingering pain.

“Ooch!” she chirped, and giggled when she saw Graham’s focused yet excited expression out of the corner of her eye as he continued to spank. “What are you doing?”

“Spanking this sexy, naughty bottom of yours,” he replied simply, his voice becoming velvety and husky.

“I thought you promised not to spank me.” She smirked; she obviously liked this game they were playing. More than anything, she liked his attention. 

“Actually, I made a point not to promise. I don’t think you quite understand how ravenous you look with a bright pink bottom. So deserving of it, too, from giving Fie such a hard time,” he clicked his tongue chidingly as he continued to spank. “Bad girl.”

Her bottom was growing to the desired shade of pink, but instead of burning with pain, it seemed to tingle. Undeniably, she was getting aroused, charmed by the feeling of his large, rough hands.

As soon as her bottom was warm to his touch, he gripped it again in his hand. “How’s your bottom?” he asked huskily; he seemed to already know the answer.

“Feeling surprisingly good,” she purred.

He carefully pushed her off his lap and then picked her up to bend her over the bed. Normally she needed a running start to get in; the beds were created for the eight-foot-tall Frians, after all. Now, the average foot Frians carried over the heads of the Swarii seemed to help even Graham, who didn’t have to bend or crouch down as he stroked his member up and down her soft, wet folds.

She liked the guttural sound he made when he entered her. If she stifled her own groaning she was able to hear it. It always sounded like he expected her to feel good, but that she always felt better than he had remembered.

He pulled her shirt off, kissing the newly exposed flesh on her shoulders when he did before growling into her ear, “Feeling well-punished and submissive, little brat?”

“Not yet,” she panted. She bit her lip mischievously as she added, “But you’re getting there.”

* * *

When Graham had dragged Ellie to the medical bay for her shot, Peyton had laughed so heartily at her protests and whines, even when she begged Peyton to interfere, that he almost fell off the bar in his doorway that he was doing curl-ups on. 

“That girl is always knee-deep in trouble,” Peyton laughed as he heard her yell down the hallway until the sound of her voice faded in the distance. “It’s funny how she can be such a savvy slave and such a bad wife.”

“Well, hopefully whatever he means to do with her, or to her, it’s finished and healed by the time we make it to the space station,” Mary replied as she was doing some Swarii language exercises out of an electronic lesson book.

“Doesn’t matter, really,” Peyton replied, doing another curl.

“Of course it matters. She wants to get off the ship as much as I do,” Mary replied off-handedly, nearly chuckling from how little Peyton knew Ellie.

“No, I mean, you girls aren’t goin’ anywhere when we land,” clarified Peyton with such matter-of-factness, it took a while for Mary to register what he said.

“What do you mean, we’re not going anywhere?” she drawled slowly.

“I mean,” Peyton drawled back, climbing off the bar to give her a properly stern look. Normally Mary didn’t have to be told anything, but she didn’t like being ordered—when he did it, he had to mean it. “Neither of you are gonna leave this ship. Space stations are dangerous, Mary. It’s like the Wild West out here. There’s nothing but prostitution, gambling, drugs, piracy—you name it. 700 square kilometers of it. It’s like Las Vegas on steroids. We don’t want to have to worry about either of you while we’re conducting our business.”

“Peyton, this place is a fraction as large as the palace. We want to get out and see something of the galaxy! Stretch our legs!” Mary stammered, her face flushed with jealousy. “I’m an adult woman. I can go where I want.”

“No you can’t,” Peyton assured sternly. “I don’t want to even argue about it, Mary. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

As if on cue, Thorton stuck his head into the bedroom. “Hey, Lovebirds,” he said, obviously able to hear the arguing from the hallway. “Beast; do me a favor and help me lug down the motorbike from level two to this level? That thing’s heavier than hell, but it will be nice to have for me to dart to the west quarter. We’ll be parking this thing in the East dock. I think the Kitten actually completed fixing it, because it even works now.”

“Sure, Bro. I’ll be right up,” Peyton replied, waving Thorton away as he went to locate a shirt. Thorton disappeared as quickly as he arrived.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Mary said to Peyton, scrambling up from the bed and waving her hands through the air due to this new-found injustice. “You mean that you’re grounding us to the ship, but you’re still taking Ellie’s motorcycle—the one she was beaten for fixing—with you? In what world is that fair?”

“Ellie wasn’t beaten for fixing it. She was spanked for going to level two at all. It’s unstable, and it was the Boss’ orders. He’s tryin’ to teach her obedience.”

“He’s trying to train her, you mean,” she argued, placing her hands firmly on her hips as she watched his tight muscles fit into his shirt. “It doesn’t quite sound like a two-way street. We’re coming with you—it’s time you learn that Ellie and I are equals. This is the twenty-first century, Peyton! You just can’t order us around anymore!”

“This is not a democracy, Mary,” he assured, cutting his hand firmly through the air, his jaw locked. “You don’t get a vote on this one. People die at places like these all the time. We want you well-protected.” He turned to leave the room.

“That’s no reason for you to not let us come with you! Then you could protect us all you wanted,” she assured mockingly. When she saw that her words didn’t even phase his expression, she added threateningly, straightening her neck proudly, “If you don’t let us, we’ll just go anyway… Without you.”

A muscle in Peyton’s neck seemed to twitch, and he turned back around slowly towards Mary, who was suddenly feeling a little nervous, particularly when she saw the deadly serious look on his face. He took a deep, calming breath in and out before speaking. “You do NOT want to do that. If you even mention it again, I will take the skin off your backside, do you understand me?” He had loomed down and positioned his face so close to hers that their noses were almost touching.

She made a point to stand her ground and not step back. She ground her teeth. “Don’t threaten me,” she growled.

“It wasn’t a threat, Darlin’. It was a promise.”

A deafening slap rang through the room. For a second, neither of them reacted to it—they continued to stare at each other, standing still. Finally, Mary stepped back, holding her hand as if it was a smoking gun, a look of horror streaked across her face.

Peyton turned his face slightly toward the direction he was slapped, as if he wondered if it had actually happened; if Mary had actually been foolish enough to do it.

She had, and after she crouched back a safe distance, she tried to not even act sorry about it. I will not let him spank me, she decided. I’m not sorry. I’m not remorseful. I’m not his underling—he cannot give me orders! I’m his wife, his partner, his equal.

“You just opened up Pandora’s Box, honey,” he finally said with an even, flat tone. He didn’t even seem angry, but his eyes focused on her as if she was a deer he was lining up with his bow during a hunt.

He stepped towards her, but when he did, she tried to run around him to head for the open door. She moved quickly enough that she almost made it before he caught her forearm and pulled her backwards to his chest.

He had lots of experience spanking women; Ellie certainly hadn’t been the first. Probably, through the nearly five years of service to Jazeel, he’d spanked nearly a hundred different women. Many of whom were far less accepting of punishment than others. Some of them truly struggled, some of them fought him, some of them cried.

Be that as it may, none of them had fought as viciously as his wife did now. He was so much stronger than her, so much larger; she had to have realized this. But she was acting as if she didn’t. She was acting as though if she pushed away from him a little more, she could escape him and her punishment.

He was able to pick her off the ground to keep her feet off the ground, but then she started to kick at his shins with the backs of her feet, and he simply kept her hands behind her back and dragged her over to the bed and across his knees.

Her head dropped down by his calf, which obviously suited her fine because it gave her something to bite. And she did—hard. He tried to grit his teeth and bear it, but the pain was shocking enough that he finally just pushed her off his lap, where she released her hold on him and scrambled out the door.

Peyton swore, and looked at his calf, which was now oozing blood from a perfect set of teeth marks. “Damn cannibal!” he grunted angrily getting up and limping towards the door. As soon as he turned the corner, Thorton was there, looking quite confused.

“Domestic troubles?” he asked, looking down at Peyton’s pant leg, which the blood from the wound was quickly beginning to stain.

“Shut up,” growled Peyton. He looked back and forth down the hallway, but didn’t see Mary anywhere. “Did you see which way she went?”

“Yeah,” Thorton replied. “But you’d better go to Fie with that. The Boss ain’t gonna like it when he sees you’ve leaked all over his ship.” He grinned, waving his hand at the small blood trail. “She got you pretty good, Buddy,” he noted, pointing to the wound.

Peyton rolled his eyes and limped towards the medical bay.

“Hey, do you want someone to lean on to get there? Or are you too stubborn?” Thorton offered in an awkward drawl.

“Touch me and I’ll kill you,” Peyton replied in a growl.

Thorton nodded. “Too stubborn. Got it.” He waited until Peyton had limped around the corner before he went to an intercom radio where he would be able to shal’ta a message to Jio, who was on the command deck with Brahm. “Hey, Jio… You like to going hunting, right?”

It took a minute before Jio responded, and when he did, even his shal’ta sounded confused. “Yeah…”

“Ever hunt a human woman before?”

“No… Why?”

“We got one on the run. I thought we might help out our dear Beast friend, who got wounded in her capture.”

There was another long response time. Probably because both Brahm and Jio were too busy laughing. “The Beast is woundable?” There was another pause and then, “Okay, I’m up for a challenge.”

“Good man. Let’s go hunting.”  Thorton grinned and rolled up his sleeves.

* * *

Mary hated the fact that she felt ashamed about things that were far beyond her control, such as being in this position. She was suddenly feeling attuned to how Ellie was feeling when Peyton had carried her down from the sublevel—she felt betrayed. She didn’t feel she had done anything to either Thorton or Jio when they hunted her down, tackled her, bound her hands and knees, and then tied her hands to her own headboard.

She had certainly fought her darndest against them, but she found that two Swarii—both who viewed the whole episode as a game—could certainly get the better of her. Now, there was nothing to do but wait for Peyton to come through the door.

She heard the bedroom door slide open, where Peyton walked through the door, sighing, but then his footsteps stopped. He was very quiet, obviously surprised to see his wayward wife tied to the top of his own bed.

He took a moment to think about whether or not he was angry at whoever it was that did this, but then feeling the throbbing pain still radiating from somewhere above his left ankle, he decided that he wasn’t. “I never figured you’d be this difficult,” he admitted, listening to the sound of her sniffling.

“I don’t deserve this!” she cried.

“I certainly wasn’t the one who slapped you across the face,” he replied simply, limping over to the top of the bed, where he tried to unravel the tie. “You have gotten away with a thousand times more snark than any other girl I’ve ever met in my life. Obviously, I don’t like the idea of spankin’ you, Mary. But I don’t like you thinkin’ I wouldn’t do it if I felt I had to—like when it comes to your safety.”

As her wrists felt a little bit of slack, a little bit of her fear subsided. It didn’t appear like Peyton was going to use her unfortunate position to his advantage. It seemed like maybe he was coming to his senses. He did seem much calmer now.

Her throat was dry, so she bravely swallowed. “Look, Sweetheart… I’m sorry I slapped you. It was uncalled for, and I was wrong. I was just angry that you threatened me,” she explained, her voice smooth and rational.

As soon as he untied her hands, he untied her knees, but he was quiet as he worked, and quick. Mary knew that he was gathering himself, and what he wanted to say. But she didn’t expect him to say what he did when she was free and his eyes snapped onto hers. “Now, are you going to take your spankin’ like a good girl this time?”

No—she definitely wasn’t. She still hadn’t mentally prepared for a spanking at all. She was suddenly back to fighting against Peyton, only this time he wasn’t so surprised by her new-found strength.

She suddenly realized that Peyton hadn’t been taking off her bindings to release her. He had merely taken them off to prove a point, which was that he could overpower her without any help.

