Taking Tilly (10 page)

The second, Tilly discovered, was a
borderline sado-masochist—well actually sadist, she supposed. She
couldn’t see that he wanted pain himself, but he didn’t care if he
inflicted it.

Actually, she wasn’t entirely certain
that he enjoyed inflicting pain. For the most part, she thought he
was simply unaware of much beside the pursuit of his pleasure once
he got started.

Except when he’d been angry with her
and she thought then he’d deliberately hurt her to teach her a
lesson.

But she thought of him as ‘borderline’
because one of the men—the lowest, apparently, on the totem
pole—was apparently totally in to sexual torture in a big
way.

Within a week of him being given full
access, every woman there was terrified of him—except the ones that
discovered they had a hunger for being tortured.

Tilly was just relieved that he seemed
to prefer the ones who enjoyed it and that there were some who
did.

She
didn’t and she was glad he gravitated toward the ones who’d
clearly enjoyed their sessions with him.

Sadly, the rumor had arisen (the
author completely ignoring the physical differences between the
aliens and humans) and become very popular just about the time they
arrived at their destination and discovered that, not only was the
situation completely authentic and not a hoax, but their nightmare
was just beginning.

They knew something was up when they
were all herded down the corridor to the processing room. Most of
them were terrified to the point of slobbering idiots by the time
they realized where they were going and they didn’t improve a lot
when the nano units were removed and they were placed in chains and
manacles.

And nothing else.

They were herded from the processing
room and into the room where they’d first been held and left alone
to stare out of the portholes toward the planet they were
approaching.

Not the most optimistic among them—or
the most inclined toward self-deception—could convince themselves
that it wasn’t real or even that they were being returned to
Earth.

The planet below them only bore a
resemblance to Earth in the fact that it was a globe. It at least
appeared to be larger than Earth, but Tilly knew there was really
no way to tell that. There was water—but the oceans seemed to be
confined to the pole areas with the exception of a few fairly large
lakes.

The sun was red and the planet had a
trio of tiny moons.

This, Tilly realized, feeling her
belly tighten painfully, wasn’t even another pickup spot. This was
where the slave market was located.

The ship landed in a nearly
featureless desert area. The ground, a reddish/orange, rolled
toward some fair sized hills in the distance, and there was
scraggly, sporadic vegetation, but it certainly didn’t seem lovely
or inviting.

There was a village, she supposed, not
far from where they landed but it looked like something from old
west mining-type towns on Earth. The buildings were all small and
looked more shanty-like than futuristic.

They didn’t look particularly alien
for that matter, but then she supposed a box was a box and
structures would have to follow that form to stand–unless of course
they decided to build domes or pyramids.

There were other spaceships, she
saw—many different designs, some just landing, some already
emptying of the people that had brought them.

She saw the