“I won’t let you hurt me!” she cried, just before Peyton pinned her down to the bed, raising her legs high in the air, her hands completely useless to get at him as he unbuckled the belt from around his pants. She didn’t quite realize how helpless she was until he shucked her pants up and off her legs with one firm and quick motion, and she could do nothing much to stop him.

“Honey, hurtin’ you is the last thing I want to do,” he said between gritted teeth. “That’s WHY I’m spankin’ you—a spankin’ never gave anyone any bit of lastin’ hurt.” He was able to double up the belt in his hand as he said, “Now, you’ll really want to keep your hands out of the way, Darlin’,” he warned, watching how she’d curled herself upwards so she could sufficiently protect her bottom with her hands.

It only took a couple of swipes with the belt for her to learn that the belt, though painful, was far more tolerable when it landed on her rear than on her hands.

The belt sent a startling, fiery pain across her flesh, and in moments it was everywhere. It was so quick and so sharp that it left her gasping and sputtering before she was able to get enough breath to start screaming.

Nobody would come to her rescue; that she knew. She had heard the sound of Peyton’s spankings many times herself, and done nothing to stand in his way. She had been content that at least he wasn’t spanking her. In fact, she thought that the fact that Peyton had never spanked her meant that she was simply better than anyone else; that Peyton had too much respect for her. That she was the only woman he considered his equal.

That respect had to have gone—how could Peyton possibly consider her his equal now? Now that he was watching her submit, be it unwillingly, to this horrible position? Where surely her bottom; once a pinnacle of his sexual gratification, was now bearing his punishment, looking certainly not at its best; it was red and striped and splotchy with marks. She could only imagine how horrible she appeared to him right now.

She was wrong. Although she was getting her bottom absolutely fried, as she deserved, Peyton couldn’t help but suffer through an incredibly uncomfortable erection. There was something unbearably sexy about forcing his wife to submit to his punishment, even though it confused him. He had done this with many women, and never thought of himself as a ‘spanking man’.

But maybe he was—at least with Mary, who was already unbearably sexy no matter what she had been doing. Every second of every day, she looked good, smelt good, and tempted him with her luscious hips and bemused him with her expressive, large doe eyes. Now, he couldn’t keep his eyes off of her beautiful, reddening bottom as it squirmed about, trying to avoid the leather stripe of his belt to no avail.

The only thing that was really getting in his way of putting his belt aside and burying himself in her moist, bare, fully exposed pussy was because he didn’t want to confuse her. This wasn’t about sex. This was about punishing her disrespect.

“If you ever so much think about slappin’ me again, Girl, you’ll come away thinkin’ you sat down on a hot stove top. You get me?” he forced himself to lecture, to keep his mind on-topic as he went into a quick rhythm of spanks.

“Yes! Yes, sir, I get you!”

“And if you bite me…”

“I’m sorry I bit you! I was scared!” she blubbered, pushing down on her thighs, trying her best to keep them off of her bottom.

What he had planned to do in the beginning of the spanking was to start with the belt and end off with his hand—to give her two spankings. One for the slap and one for the bite. But he didn’t—he could easily see the tears streaming down her agonized face. It was as if pain in itself was a whole new, horrible sensation that she had never felt before. No, he couldn’t proceed much further. “You do it again you’ll think today was just patty-cake,” he still threatened, and meant it.

His father was a true head-of-household, and although Peyton had never seen it growing up, it was no secret that his father spanked his mother from time to time. ‘Don’t you worry, Son,’ his father had said to him once on the issue. ‘A woman’s bottom can take a lot.’ The advice had served him well when he was Prime.

Still, he didn’t want to push her first experience. Not long after she stopped fighting and was sobbing, he let go of her and dropped his belt to the side of the bed. When her feet were back on the bed, she rolled her body over to her side, her body vibrating from her ragged breaths and her hands gripping her bright-red bottom tightly.

Peyton laid his massive body down next to her and carefully brushed some hair out of her face and behind her ear. He kissed the back of her neck.

  “I only want to keep you safe,” he told her softly, moving his rough, thick fingers to her hip and petting the soft, naked flesh there softly. “You have to let me make some rules.”

“But I’m your wife!” she finally sobbed. “How could you just… just spank me?”

“Because you are my wife. And you’re so important,” Peyton told her with such assurance that he seemed to think it was obvious. “You know—when these Swarii fall in love, it’s blind. They’ll protect anyone they’ve unioned with because their life now revolves around them, and their life would be pointless without them. I know how they feel. When I saw you, it was magic. You’re the sun I merely revolve around… If somethin’ ever happened to you, it would kill me. Literally, I think. I couldn’t imagine it. So, if you do somethin’ that scares the shit out of me, Mary, that only gives me one option and that’s to do anythin’—and I mean anythin’—to keep you safe. Even if you do think I’m erring on the side of caution, and you think I’m an overprotective brute. I’m okay with that, as long as nothin’ happens to you.”

Her crying and her anger were subsiding, although Peyton didn’t see the confusion in her eyes. It was very sweet, what he said. She had never once doubted his loyalty or commitment to her. When she first met him, she was practically knocked off her feet by how this large, handsome, normally-grumpy man could treat her so differently than any other woman. And this was why; because she was different. She was more than a woman to him.

So Peyton never considered her as his equal, after all, like she had thought. No, no—Peyton had put them both on different plains of existence from the beginning. She wasn’t beneath him, though. She wasn’t a possession to him as much as someone who could possess the air he breathed. It was nothing like she feared and far beyond what she hoped she was to him.

She slowly turned around and pushed her head into his chest, finally accepting his comfort. “I love you,” she admitted tenderly.

“And I love you, too,” he assured her.

“I know. And so, unfortunately, does my tush.” She felt his chest echo with a deep laugh and grinned into him. “Let’s say we try to avoid these displays of affection in the future?”

“That’d be fine by me, Darlin’. I’ll just follow your lead on that.”

She pouted for a second at that answer, but then snuggled into him harder, content, even as the burning pain on her bottom’s skin continued on.

Chapter Eight

“You’re gonna be a good girl for Fie, right?” Graham couldn’t help but ask as he picked his wife up so her feet didn’t touch the ground and kissed her.

“Of course,” she replied, trying to sound as annoyed as possible at the insinuation that she wouldn’t be good. Not that she had planned on being good, of course. She planned on getting quite a large experiment built and tested that day, and Graham and his men would only get in her way. “I’m not a child, you know?”

“I know.” He grinned and further explained, “It’s because of this very old Swaraan proverb: The very small tend to get in very large mischief. Don’t mind me; I’m just paranoid. But for my sake, not many men have such beautiful, intelligent wives. That being said, please refrain from fixing anything before I get back—I’d feel better if I were there.”

“Why? Because you think I’ll break something?” she charged, pouting.

“No, it’s because Thorton told me you made him stand behind you for two hours yesterday with a club to break your arms in case you accidentally hit the main power grid and you couldn’t let go of the electrical current.”

“That was a safety precaution, Graham,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “I thought you liked safety precautions.”

“That’s not exactly a safety precaution—that’s a plan-b. I don’t like my wife having the need for a plan-b…” He chuckled at her suddenly very surly expression and kissed her cheek. “We’ll talk about it later. Just be good.”

She smiled and pressed her face to his warm one, and it felt good.  The thing about space was that it was cold. And maybe because the Swarii were so used to space travel—even before the Swaraan became the ‘Swarii’ they had been at it, traveling and mining the planets around them—that their body temperatures were quite a bit warmer than those of humans. When necessary, they were even able to lower their body temperatures drastically. Ellie was not the same way. She was cold, all of the time. Graham felt like a giant heating pad as far as she was concerned.

“That’s it, I’m bringing you and Mary back some clothes,” he replied, fingering the bottom of the skirt Mary had made for her yesterday, which was now flowing over his hands as he held Ellie to him. “My little ice cube.”

“Go for it!” she granted with a laugh, kissing his impossibly handsome cheek. “The faster you go, the faster you’ll get back,” she told him. “I’m freezing my buns off.”

Because he had never heard the expression, he laughed and responded, “You know, in the case of freezing to death, your buns would be the last thing to freeze.” He grabbed her bottom with his hand as if it accentuated his point.

“And I think we’re already to that point, Graham.”

He hummed thoughtfully. “Then I should go.” Finally, he put her back down on her feet. He turned to Fie and pointed to her. “The most important thing in the universe is right here, got it?”

Fie grinned. “Don’t worry, Boss. She’ll be here in one piece when you get back if I can help it.”

“Good.” He reached down, gave the back of Ellie’s skirt a playful swat, and then looked over at Thorton, who obviously thought he was looking pretty cool with his riding goggles and open jacket as he mounted his motorcycle. “Don’t get into any fights. No gambling, Thorton. You’re on duty, remember.”

“Don’t worry, Boss. Professional’s my middle name,” Thorton chuckled.

“Be… be careful with my baby,” Ellie said, gesturing to the motorcycle. “It’s been through a lot, and it’s been a lot of work…”

“Don’t worry yourself into knots, Kitten,” Thorton replied, actually sounding a little snippy, as if he really didn’t want a girl to give him motorcycle advice. “I know what I’m doing.”

He then started the motorcycle, which, in a puff of steam, hovered into the air. He then gave it two revs, and made it go flying backwards about seven feet, nearly knocking Fie over. Ellie gasped with horror.

Thorton added sheepishly, “Just… keeping you on your toes…” After that, he did it right, and disappeared down the ramp into the cold, frosty air of the space station.

“Beast, you coming?” Graham laughed as he watched Peyton continue to vivaciously kiss Mary. It looked far more like foreplay than a goodbye. Ellie knew better than to give them any grief about it; they were still enjoying not having to hide their relationship from anyone. Kissing in public probably seemed like a thrill, indeed.

Peyton lifted a single finger to say to Graham to wait a minute, and then finally broke the kiss and said a couple more sweet nothings to Mary, whose cheeks flushed.

Peyton finally left and walked by Ellie to tap her nose and say, “Don’t get into any trouble.”

Ellie’s mouth dropped open with protest, but before she could complain, he walked down the ramp and the group of men closed the spaceship doors behind them.

“I’m sorely treated in my time,” she complained to Fie, turning and walking in the direction of the lounge.

“You’re very loved, though. Both of you. So, be patient,” Fie instructed, putting his arms around both of them as they walked along. “What would you like to do today? Watch a movie? Play a game?”

“Oh, whatever you’d like to do,” Ellie replied. “I should probably take a nap and eat lunch soon,” she added, hoping Fie could nearly see a halo around her head.

Fie was suddenly nervous, instead. Ellie did nothing but complain about napping and lunches—she thought she should only do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted.

Mary seemed to sense his hesitation. “A movie, definitely a movie… I’m going to make myself something nice to drink, though, if you want something, Fie? Ellie?”

“Oh, yeah, whatever you’re having,” Ellie said, grinning widely.

Fie smiled at Mary. “Sure, thank you.”

Mary grinned. “Just get the movie started. I’ll be around…”

* * *

Ellie leaned over Fie’s sleeping, snoring body and poked him sharply with her finger. “So, he’s out?” she asked, looking towards Mary, who opened one of Fie’s eyelids.

“Yep. Out for the count. Hopefully I didn’t overdue it…”

“How long do I have before he wakes up?” Ellie asked, poking the giant man again.

“I don’t know. Maybe three hours. Possibly five. It’s really hard to account for someone of his size… That, and when you’re just dropping someone a mickey in their drink, you never can be sure how much they’ve actually had. I’m guessing he took half the dose I gave him… Hopefully,” she hedged, grimacing.

Looking satisfied, Ellie finally stopped poking at Fie. “Cool. Thanks for doing this for me, by the way,” Ellie said, standing up and zipping up the front of her coat. “Sure you don’t want to come with me? Be my assistant?”

“No way. It’s like… thirty degrees out there. Just don’t get fried—I’d feel guilty. Don’t fall, either.”

“You’re not going to give me a lecture about how this is dangerous, and stupid, and…” Ellie asked, raising a curious eyebrow.

“Nope. I think going out into that sort of cold with a short skirt is punishment enough. You’re nineteen, Ellie. When I was nineteen, I took some ‘shrooms and got lost on a flight of stairs for about nine hours. You never got that wondrous experience. You need the chance to learn from your own damn mistakes.” She wobbled her head back and forth for a second, but then added, “You get caught though, and it certainly wasn’t ME who slipped him drugs, if you catch my drift. If you tell on me I will get even with you even if I have to live to be a thousand.”

Ellie put her thumb up in understanding. “You got it. I’m not a tattle-tale like your man.”

“I know,” Mary said with a dismissive wave, settling down to actually watch the monitor before her, and the musical that was playing on there (it seemed like all—or at least the vast majority—of Swaraan television consisted of musicals). “That’s why I help. Have fun. If something goes wrong, I don’t know you’re out there,” she warned.

“That’s fine.”

* * *

“This is SO not fine,” Ellie grumped four hours later, freezing her tuckus off. “How the hell hasn’t she come out to check on me yet? It’s getting late, for God sakes! I’m gonna die out here.”

She knew she was lucky that she wasn’t dead already—she had fallen to the wing of the spaceship from the landing she had been on. She had just finished her modifications to their communication system, and while walking back to the ladder she had slipped on black ice that had frozen to the metal hull of the ship.

“ICE!” she coughed at the thought. “Goddamn it!” She hugged her legs closer to her chest. She had manipulated the jacket she was wearing so that it covered her legs, but she had to shift every now and then when her butt began to feel like it was freezing to the ship.

At this point, she didn’t even care about what horrible punishment would occur if Graham found her there, just as long as she was found. Her face was beginning to hurt. But the men weren’t even expected to return for a few more hours yet, maybe longer.

She was going to freeze to the wing, she thought. Freeze to death. On the wing. At a cold space station. Shit.

But finally, she thought she heard the sound of a motorcycle approach—Thorton’s? “Could it possibly be?” She got up on her hands and knees, hoping to see his figure drive into the ship… but she didn’t. It wasn’t a motorcycle at all. A car hovered by the front landing and parked itself.

A man who didn’t look too old, but still had graying hair—probably about fifty or so—stepped out and adjusted his jacket. He looked around at the ship for a moment and then stepped forward.

“Hello? Hello?” Ellie shouted. “Sir! Sir? Hello?” She watched the man spin around, looking around him, and then up until his eyes finally landed on Ellie.

He certainly looked both confused and surprised at seeing a little human girl on the wing. He shouted something up to her.

She wondered if shal’ta could make it all the way down to his level—it could only travel a certain distance without the help of technology. She tried, anyway. In the last twenty hours, since her shot, she had actually had a couple of good attempts at communicating with it and not just listening.

But she wasn’t exactly lucky. He didn’t look like he could understand her. It was a language impasse. “Help me!” she finally shouted down. “Help, help!” She waved her arms around, knowing it was horrible charades, but not caring.

The man was smart—he got the point. He walked to the intercom to get help from inside, but he didn’t get any response. That wasn’t too weird; if Fie was still ‘out’, Mary wasn’t going to let a weird man inside, and she wasn’t in too much of a position to help Ellie, anyway.

After a long few minutes, the man looked around him, frustrated. He pointed up at Ellie and barked an order. Something that sounded a lot like, ‘stay put’. He walked to his car—or, as Ellie would call them ‘cruiser’, jumped inside, started the motor, and disappeared.

Ellie, dejected, slumped her shoulder over and groaned. Where did he go? Did he just leave?

But then, the sound of the car came back, and Ellie could see that it wasn’t hovering anymore, it was flying very close to the wing she was sitting on—almost as high. He opened the door with the motor still running, and climbed up to the hood of his car. 

“Can you just get closer? Couldn’t I just climb in? If you got close enough…” She shal’taed to him.

He faltered a minute as he got to his knees, obviously surprised at her shal’ta. “No, I can’t get closer, how high do you think I can go?” he replied back in the same way, only his face was hard as stone. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

“I slipped from above,” she replied, pointing. She became defensive due to his stern expression, and added, “It’s icy up there…”

She heard him sigh as he simultaneously shal’taed, “Come on, just hop down to me.” He stepped as close to the wing as possible and held wide his arms like he planned to catch her.

She winced at the idea. “Hm. Yeah. I don’t hop, per se… Got a rope or something?”

“No. I don’t.” He looked extremely flustered. “Do you want me to climb up there and carry you down?”

She looked down towards the drop off the side. It was quite a ways—about twenty-five feet. “No… Then you’ll just have to hop down, right?”

“Right.”

“And there’ll be no one to catch you...”

“It’s a dangerous proposition, to be assured.”

She wrung her hands thoughtfully in front of her, frowning. She got down on her hands and knees again and began to slowly teeter towards the edge. She sighed. The car wasn’t directly below her. She was going to have to make a running start to jump out a couple of feet so he wouldn’t have to lean over. “How much experience do you have with catching… people?” she questioned, standing back up on her feet.

“I’ll catch you,” he assured, making his shal’ta as soft as possible.

She bit her lip. God, she hated this. She didn’t have any particular problem with heights, but she did with falling, for sure.

“On three. One… Two…”

She didn’t make it to three, she suddenly jumped off the wing, propelling into him enough to make him step back a treacherous foot. She screamed as they teetered over the edge. He merely sighed with relief.

“What happened to ‘on three’?” he demanded wearily, feeling the need to catch his breath.

“I panicked,” she replied, feeling very small.

He put her down momentarily and instructed her to climb onto his back.  She put her arms around his neck and her legs around his chest as he climbed slowly, carefully, back towards the car.  Finally, she was able to let go of him and clumsily adjusted herself into the side seat.

She looked around when he got in. Yep—it was a car. It looked a little different—there were a lot of buttons in front of her, and she didn’t know which did what. Also, the dashboard had a metallic shine. She reached out to touch the dashboard, just to feel the machinery on her fingers, marveling at how wonderful and smooth it felt.

Her hand was caught by his. “You have some explaining to do, Young Lady,” he warned her, dropping her hand so that it fell in her lap.  He began to strap her safely into her seat with the seatbelt, which had a design she felt served better on a roller coaster than a car. There was a heater, though, and he made it so that the hot air blew right on her.

She looked over at him. He looked, very simply, like Graham. Really, spitting image. This man was probably only in his fifties; he certainly wasn’t what she’d call ‘elderly’. He was still muscular. He had scars on his hands and on his face, his salt-and-pepper hair was definitely more on the salty side. But he was still handsome in the same way: same eyes, same broad shoulders, same nose. “You’re Graham’s father,” she stated after a few moments.

His eyes looked towards her direction only momentarily as he put the car in gear. It glided forward. “Admiral Jack Masterson,” he finally admitted, his shal’ta still gruff. “And you’re Mary.”

“Ellie, actually,” she replied, putting her hands flat against the heaters as if she was trying to dethaw.

“Eleanor.” He said her name aloud as if she couldn’t have been serious.

“Yes.” She nodded.

“You’re Eleanor?”

She laughed at the way his face twisted with doubt. “Yes. Ellie.”

“Graham’s woman?”

She hummed as she watched him drive the car away from the ship, slowly descending as he did. She finally realized why he had to drive away—they took awhile to descend and ascend. “How high can these hover?” she asked curiously.

He didn’t answer. “How long were you out on the wing?”

“About three and a half hours. So, thank you… How do you know so much about me?”

“I read Graham’s report,” he retorted. “What he omitted from it, however, was how mind-bogglingly stupid you are. He didn’t mention that you could fully communicate with shal’ta, either…”

“I’m full of surprises, I guess.” She frowned and slouched her shoulders forward. It became very clear that Graham’s father would not be a very good ally to her—he was doing his best to give her the first degree. The car was descending towards ground-level, and their spaceship was again coming into sight.

They didn’t say anything else until the car stopped.  At that point, she tried to quickly take off her safety belt to try to get in the ship before him. Maybe with a couple of seconds, she could get Mary to wake up Fie and at least get away from the fact that she had a drugged Swarii inside the ship.

“Urgh!” she groaned with frustration, trying to push the safety harness over her head. It didn’t work; long before she could get out, Jack had gotten out of his seat, walked all the way around the car, opened her door, and began to help her out of the harness. As soon as it was off, he dragged her out of the car by her arm and marched her up the spaceship’s landing and made her type in the entry code.

As soon as the door opened, Jack jerked her into the far warmer air of the ship. Mary quickly entered the hallway as soon as she heard the footsteps, saying, “Ellie! I was getting…” It was about that time she saw Jack guiding Ellie down the hall non-too-gently by the scruff of her coat. “Worried...” She backed up, her eyes wide and her face white.

“Meet my father in law,” Ellie grumbled, looking towards the ground.

“Where’s everyone?” Jack demanded, finally letting Ellie go when he approached the other human.

“Out.” Ellie suddenly realized by his expression that she was walking very much on thin ice. She didn’t know what would happen if this ice cracked, and she didn’t want to know what would happen when Jack Masterson cracked. “Thorton went to sell the ship—the others went out to check into the military outpost.”

“And they left you alone?”

“No,” she admitted, shoving her hands in her jacket pockets. She asked Mary out of the side of her mouth, “Where’s Fie?”

Mary gulped. “Still out…”

“Shit.” Ellie slapped her palm against her forehead.

“Young lady…” he charged, obviously tired of playing twenty-questions with her.

Ellie shook her head. “This is not going to go well at all…”

* * *

It still had taken Ellie quite a long time to tell the Admiral that she had, in fact, drugged Fie into a deep unconsciousness so that she could make modifications to the communications system… Modifications that Graham hadn’t wanted her to risk making on chance that they might go wrong.

She couldn’t say she was too surprised when not much later she found herself sitting on a stool facing the corner of the lounge where Jack could ‘keep an eye on her’ while he waited for Fie to wake up.

When Fie woke up, he didn’t wake up particularly well. He had a horrible hang over, and was extremely disoriented. Jack helped him to his room, and Ellie took off down the hallway, eager to at least test the communications system to see if her experiment worked. If it did, then at least one good thing would have arisen out of all this. If she made Graham happy enough, then it was even possible that he would forget to punish her…

She sat down in Graham’s command chair and plugged in Thorton’s gigantic controller’s headphones and started to play around with the controls. “Come on, baby. Come on!” she said with gritted teeth, trying to listen to what she wanted.

Finally, she found it. A Frian signal; clear as a bell. She had one. And if she had one signal, that meant she had intercepted probably hundreds, or at least had the potential to do so.

She smiled widely, relieved. Her relief lasted a good five seconds before the headphones were ripped off her head and she was grabbed by the shoulder off her seat and was suddenly facing a very angry man. He didn’t even have the patience to shal’ta a lecture; he put his leg up on the chair and leant her stomach quickly over his knee.

“No, no, no!” She kicked and wind-milled her arms around wildly, but he was quick to begin slapping his hand against her pantied bottom; her skirt was so short it was practically out of the way already. “Wait, wait, wait!” she pleaded, realizing how bad it must have looked to him—to come into the lounge and find that she had disobeyed yet another order. “I can explain!”

But the spanking was quickly over, almost as if he had felt he was crossing some sort of propriety line by spanking her at all. Still, when her feet again touched the ground, she put her hands behind her to cover her bottom protectively. Her skin was already hot to the touch, sore, and tingling. The spanking had been very short but not light. He said a couple of short words in Swarii, and she knew what they meant. “Bad girl”.

He took her hand and began to pull her back towards the lounge.

She dug her bare heels into the floor and grabbed the chair with her other hand. “Wait, wait!” she was finally able to shal’ta. She knew it sounded as desperate as she felt. “Please!”

“Girl, I can make sure that by the time you CAN sit again, you won’t remember how it’s done,” he threatened darkly.

“Please let me show you something… Sir?” she pleaded, giving him the no-fail puppy eyes, trying to give him the kind of subservience that would curl Jazeel’s toes.

They remained the no-fail puppy eyes. He finally huffed angrily and let go of her hand. “What?”

Ellie grabbed the headphones and then carefully presented them to him.

He grabbed them and put them on. “What? Are you making calls or something?” he snapped, but suddenly his brow crinkled.

His expression changed from anger, to confusion, to intensity, to doubt, to amazement, and finally back to intensity again. These emotions didn’t come and go quickly, either. She watched him with amusement for about five minutes before he finally, very slowly, pulled the headphones off his head.

“Was that what I think it was?” the admiral asked very crisply.

For a moment, she wondered if she was in trouble—his expression was dark. She nodded, wringing her hands in front of her nervously.

“Did you do this?”

She nodded again, even more hesitantly. This time, she put her hands back over her quivering bottom.

And then he lunged towards her. She squinted when he did so, expecting him to haul her over his knee again. That’s why she was very surprised, indeed, when he picked her up by her waist and twirled her playfully around, kissing her cheeks, her forehead, her eyes—it was suddenly too much.

Finally, he put her back down, and gave her a tap on the nose. “You need to learn how to obey my son, little one, or else you could have gotten yourself frozen to the wing! I figured you the stupidest creature this side of the universe; I still think he’s going to have his hands full. At the time I even felt sorry for him. And what you did to Fie is absolutely deplorable. You’re just lucky you’re not mine.

“But I’m impressed by this. And by God—I’m not impressed very often!”

“You don’t seem like you are…” she finally said, finally brave enough to smile.  He didn’t seem like a man who smiled often, either. But he certainly was smiling now, bright, white, and wide.

* * *

“I swear, Bro, you are stupider than hell,” Peyton heaved as he braced Thorton against him, his arm slung around his shoulder as Thorton limped along pathetically, bleeding from his mouth and not being able to see because of his swollen eye. Jio was helping Thorton on his other side.

“I said ‘no gambling’, Soldier. No fighting. Do you remember any of that?” Graham continued to nag, as he had been nagging all the way home. He pressed in the code to the spaceship door. It opened in front of them.

“I don’t remember a lot of things right now, Boss,” Thorton admitted.

“Of course you don’t. You got your ass kicked. You’re lucky you were at a place we happened to be walking by.”

“Lucky, or strategic?” was Thorton’s response. It probably hurt to smile with a busted lip, but he did, anyway.

“Lucky you weren’t shot,” Graham grumbled.  “Completely unprofessional. If I were my father I would give you the lash. We can’t do this every goddamned time we land somewhere.”

“Hey, I sold this ship for pretty good money, Boss. More than she’s worth!” he defended.

“I don’t know if that’s much solace for dealing with your bull—” Graham turned the corner and recognized his father sitting on the couch where he had expected Fie to be. Thorton’s large, bulky headphones were around his father’s ears yet the television monitor in front of him blared on quietly.

That wasn’t as shocking as the fact that both Mary and Ellie had curled up with him. Ellie was sitting on his lap resting her head on his chest, and Mary was curled up into his side, cocooned in a blanket. It was a very similar image to how his father had been with his sisters, when they were alive and young. He thought all the warm-and-fuzzy had been wrung out of him long ago from the losses he suffered in the war, but as he watched the girls snuggle up to him comfortably as they slept, it made him rethink that.

Graham looked to his left and his right—his men were extremely tense, as if they had just walked into a room with a sleeping dragon.

“Who’s he?” Peyton whispered, also sensing the tenseness.

“Admiral Masterson,” Thorton whispered back. “He might not have noticed us. We might be able to get out alive…” he tried to steer Peyton so he could limp safely from the room with his help.

The movement caught the edge of the Admiral’s peripheral vision, and his neck turned to face them. “What the hell happened to you, Lieutenant?” he snapped, clearly already of the mind that whatever happened was of Thorton’s own making.

Graham, as he’d done since he was a child, stepped in front of Thorton as if to shield the sight of him, and saluted his father respectfully. “Admiral,” he acknowledged, his posture straight as he put his hands behind his back in order to puff out his chest. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“Well, after you sent me your mission report, I made it so the fleet just happened to be in the area,” the admiral noted frankly. “From the sound of it, you’re lucky you weren’t shot in the face. It certainly would have made your escape tricky.”

Graham nodded so slightly that the movement of his head could barely be detected with the human eye. “Indeed,” he agreed.

“But although I didn’t think it WOULD be, it’s possible that having the union with the human is the best career move you’ve ever made.”

Graham didn’t respond. He was too shocked by his father’s statement. In reality, he had dreaded what his father would say about it—he wasn’t the most open-minded man in the galaxy, for certain.

Peyton, who couldn’t speak Swarii, looked over at Thorton and whispered, “Translate?”

“I don’t think I should. I don’t think he’s the admiral anymore. Possibly a robot spy that merely looks like him…” Thorton replied, a stupid smirk appearing on his beat-up face.

“This update she did to your communication system is revolutionary, Son. I haven’t been able to get over it. She’s sort of the mad-scientist type,” the admiral said, gazing down at her as she continued to snuggle into him.  He played with her five-toed little feet, which had been getting warmed with his hand all the while. “Only the human part makes her a little too damned cute to take seriously at first.”

Graham felt a mix of emotions in him—he would have felt nothing but pride at whatever it was his father was so happy with, but he was mostly thinking how he had specifically told her not to fix or fiddle with anything while he was gone. That’s why he had left Fie behind—to insure that.

He looked around the room, suddenly confused. “Where’s Fie?”

“Probably still in his bedroom, puking his guts out,” he answered, looking unconcerned, and even a little bit amused. “This one slipped him some sort of drug, or so she says. But I really think it was this one,” he said, nodding over to Mary. “Because she’s been acting far guiltier about Fie’s side effects. She’s exhausted; been at Fie’s side for the last seven hours. It feels like they’d pre-arranged who’d be at fault.”

Graham was massaging his scalp already with the tips of his fingers. “Urgh,” he finally said, and took inventory of his current problems: a drop in from his positively frightening father, also the highest commander of his fleet and life, a banged-up electrician, an exhausted doctor, a poisoned research scientist, and the wife that poisoned him and obviously went off to do whatever she wanted to do whenever she wanted to do it. “Terrific,” he grumbled.

He spun around and pointed at Thorton and Jio. “Take him to bed. I’ll send Mary in there behind you. Don’t translate for Peyton what happened, because I want her to see to Thorton first.” He pointed at Brahm. “Check on Fie. Make sure he’s not dead or almost dead.” Brahm nodded and disappeared out of the room.

“Wait, wait—” Thorton said, waving his hand before Jio and Peyton could help carry him out. “If she’s getting a spanking, can I watch?”

Graham jerked his thumb towards the hallway, and Jio, with a grin, continued to guide Thorton out.

Chapter Nine

The rumbling of Jack’s voice finally woke Ellie gently out of sleep. Despite a poor first-impression, she was now quite certain that the admiral took a great liking to her and Mary. Whether or not this apparent ‘liking’ was going to get her out of a ‘licking’, she did not know. In fact, she doubted it.

She knew that Graham had returned before she opened her eyes; there was something extremely distinguishable about his voice. She could barely understand a word of what they were saying, mind you—they were speaking Swarii, not English. Still, Graham’s voice had the lulling sound of a deep, grumbling drawl. By the way his words rolled out of his mouth, she could certainly say that he enunciated the ending of his words better than the beginning, and that whenever he said a word with an ‘rr’ sound in it, it seemed drawn out like a growl.  It made him sound like he was serious and angry even when he wasn’t.

She was actually wondering whether or not to continue to pretend that she was asleep—Graham could not punish her if she was asleep. Rather, he WOULD not. She couldn’t imagine that he would wake her; she knew that he coddled her, and would continue to do so no matter what she did, to him, herself, or his friends. She understood very quickly into their relationship the tender mechanics of it; that she was the main gear in the relationship, the most important and unbreakable part as far as he was concerned, and he would go far out of his way to revolve around her more than he expected her to revolve around him.

Whether or not he loved her in the human-sense was inconsequential. Although she had just turned eighteen when she had been abducted away from Earth, she had recognized the significance a husband and wife would hold for each other, which was affection; sometimes possessiveness, sometimes a convenience. In all regards, Graham's bond with her was tougher. No doubt she was always in the back of his mind, and when he saw her, the affection that he allowed to be observed on his face was just as real as anything else.

In short, it was laughable to think that no matter WHAT she created—it could have been innerspace travel itself!—was not going to save her from punishment. He would not be as easily appeased as the Admiral, who was certainly looking at her invention as ANYBODY losing a war would view it—as a miracle.

Graham wouldn’t see it as that right away. His mind would certainly not move out of how blatantly she had disobeyed him, or how dangerous what she did was. He would be thinking about how she could have been electrocuted, how she could have slipped and fallen on the ice and could have fallen down a few stories, and not onto the wing. He would consider the fact that had not his father shown up, she would have frozen to death by now, or at least be in jeopardy of losing a toe or two—she would have been out there twelve hours; it was probably close to morning. Fie was far too ill at the moment to have saved her at any point in time, and Mary wouldn’t have been able to help her even if she had known where she was.

Finally, she realized that Graham was waking Mary. Mary was at her feet; her head was basically resting on Ellie’s knee. Mary made a moaning noise as she awoke, sounding very unhappy about being touched and being very dazed. “Mary,” Graham said patiently. “Can you please go to Thorton’s room? I think he needs some medical attention, and with Fie out of commission, you’re the closest we have.”

As Ellie opened her eyes, she realized Mary was rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and she sat up. “Peyton?” Mary asked, worried when she looked around and didn’t see him.

“He’s with Thorton and he’s fine. When you're done tending to Thorton, I’d appreciate it if you let me know what chemicals you gave to Fie when you drugged him. I’m sure he’d also like to know.”

Ellie’s body went rigid. “It was me!” Ellie quickly said, jumping up in Jack’s lap.

Graham didn’t look amused. He crossed his arms. “Really? What chemicals did the drug contain?”

“It was a… sleeping pill,” replied Ellie, suddenly realizing that she had no idea. Mary knew that sort of stuff. They hadn’t discussed it; Ellie had essentially just phoned it in.

“Made of?”

Ellie bit her lip. “Alright, I had Mary make it for me, but she didn’t know I was actually going to use it,” Ellie finally blathered.

Graham’s head rocked towards Mary very slowly. He didn’t speak; his expression spoke for itself. It somehow was asking Mary if she was really going to go along with the story that a girl about 9 years younger than her had somehow duped her into drugging someone else.

The idea embarrassed Mary enough that her head dropped and her shoulders slumped. “No, no. I did it… It was Rohypnol; I was trying to cross reference Frian medicines with discovered Human medicines, and I found it. I don’t remember the Swarii name for it, but I could point it out,” she sighed. “I’m really, really sorry, Graham.”

“Thank you for your honesty,” admitted Graham, also sighing. “I’ll talk to your husband later on. Just make sure that idiot, Thorton, is okay.”

“Okay,” Mary said, her throat dry. She pushed off from her place on the sofa and slowly trudged down the hall.

Graham watched her go until she was out of sight, and then let his gaze slowly rotate back to Eleanor. “You.” That was all he said for a few long, silent seconds. His tone was very discouraging. “You have been a very, very bad girl, Eleanor.”

“Yes,” Ellie said, clearing her throat and tapping the pads of her fingers against themselves nervously. “I think you might be looking at this from a bad angle. There were things that went wrong, yes. BUT I couldn’t help it. That robocuffin has made me crazy, Graham! Everything’s been so clear! I have all these ideas now, all these thoughts! I couldn’t just sit on this experiment. It’s really important.” She looked imploringly at her father in law. “Can you please explain how important this is?”

“Don’t get my father in the middle of this,” Graham demanded, his jaw locking. “The experiment would have been done fine TOMORROW. Or the next day. With proper system backups. With precautions made. With supervision, safety previsions. This isn’t even our ship anymore; Thorton sold it. We have to leave in the morning, and now we have to rectify the communications to where it was, or else we’d be putting your new technology into a stranger’s hands. AND if you BROKE the communications system, we’d be liable for the damages! That’s thousands of dollars and it would come out of everyone’s prize money. You’d be less than popular.”

“I just wanted to work on it by myself—I had to figure it out on the fly a little bit,” she replied, hoping it was a good reason.

“The way I understood it, you’re lucky I didn’t find you frozen to the wing. You probably thought it was pretty cold out there during the day? Do you know how cold it is NOW? It’s ten below out there. It’s cold. You’re lucky my father came by to save you. Not to mention if you missed the wing when you slipped…”

She sighed audibly. This was going just as badly as she’d imagined. She leaned her head wearily against Jack’s chest, who rubbed her back with paternal comfort. “Don’t wear her hide out tonight, Boy,” Jack told him in shal’ta, obviously so she could hear that he was pulling what strings he could for her. “She’s tired, and your men will have to move in the morning. You and I have to talk about your next assignment, anyway.”

Graham looked like he was swallowing back a very bitter flavor that was in his mouth, but eventually he conceded. “Say goodnight to my father,” he told her, firmly but too wearily to feel threatening. “We’ll be discussing this tomorrow.”

Ellie swallowed. Somehow, she didn’t trust that they’d be discussing much.

* * *

“What did you call him to do this?” Mary asked, wrapping Thorton’s knee now that it was reset.

“Do you know what a zoopafoob is?” Thorton asked, gritting his teeth together.

“No.”

Thorton dropped his head back in his pillow. “Yeah, I don’t think there IS a human equivalent. Let’s just say it’s pretty bad. Still, he cheated. And Ellie’s gonna kill me when she realizes that I gambled away the motorcycle. I know she wanted me to at least take her on a ride before the Boss made her get rid of it…”

Peyton came in finally from visiting Fie, his expression reflexively dark. He knew. And what was strange was that she was glad that he knew. She hadn’t been able to really look at him since he returned; she was too guilty.

Mary glanced at him, blushed, and then gave Thorton a sort of desperate expression. “Alright, so, before you do anything rash to my Mary,” Thorton said, understanding Peyton’s expression. “Understand that she’s a good girl, led astray by the small one.”

“I can’t believe that you’re the one who drugged him,” Peyton sighed, obviously disappointed. “What could Ellie have possibly said to talk you into doing that? Please say blackmail.”

Mary blushed; she was wrapping Thorton’s knee as slowly as possible. “She explained what she was doing, and I got lost somewhere when she was explaining something about magnetic repulsion and radio waves. I didn’t even think she had brains, you know? Not real ones. I just thought I’d throw her a bone... I thought she knew how to keep out of trouble…” She shrugged when she saw Peyton’s incredulous gaze. “She was pretty damn good at it when she worked for Jazeel.”

Peyton looked somewhat incredulous that Mary could be that naive. “Mary, Baby… We worked as a team. I was in charge of making sure she didn’t do anything stupid, and not because Jazeel wanted me to. All she could do was listen in on Jazeel’s inner monologue—she doesn’t have enough sense to rub two thoughts together. Never has. I’ve never seen someone so tunnel-visioned in my life.”

“I didn’t know,” Mary admitted, shaking her head innocently. 

“You knew better.”

“Peyton, let her be, eh? She’s patched me up pretty well!” Thorton peeped in, patting Mary’s hand reassuringly. “We should all be lucky enough to have a Mary in our lives!”

Mary shook her head, her face blushing. “No, no. Poor Fie—I don’t know what I was thinking! Even Ellie almost died tonight. It was the biggest clusterscrew in history.” Her lips were curled with disgust for herself. She had been at Fie’s side all night, discovering how much an eight-foot-man could throw up. She discovered that it was a lot. She’s lucky he didn’t have heart failure. She could have never lived with herself.

Thorton was surprised to see a tear drop down Mary’s cheek. She was deep in picturing how bad things could have gotten that night. “It’s okay, Mary. Everything worked out okay,” Thorton reminded.

“You’re done,” Mary told him, sticking out a strong chin. “Just get some sleep, Thorton, and for God Sakes—take it easy.”

Peyton’s eyes even softened when he saw tears. He led her out of the room with his hand gently on the small of her back. He heard her sniffle.

“Thorton’s right. Everything did end up working for the best,” he heard himself saying soothingly. “Don’t cry, Darlin’…”

“I was stupid.”

“Ellie was stupid.” If he didn’t know any better, he would say he was arguing against his earlier self. He didn’t like to see his wife torture herself. 

“No, Ellie was being Ellie. I was being stupid,” she shook her head stubbornly, more tears escaping her eyes. “If I hadn’t done it, Ellie wouldn’t have been in any trouble. She wouldn’t have gotten the chance to get into it! Poor Fie!” She wiped her face clean with her hand, but tears soon replaced the ones that she wiped off.

“Let’s just go to sleep for now, Honey. You’ll feel better in the mornin’,” he cooed sympathetically, putting his muscular arms tightly around her.

He got her to believe that sleep would make her feel better. But when they did go to sleep, she just dreamt of it. Dreamt of Ellie being stuck up thirty feet, the bottoms of her bare feet stuck to the spaceship as she froze to death in a heavily-polluted space station. Peyton had WAY better circulation than either of the girls, and he still had to wear several layers—even double socks. And he still came in half-frozen!

After the same nightmare woke her up twice, she sighed loudly and crawled out of bed and began rummaging around in the dark for Peyton’s belt, which was still on the pants he was wearing that day.

It was probably about six o’clock in the morning, which meant the Swarii were probably up and at ‘em already, and Mary and Peyton had been asleep for a measly four hours. But when she found the belt, she got up on the bed and knelt by Peyton’s head. “Honey?”

Peyton slowly woke up by opening his eyes and closing them. Shocked to realize he just saw his wife leaning over his head in the darkness, his eyes opened again, this time much more awake and much wider. “What’s wrong?” he asked, wiping the sleep off of his face as he sat up. He turned on the light next to him.

“I think you should spank me,” she said quietly, her cheeks flushing, wringing the belt in her hands.

Peyton’s eyebrows raised with surprise. “Just the other day, you said I didn’t have the right to spank you. Now you demand it?” he didn’t sound incredulous as much as amused.

“I can’t sleep, Peyton. I feel like… like I owe someone something, you know? It’s weighing on my conscience. I don’t want to get away with anything. You know Ellie won’t, and I don’t want her to get punished but I get off scot-free.”

Peyton sighed. He was obviously tired. He was having a nice dream where they were both somewhere warm, like Maui. Maui with a TV close by, playing the super-bowl. It had been awhile since he saw one of those. Still, he didn’t like the sad look on Mary’s face—and there were worse things than one’s wife wanting to get punished for wrong-doings.

“Alright,” he said, rolling out of bed and heading over towards his pants, which he quickly pulled on, as if being naked while punishing her was an inappropriate act. “I was going to punish you. But then you were doing such a great job of punishing yourself. But you’re right—punishment should come from me.” He opened his palm so she could lay the belt into it. “The great thing about having me around is so you don’t HAVE to punish yourself.”

She already looked like she was second-guessing this whole thing, and very slowly put the belt into his hand.

He put his other hand on her cheek and gently stroked her cheek with his thumb. “I’m really proud of you—for coming to me for this,” he told her, smiling softly.

“Good you think so,” she replied, sounding like she was in pain already. “I think I must be nuts.”

“You’ll feel better about it, I promise.” He helped her off of the bed and wheeled her naked body around the other side of him. He sat on the bed and pulled her over his lap. The cut still healing above his ankle tingled at the remembrance of the last time—the last spanking that was already so different. She was letting him arrange her body over his knee so her wrists were pinned to the small of her back by one of his hands, and his leg held down the backs of her knees. There wasn’t very far she could go.

“Now, what are you about to be spanked for?” he asked somberly, looking at the small bruises that were still lingering from the first time.

“Doing something devious; let alone far against the Hippocratic Oath…” she groaned, crossing her feet nervously.

“Yes, Ma’am. That’s correct.” She was adorable, Peyton thought. He just loved her. It nearly killed him when he raised the belt up and brought the leather down upon her bottom, and he found himself cringing when he did it. SMACK! There was hardly a sound from her—merely a guttural moan. He brought it down again, and again.

About the tenth smack, she cried, “Please stop! That’s enough!” but he kept on.

“It’s not enough,” he replied firmly. “We’re just gettin’ goin’.” And he was just getting going—her bottom was barely welted enough to make any part of it even pink. And although she asked for this lesson, he was still going to teach it properly. What she had done, he reminded himself, was dangerous, and irresponsible, particularly for a girl in her late twenties. With Ellie it was predictable—if she was the type who’d go to college, she’d be one of the first of them to get drunk and show her boobs on ‘Girls Gone Wild’. Mary wasn’t. She had more self-control than that. But obviously, she could be talked into stupid.

“Peyton!” she yelped. “I’m sorry! Just stop!”

She began to try to violently squirm from his grip. But he knew she wouldn’t bite him again. He didn’t want to have to punish her for THAT infraction again. This time, it would have been much worse.

The belt, be it convenient, was not one of his favorite tools to spank with. When he had time, he liked to use a wooden paddle at the palace—that was easier to wield. Belts and straps were long enough to give him less control of the territory he was spanking. He wanted her bottom a nice shade of red, but he didn’t want her too bruised.

She squealed and screamed loud enough for probably the whole ship to hear, and that, he decided, was for the better. Everybody needed to hear that serious mistakes were dealt with, even by the humans. But eventually her screams and demands shrank down into sobs. Finally, she had fully submitted to her punishment. She was letting him do this—she didn’t even fight against him any longer.

Her bottom was a very pretty red—it was a dark color, really. The zone he had covered was from the top of her bottom to nearly above her knees, mostly because he knew that thighs hurt more. She should feel properly punished from this—she would feel better. Her penance was fully paid.

Finally, he felt he could put the belt down and rub her bottom as she sobbed over his knee. He released her hands. “Shh, baby,” he cooed at her. “It’s over.” He helped her into standing, watching her continue crying, and took her onto his lap. He held her and rocked her for a long time, but she eventually fell asleep, a heavy one.

He smiled and laid her down and pulled the sheets over her. He pulled off his pants and crawled into the bed next to her. “You are so sexy,” he whispered, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “And you’re such a good wife.” He put his thick arm around her and nuzzled his nose into her long, blond curls, his groin pushed against her tender, warm bottom. It was easy for him to fall asleep.

* * *

Graham could hear the distant sounds of Mary’s chastisement in the hours of the early morning. He looked down at the soft little body that was snuggling into him for warmth so that she was practically lying underneath of him, and he sighed.

He was too angry with Ellie to even punish her last night. He had put her to bed and then went out to rejoin his father, who he hadn’t seen in person in two years. Graham had to give his little wife this much: his father loved her, and his father didn’t even like a whole too many people.

“Mmm… Magnetic… repulsions...” she murmured in her sleep.

He pursed his lips together. It wasn’t natural, what was happening to her. Her mind was expanding too quickly, her ideas were becoming boundless. She was clever before the robocuffin—she had quite a knack for fixing things. Those sorts of people were on high demand on the Libiian, Swaraan, and all the other Swarii planets. They were not-so-affectionately known as ‘gear moguls’, mostly because they charged so much money to fix things that took them very little time. 

The robocuffin, however, had made something much better than expected. Gear Moguls had irregularly the desire or the imagination to go about inventing things—inventions normally came sparsely from scientists rotting in laboratories. And the concept she created for spying on Frian signals was so genius yet so simplistic that she was able to make her temporary adjustments with a butter knife, a paper clip, a coin, and a package of chewing gum.

But for a genius, she could sure be a real idiot. She didn’t quite conceive of how fragile she was, or how irreplaceable. She was going to wind up being very short-lived if he didn’t do something about it soon.

“Don’t be too rough on the poor little thing,” his father had told him after Graham returned from putting Ellie to bed. Jack had been scribbling notes onto his electronic tablet with his headphones on; Graham was honestly surprised that he had noticed Graham re-entering the room. “Some women can’t even help but make poor decisions every five seconds. Especially the absent-minded ones.” 

“She’s going to end up dead,” Graham huffed, crossing his arms and sitting next to Jack.

“Yeah, well. That’s what you’re for. I’m just saying—don’t carry any resentment over her. Punish her to your heart’s content, but make sure she knows she’s forgiven afterward.”

Graham turned his head slowly in the direction of his father. “Are you the same man I grew up with? Since when are YOU compassionate?”

He chuckled, but still continued to etch upon his tablet. “I don’t know. Humans are sort of cute. The biggest struggle the federation is going to have isn’t going to be to accept the humans into our alliance—it’s going to be to keep them from becoming pets.” He finally slid his pen into his pocket and turned to face Graham. “So, I guess we should get down to business?”

“You’re here to promote me, aren’t you?” Graham asked flatly, not sounding particularly happy about it.

Jack’s brows knitted together. “How did you…”

“Last time I saw you, it was for the same reason,” he sighed, then got up with the intent of making himself a heavy drink at the bar.

“It’s time you rejoin the fleet, Graham,” Jack instructed. “It’s not going to kill you, not being the biggest fish in the tank anymore. And who knows? Maybe it won’t last long. Becoming a captain at thirty is nearly unheard of. You’ll be kicking me out of my job before you know it.”

“Ugh,” Graham grunted, as if the prospect of being the High Admiral was even more distasteful than having to be a captain of a ship attached to one of the seven hundred ships attached to ONE of the larger motherships. Having that many captains in so little space was a cesspool for drama.  “I think my men were hoping for a little bit of leave,” he admitted.

“Leave? Leave at a time like this? In the last few hours, I have listened to Frian plans against our fleets that would make your toes curl. This is no time for a vacation, Son. And besides, the meatballs you have running around this ship can’t survive out in the wild. They’re alone for five seconds and they’ll be up to their asses in trouble.” Jack pointed to the direction Thorton limped away in. “You and I both know it. Besides, if you’re thinking about just getting your kitten situated and safe at home, then you’ve got another think coming. She’s not just some tame Swarii girl who will bow her head to you and work on her cooking so she’ll be perfect by the time you get back. She’ll probably go about destroying the house before you get home.”

Now, as Graham lay in bed, he looked down and realized his father was right. He had to take her with him on the ship, as distasteful as the idea was. She deserved better—she deserved being safe back at home, free to shop, to socialize… to do what women do. But she would probably find some way to get killed before the week was out.

Taming Ellie was not going to be easy, especially for major infractions like blatantly disobeying him and putting her own life in danger because of it, not to mention egging Mary into a punishment. Not that Mary shouldn’t have known better than to let Ellie talk her into helping her on her harebrained schemes.

Luckily, there was a way to kill two birds with one stone. Fie needed to check her anal and vaginally elasticity anyway. If any time was a good time for such an awful test, today was the day.

* * *

Since Mary’s punishment was over by the time they reached the mothership via the shuttle, Mary and Peyton were actually able to enjoy the shuttle trip. Ellie thought Fie was trying to bore a whole through her head, which was making her endlessly nervous, and Graham hadn’t smiled at her once all day.

She had done her best to be helpful—she put the sheets and towels in the freshener and folded them, made sure her room was clean, repaired the communications system back to its useless originality with the help of Jack, who was so careful with her when they walked back out to the top of the ship, that he had very efficiently gotten in her way at every step. Still, she didn’t complain.

The mothership was massive; but then, she expected it to be. The mothership carried on it about two hundred thousand souls… And it wasn’t the only mothership of the Swaraan fleet. There were literally hundreds of motherships.

And Jack was the commander of every single damn one of them. “So… You guys are LOSING the war?” she asked Jack as she knelt on her seat to watch the view of the oncoming mothership from the window behind her.

“Our population has greatly declined, yes. We colonize a lot of planets, remember. An army of a few million isn’t a lot compared to the rest of our population, and it’s nothing compared to what the Frians have,” Jack explained patiently, giving her a fatherly pat on the rump as if to remind her that it was far more proper to sit down on a seat.

She turned around and plopped heavily back onto the tall seats that left her feet dangling slightly above the ground. “Give me a tour when we land?” she asked Jack.

“You and I have a lot to discuss when we land,” Graham reminded darkly, looking up from the electronic tablet he was reading. “The tour will have to wait.”

Her cheeks flushed brightly and she looked back and forth to see if anybody else had heard of her impending doom. Fie grinned back at her. He still looked a little behind the weather, and certainly tired, but he looked far better than the last time she had seen him.

“You are such a brat,” Peyton snorted, but not very loudly. She only heard him because he was seated on her other side. “I can’t believe you did that to Fie. Are you sociopathic or something?”

“Any time you feel like shutting the hell up, Peyton, you go for it. Don’t wait around for my permission,” she snapped, glaring up at him. “I didn’t mean to hurt Fie. I meant to put him out for a nap. My cousin used to slip my uncle a roofie all the time so she could go party. The man didn’t even wake up with a hangover. He was never the wiser!”

“It was stupid. You’re lucky I’m not in charge of you anymore, Girl,” Peyton snapped back.

“Peyton—don’t threaten my wife,” Graham said firmly, yet strangely patiently. “Or egg her on, if you would. She’s in enough trouble.”

Peyton immediately retracted and respectfully replied, “I’m sorry, Sir.  You’re right.”

Ellie leaned over Peyton so she could make incredulous eye contact with Mary. ‘Sir?’ she mouthed.

‘He’s working for Graham now,’ Mary mouthed back, rolling her eyes. ‘God help us.’

‘But… Peyton doesn’t tell ANYBODY ‘they’re right’…’ Ellie replied, still mouthing.

“Eleanor, stop it,” Graham ordered, quickly becoming annoyed by watching mouths move but no sounds come out. Not that the facial and hand gesturing wasn’t making it incredibly obvious what they were talking about, anyway.

Ellie sat there, pouting, embarrassed at constantly being snapped at, and glared down at her feet. She couldn’t wait for her punishment to be done with. She couldn’t stand having the weight of it above her head.

Or so she thought until an hour later, when she was sitting in her new room, on her new bed, fretting about how any second Graham was going to finally come through the door and spank her. At least she thought so. Now that she was thinking about it—did they have worse than spanking? Did she deserve worse? She did, after all, invent something very bad-ass. Shouldn’t that buy her some leniency?

Graham was taking forever—she thought she would be punished as soon as they landed, but instead he just had a solider guide her to their bedroom. At first she was relieved for not being spanked right away, now she was dreading it.

Whirr. It was the sound of the electric door opening to the bedroom. She could hear Graham’s boots step into the room. She very slowly pulled her head up to look at him, hoping to appear as pathetic as possible.

She looked even more pathetic when she saw what could only look like a paddle in his hand. And a small, hard suitcase. She was more concerned about the paddle, though. “Can’t we talk about this?” she asked, her voice filled with hope.

He slowly rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. “You blatantly disobeyed me, didn’t you? You endangered yourself, didn’t you? You and Mary nearly put Fie on his death bed.”

“Well, I did invent something pretty awesome,” she reminded.

Graham didn’t look as impressed with her as she obviously was with herself. “You could have waited to invent it. You could have waited until I was there, and you were safe. You could have asked for help, for protection. You knew I didn’t want you leaving the ship alone. Besides, if I let you do whatever you want just because something good comes out of it, what am I supposed to do when you screw up? Punish you for not being a genius that day?”

“Can’t we cross that bridge when we come to it?” she offered.

“No! Because one day you’re going to do something that’s going to get you killed, Ellie! I don’t want to come to this bridge again!” he replied, exasperated, putting down the small suitcase. He sat down in an armless lounging chair by the door. “Come here.”

She nervously rose from her seat on the bed and very slowly walked over. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the paddle in his hand. Now that she was a foot closer to it, she could see that it was made out of leather. It still seamed incredibly foreboding.

“This is called a slipper paddle, Eleanor. You’re sure to become very acquainted with it during our marriage,” he informed sternly, reaching out his hand and grabbing her forearm the second she got close enough.

“Didn’t your hand do a good enough job the last time?” she asked fretfully as Graham quickly pulled her across his knees and adjusted her body on his lap.

“Yes, but this should sting more and bruise less,” he added with a touch of optimism as he flipped up her little skirt and pulled her panties down and off her legs. “A gift from your new father-in-law,” he added, taking her arms and pinning them behind her back before the spanking began. 

This she was surprised by—she thought that Jack liked her. He hadn’t at first, certainly, but he did treat her very tenderly, more like a man would a daughter than a daughter-in-law. Why in the galaxy would he give his son a weapon to use against her? “What—” SMACK! Her eyes widened with the shock of even the sound of the paddle touching her flesh. “Oh! JESUS!” The sting was lingering, harsh. It felt like burning lightening.

The paddle came down again and again, leaving a well-sized red mark behind in its every wake. Although supposedly it didn’t ‘bruise’, she certainly didn’t think it felt any better than his hand. It felt much worse, in fact. It was biting, scalding.

Her eyes were crossing from the pain, and she was done making surprised gasps from the slaps as she viciously tried to kick her legs as if there was a way she could swim off his lap. Yep. It was definitely time to start screaming.

She was certain that there was no difference between her scream and a twelve-year-old girl’s. Not even by human standards. Her scream was shockingly shrill and squeaky. She pretty much continued until her voice broke from the strain.

And then she began to blubber. SMACK, SMACK, SMACK! The paddle went on and on. Graham didn’t speak this time, his jaw was locked tightly with resolve, obviously not listening to any of the begging that she was now beginning to try to put into babbling words. There was certainly a level of red he was going for, and her bottom was steadily becoming that. He didn’t want her to sit down comfortably for at least a couple of days.

He adjusted her quickly so her legs splayed apart a little, exposing the creamy white skin between her thighs. Eleanor treated it like he had just restarted the spanking—she had stopped struggling for the most part and had started to make her “boo-hoo-hoo” sobs, tears were running down her cheeks, her sniffling would ring constantly through the room. Spanking the thighs made her start screaming again.

But eventually he slowed. Everything on her bottom was a cherry-red color; swollen. With his finger tips he could feel the heat seeping out of her skin. But he wasn’t done.

He stood her up, and just as she tried to pull her skirt down over her bottom, he grabbed the suitcase, grabbed her arm and dragged her into the bathroom. He pointed to the bathtub and told her to bend over.

She looked up at him with her watery eyes, horrified. “But… But…”

“We’re not done,” he informed, and pointed sternly to the tub again. “Bend.”

Chapter Ten

Graham opened the suitcase as he watched her slowly bend over the tub, her toes barely touching the ground. She gave a loud sob or two, frightened and miserable.

“Please, just forgive me!” she cried when she heard him run the water, not able to fathom what he was planning, but knowing in her bones she was going to hate it.

“I forgive you,” he said simply. “I’m just disciplining you, sweetheart.”

“Please stop it!” she begged, wondering how he could even think she needed more punishment. Her bottom had to be as red as a tomato by now—it couldn’t get any more spanked, could it?

“This is for your own good,” he replied just as he put a little bit of lube on his finger. He walked over with the prepared enema and then reached between her round, squirming bottom cheeks and rubbed the lube onto her puckered little anus.

Her whole body went rigid, and her face quickly became just as red as her bottom. This was not okay. Her vagina he could do with what he wanted, but her bottom was still hers. “No, no!” she said, suddenly trying to stand up.

“Eleanor!” he barked, pushing her back down with his elbow.

She made a miserable whining and squeaking sound, and then another when his lubed finger delved into her small, tight anus. “Please, please…” she begged. But it did no good. His finger retracted and in its place came the lubricated nozzle of the enema bag.

The beginning part of the nozzle was smaller than his finger. But as he pressed it farther in, she realized it was stretching her anus wider and wider. The ring of her anus began to burn and sear with the stretching. “Noo!” she groaned past her clenched teeth.

“You’re okay,” Graham cooed at her as he watched her body try to clench and repel the object from her. He wouldn’t let it. “Relax like a good girl.” Her body showed no sign of relaxing—she continued to stubbornly clench down on the nozzle. He gave her a quick, stern slap across one bottom cheek. “Relax,” he ordered.

She sobbed, but slowly relaxed, letting the nozzle get deeper and deeper inside of her. Finally, she felt something warm with a soapy sort of burn fill her bowels. She gasped and tried to stand up and get away again, but Graham held her where she was.

“Please, please let me up. Make it stop,” she pleaded, becoming quite concerned that she was going to have an accident—she certainly felt a sense of urgency. She wondered if she had ever been so fully exposed, so humiliated. Not even Jazeel had ever done this to her. It was said that Peyton would give a punishment enema every now and then at the palace, but she had never seen one.  She had barely believed the rumors at the time, but she now understood why the punishment had been mentioned with such trepidation.

“I know it doesn’t feel very good, Baby. But as my mother used to say, ‘A good cleansing never hurt anyone.’”

Eleanor took that moment to hate Graham’s dead mother. Obviously she had never actually had a cleansing. No one could say that it didn’t hurt. The cramping alone was miserable, let alone the pain due to the stretching of her anus.

It seemed she was bent over forever, even after the entire contents of the enema bag had flowed into her. It took so long that she wondered if it was poetic justice for how sick she had made Fie—he’d been sick for hours and hours, and although she didn’t actually have the nozzle in for anywhere near that long, it certainly seemed like it.

Finally, she felt him slowly pull out the nozzle, and there was the numbing sensation of her anus being relieved of pressure. The cramping seemed even worse as she tried to hold the soapy liquid inside of her. “You can go relieve yourself now,” he said.

She stood up and walked to the toilet, but then looked up at him like she was very surprised, and very confused, to see him still standing there. “Can I have… a moment?” she begged, her teeth still gritted.

“No. This is a punishment enema—you don’t get the luxury of privacy here, just do your business so we can finish up.”

She swallowed and whined like a little unhappy Chihuahua, but eventually gave up and gently lowered herself onto the toilet seat. She didn’t look at him—not even his feet—as the soapy fluid in her bowels left her body.

She put her head in her hands. It was the most embarrassing moment of her life.

Ellie couldn’t imagine a way that the moment could get any worse. But then, after he made her stand up and then cleaned some lingering soapy fluid from her anus, he bent her back over the tub. At this point, her knees were shaking. She couldn’t believe that the punishment wasn’t over. “Please, I’m sorry. I’ll never do anything remotely stupid for the rest of my LIFE. I swear! I’ll do anything you like, anything you want, anything, anything!”

“Relax. This is just a test Fie suggested,” he explained, but he didn’t seem very sympathetic to her sobbing. “This goes fast.”

Before she could ask about ‘what tests’, she felt something very metallic, very smooth, and very cold rubbed against her clitoris. Ellie cried out when she felt it, embarrassed by how swollen her clit was, how tender she felt. Her flesh nearly throbbed. But then the smooth phallus-like object pressed into her.  Once it was deep in her vagina, she felt it begin to expand. Her toe scraped against the floor, but Graham pushed her forward and held her in place by putting one of his large hands around her thigh.

She felt the cold object continue growing larger, even as it remained deep inside her, and she groaned nervously. But suddenly, the machine beeped. Slowly, it returned to normal size, and Graham pulled it out. He hummed and she heard him squiggle something on his electronic tablet. Then she heard him put that down and she felt him rummaging around for something else.

Then she felt his warm fingers pressing into her bottom again, re-lubing the entrance. “Please, no… I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be good...” she said quietly, when she realized what he was doing. She was being tested for elasticity—there was a machine trying to decide how much she could be stretched during a sexual session. At first the device was about equal in size to the enema nozzle, but it grew rapidly to the size of the anal plug with which Jazeel had punished her. Again, there was a beeping sound, and the pressure subsided.

She took a deep breath, hoping that was all over, but then a more plastic, smooth, room-temperature object pressed against her bottom’s entrance. It was lubed, but she still clenched her bottom tightly when it tried to penetrate.

Graham sighed. “Ellie, the sooner this is done, the sooner it’ll be over,” he reasoned, feeling the resistance from her clenched anus. 

“You’re not putting a plug in me!” she sobbed defiantly.

“You need to be stretched to accommodate my girth, Ellie,” he replied wearily.

She gasped. “I don’t want to accommodate your girth! Ohh!” she squeaked miserably as he continued to push it into her. It was obviously cone-shaped; it was slender near the tip, but the further he pushed it in, the more the tender ring of her anus stretched. “Eeeep!” came her shrill squeak, and her hand went back to stop him.

He caught her hand, and began to pull out the plug gently. He did that again—pushed it all the way in, and pulled it all the way out.

She cried at how ashamed she was—she never wanted Graham to see this much of her, all her worst parts. The parts she’d learned to keep under cover since childhood. Now she was writhing against an anal plug slightly larger than the one she’d felt last week, the one that had made her so miserable. Her pussy continued to throb sorely. She brought her head up, suddenly feeling her muscles all lock.

She screamed again, but this one was shallower, more guttural. She was having an orgasm. Her body was shaking in violent jerks, but Graham held down her waist and continued pressing the plug in and out of her. Her scream turned into a groan that turned into a moan, which turned into breathy pants.

Finally, she was silent again, a victim of his continued movements until finally, he pulled out the plug.  That caused his wife to give a heavy, relieved sigh, but then she continued sobbing as she curled her toes pathetically against the cold floor.

Her legs were shaking and she just wanted to sink into the floor and die. She recognized the inane cliché of what had happened… She was taken on board a mothership and probed by a giant alien. His large hands pulled her onto her feet, and walked her back into the bedroom and over to the corner, where he tugged the bottom of her skirt into the top hem and then took her hands and placed them onto the top of her head.

“Don’t move,” he instructed, and then he walked back into the bathroom.

She leaned into her corner and sniffled, listening to the sounds of Graham cleaning off his instruments, and then at the sound of him scribbling up a report, probably sending the results right over to Fie, who no doubt had been smiling earlier simply because he knew what awaited her when they got to the ship.

Eventually, she heard the door of the bathroom open. She pressed herself further into the corner as she felt Graham’s eyes on the back of her neck. “Do you understand what you need to do from now on?” he asked flatly. She didn’t answer—he only heard a sniffle. “Eleanor? What do good girls do?”

It sounded utterly pedantic, and she didn’t respond. He put his hand on her arm and slowly turned her around to face him. He put a thick finger under her chin and lifted her gaze up to him. “They obey, don’t they?”

She was angry, and it was obvious what about. She was humiliated, and hurt. It was the expression of someone who suddenly realized that they weren’t married to prince charming; they were married to someone who would punish disobedience thoroughly.

“They obey,” she finally said, her voice quiet and raspy, as if her throat was sore. Just crawl up into the fetal position, that annoying, new submissive side was saying. Apologize again. Promise to be a good girl. You want to be a good girl, anyway. You don’t want him angry with you. She nearly shook her head in response. No, no. She wasn’t too sorry. She was just sloppy with her execution, she decided. She’d never be so sloppy again. “I can’t believe you punished me so much,” she rattled quietly, her body trying to shrink out of his hold.

“It’s because I love you so damn much, woman!” he said, letting go of her body quickly and crossing the room with exasperation. “It’s not because I’m sadistic. Trust me, I’d rather just hump the living need of day out of you. That’s what I feel like doing,” he divulged. He then leaned forward threateningly, raising his eyebrows. “But I can’t. Unless you want to be stretched some more? Because as soon as ‘bad girl’ sex is available, don’t think I won’t use it.”

Her cheeks flushed again. She couldn’t imagine his cock fitting up her bottom. She couldn’t imagine anything bigger at all going up there. If you’d asked her earlier, she would have said that she didn’t think the latest plug could go up there, either. She stared at the ground, angry but not wanting to be punished further—she felt sore all over, inside and out, already.

“Our relationship isn’t normal, is it?” she grumbled. “No way would an actual Swarii woman be okay with anything you just did to me.”

“Of course she would. She’d probably have seen it coming a little better than I guess you did,” he admitted.  “Because this is pretty common… Pop suggested I just keep the plug in for a few hours, but it’s your first anal punishment, and since Jazeel did something similar, I—”

“Jack suggested that?” she interrupted, horrified. “Why is he evil? I thought he liked me!” 

“He loves you, Ellie. You can tell,” Graham assured, stepping close to her to put his hands on her arms and to rub them soothingly. “When he and my mother had the union, she was quite a handful, supposedly. He just wants to spread the wealth of his wisdom… Like he always does…” He grinned, as if he had just made an inside joke that she was going to soon understand.

Ellie felt the edges of her mouth going up—for some reason, even with her ass throbbing inside and out, the obvious fact that Graham thought of his father as his biggest rival amused her.  She didn’t want Graham to see her smile, however, so she pressed her face into his chest.

He pressed her tighter to him. “Are you giving me affection, or are you cold?” he finally asked after letting her hug him in silence for a while. “Either one’s fine. I was just hoping that since I have to dress you in something warmer, you’ll let me give that skirt you’re wearing a nice farewell.”

Ah, sexual references. She had wondered, deep down, how long Graham could go after shoving things up her vagina and anus before he restarted the sexual festivities. The strange thing was, she wanted it, too. Through the burning and soreness, she was still somehow aroused. Maybe it was his smell that kept her from being angry with him for too long—he smelt so good…

“As long as you don’t share the details with your father,” she replied simply, craning her neck to look up at him. “Or ask for his advice afterward.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” he purred, plucking up her skirt with his fingers. Little did she know, but as he hiked up her skirt the mirror on the dresser was giving him an excellent view of her naked, bright-red bottom. “I plan to explore you enough that people will be lining up to ask me advice on how one thoroughly makes love to one’s wife.”

“So, you plan to be a professional in this?” she purred, her cheeks suddenly blushing with lust instead of embarrassment.

“Well, I need to study first,” he smirked, and pulled her over to the chair he had sat on during her spanking earlier. “Come sit on my lap, you naughty girl. We have research to do.”

* * *

Ellie was exhausted.  She was mentally tired from learning the Swarii language, but she was finally getting quite fluent in it after three months. It was the middle of the afternoon but, even though she mocked the theory that she needed an afternoon nap, there she was, hitting the sofa in the officers’ lounge like it was a featherbed.

“Hey Kid,” Peyton said, surprisingly in Swarii. Her brain ached when she listened to it.

“Hmmph…” she grumbled back dreamily, crossing her arms under her chin as a makeshift pillow.

“Kiddo?” Peyton raised an eyebrow as if he thought she was trying to be funny, but wasn’t sure. Then he heard her snoring. He shook his head before he reached down and rattled her awake. “Ellie.”

“Yes?” she said, annoyed.

“The Boss is coming down here. Supposedly he’s got big news for you,” he said quietly, not trying to startle her.

She rolled over and stretched her arms wearily underneath her head. “Urgh. Big news. You know what happened the last time I got big news? A giant shot in my ass,” she grumbled. “And then I got my mouth washed out for calling it ‘ass’.  I tell you, I get no respect.”

“Yeah, well, your mechanic command test scores just came in…” Peyton acknowledged. “So, respect will be forthcoming.”

Her eyes shot wildly open. “Test? I didn’t take any engineering tests.”

“Yeah, well, didn’t Thorton ask you to change the radiator with only a mass-tedion and a pair of tweezers?” Peyton shrugged. He barely knew what a mass-tedion was, but he had heard that some of the mechanic tests were practically designed as a joke—they were nearly impossible to do, so he was guessing the tool was nearly worthless for the project; the tweezers doubly so.

“He didn’t ask. He mentioned the radiator needed to be fixed, and bet me his dessert portion for a week that I couldn’t fix it with just a mass-tedion and a pair of tweezers,” she replied, her brow crimped in confusion. “I think that’s why I’m so tired. I cannot eat cake for lunch, man. Puts me in a coma, especially after I’ve been speaking Swarii all morning—my brain hurts right now…”  She shook her head and tried to focus. “But that was a test?”

“Thorton’s idea. He really wants you as his assistant…” Peyton said cheerily, as if he figured Ellie would be flattered.

Instead, Ellie snorted. “He should be my assistant. I invented the damn Fledge system, didn’t I?” Why the Swarii had decided to call her system for intercepting Frian signals “Fledge” was completely beyond her, but in any case it had been a sensation.  However, the fact that the spy-device was created by a mostly-human had definitely been kept out of the limelight, and therefore Ellie felt that she hadn’t gotten the proper amount of pats on the back. 

“I think the fact you did it in a way that would make a boy scout drool was more impressive than the actual invention to them.”

“That’s weird, though. Isn’t it? To regard the process more than the invention?”

“Well, it was a pretty simple invention, Ellie,” Peyton shrugged. “I mean, look at the simple stuff that has changed our lives: like can openers. Did you know people used tin cans for fifty years before somebody thought of the can opener? Until then, they just went at it with a big hammer to get the damn food out. You did that—you created the can opener—faster, better, more efficient, and when the Swarii looked at what you made, they couldn’t believe they didn’t think of it themselves. And that’s what they’re impressed by: you created somethin’ they didn’t. They have a really strange way of lookin’ at things… And DOIN’ things…”

Ellie grinned, knowing what Peyton was thinking. He was amazed that he was held in such high regard. He felt out-of-place at first—he was small compared to the rest of the Swarii, but the Swarii weren’t quite built for wars like humans were. None of their combat history had involved much hand-to-hand fighting, and so it wasn’t emphasized in their training. They thought Peyton looked like Chuck Norris on steroids, just because he was a skilled marine. He saw his own faults—he was getting into his thirties, now. He was getting a little slower than he was when he was twenty five and in ‘the bush’. He was out of practice. The Swarii, however, just saw him as a killing machine.  

“You’re telling me,” she replied, unable to keep from smirking. “But you look hopeful about Graham offering me a position on his ship…” She lifted her eyebrows, obviously expecting a compliment.

Peyton shrugged, plopped his body down next to her on the sofa, picked up an eBook from the table in front of them, and clicked it to newspaper mode. “Yeah, well,” he said while he fiddled with the device and then slowly deciphered the foreign language squiggled in front of him. “I miss it when you’re not a constant pain in my ass, as it turns out. You spendin’ so much time on the mothership with the Admiral… those classes he makes you take, those engineers he makes you hang out with… I suppose it’s creating a bit of separation anxiety in Mary and me.”

“I come here in the evenings…”

“Yeah, to sleep,” Peyton grumbled. He rounded his shoulders as if she had hurt his feelings somehow.

“So sue me. Jack’s the big boss. Where he says to go, I go. When he says jump, I jump. And he decides how long I’m on the mothership—he’s the one that’s working me after hours. I don’t personally like it. They make this chicken dish in their cafeteria that is really dry… And I swear, the more I complain to the staff about it the dryer it gets. By next week, I’ll be eating jerky,” she grumped.

Peyton grinned. “I forgot you were a picky eater.”

“I’m not cool with mystery meat, including species of animals I’ve yet to come into contact with. I need to look them in the eye to trust that I can eat them,” she admitted with a chuckle. But then her expression became serious. “Graham’ll never offer me a position,” she said, obviously more to herself than to Peyton. “Jack won’t either. All this ‘military’ nonsense. Just the other day Jack told me that I should start inventing new kitchen tools.”

Peyton laughed. “For an encore, the Admiral should slap Hillary Clinton on the ass and tell her to make him a pie.”

“He’s slapped me on the ass and told me to do the same thing,” she assured. She shook her head. “It’s been a long, long three months. Full of leaps and bounds for Swarii feminism. And I’m not even a feminist. I would never trust my own car to a chick.” She smiled excitedly as she tried to make a joke that would betray her own sex the most. “Her boobs might get in her way when she’s working on the transmission.”

“Do your boobs get in the way?” Peyton laughed.

She thought about the truth in her own joke. “More often than you might think,” she finally decided. She shrugged. “Graham likes them, though, so I guess I’ll keep ‘em around.”

“Thank you.” Graham’s tall figure appeared in the door behind them, crossing his arms over his chest.

Ellie spun around in her seat so she could look at him. Yep—he was perfect. There was something about his captain’s uniform that she didn’t tire of even though he had been wearing it for three months straight. He looked so powerful, so confident, so drop-dead sexy. She was excited to get it off of him that evening. They hadn’t gotten a chance to make love for a whole week now. They had been too busy; they would come together at night too tired to do anything but fall face-down on their pillows and conk out. But he was in the mood—she could see it on him, even though his whole heart wasn’t in his grin—he wasn’t as happy as he wished to appear. Yet, she could see his eyes settle on her chest, then climbing up her long neck to her ponytailed head.

“Well, well. Thank Thorton for his never-ceasing campaign to make you an engineer, second-class, Mrs. Masterson.”

Her head cocked to the side as if she had trouble processing the information. “Second class?” she finally peeped, looking hurt.

“Second class is higher than fifth,” Peyton reminded. “Which is entry-level…” he looked at Graham with a confused expression.

Graham sighed grumpily. “Thorton reminded me that there’s no such thing as a fifth-class engineer that can fix a radiator, let alone with a pair of tweezers… I mean, that ‘test’ was a joke, Ellie! For God sakes, you weren’t supposed to actually do it! It’s just something made up to get engineers thinking about resourcefulness…”

Ellie smirked at how incredulous Graham was about this whole thing. Somehow, and completely by accident, she had put Graham very much against the wall when it came to hiring her on. He could no longer say she didn’t have the experience. He couldn’t claim that she wasn’t resourceful. He couldn’t say that she wasn’t the most promising engineer in the fleet. But he really, really didn’t want to admit it. Still, facts were facts. She was in.

“So, you’re going to let me work with you? You mean, you’ll have to deal with your wife on a twenty-four-hour basis? How will you ever manage, Captain?” she teased, forcing a straight face although she was practically shaking with excitement.

He rolled his eyes. “It’s not that. I’m looking forward to more time with you. I mean, my father’s totally pissed up to the hilt about it—he wanted to keep you here, but he can’t argue with the fact that you coined the phrase, ‘human rigging’, and that you might prove to be indispensable. Especially since Thorton wants to go into mothership command in the next year or two, and he leaves big shoes to fill.

“But,” he continued, stepping up to her and wagging his finger at her. “I’m in charge of your safety, remember, and if you think I’m a strict husband, think again. I’m a much stricter captain. I’m giving Thorton a strip of leather, and he’ll use it if you even think about doing anything even close to unsafe. And you do not want to cross me. Give ME an excuse to use you as an example, and I will,” he threatened seriously. “You will have to learn to actually follow orders; cute’s only gonna get you so far. You are going to hate me as a boss.”

She climbed over the back of the couch and snuggled into his chest. “Well, I’m definitely not going to call you ‘Boss’,” she admitted. “Not my style…”

He grumbled but then scooped his arms around her waist. “So you don’t mind having to submit to my authority both at work and at home, then?” he asked playfully, raising his eyebrows with amusement.

Her body cried, ‘Looking forward to it!’ and began to ache with need. But she comfortably shifted the thought to her mind. “Submit?” she snorted. “Humans don’t submit.”

“Really? Then what do humans do? Mutiny?” he smirked at the idea, although he was certainly focused on her answer.

“No. Humans never submit,” she kissed him playfully on the nose. “We love.”

He kissed her. “Well, learn how to love to avoid spankings, and we’ll be good to go.”

“Well, since you’ve introduced the idea… Maybe I should get in trouble more often. I haven’t had any of this ‘bad-girl’ sex you’ve spoken about,” she reminded mischievously. She had only earned short spankings and swats—lots of them, but she hadn’t done anything serious enough to require more than one more stretch session since her first day on the mothership.

“Oh, I’ll be sure to teach you all about it,” he assured, his voice a velvety rumble.

“This is gross. Where’s your decency, you guys?” Peyton asked, rolling his eyes up towards the couple now wrapped up in each other and kissing.

Ellie couldn’t help but chuckle. She looked over at Peyton and said, “Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

“Well, I was hoping you’d want to pay back the Frians by kicking butt on our next mission. Not by ear-raping me with your gory details,” admitted Peyton.

“Oh, I’ll pay back the Frians,” she assured, but then rolled her head back towards Graham and jumped playfully onto him, wrapping her legs around his waist. “But for now, I have a mission for Graham. Take us to our bedroom?” she giggled, loving how Graham was strong enough to carry her out of the lounge like she was a small doll.

“In what universe does an engineer second class order around a captain?” he asked her, smiling excitedly.

“In this universe,” she replied, her face full of joy. “In this universe, anything’s possible!”

“Anything’s possible with you around,” Graham replied with a laugh. “Can’t wait to see what tomorrow will bring.”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry about tomorrow—I’m focused on tonight.”

“And tonight’s going to last a long, long time,” he agreed as the couple disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. Yep—their next mission was going to be interesting, that Ellie knew, but having Graham in her bed every night was going to be worth the misadventures and war that ultimately lay ahead. In any case, as soon as they were alone in the bedroom together, she forgot all about it. She was loved and respected.  She also knew she’d be well-disciplined, but it didn’t matter. She was free, and she was happy, and she was in love with Graham Masterson.

The End

Blushing Publications thanks you whole-heartedly for your purchase with us!

There are plenty more stories such as the one you’ve purchased from Blushing Books!  Visit our online store to view our might selection!

http://www.blushingbooks.com

This book is intended for adults only.  Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.  Nothing in this book should be interpreted as advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

The End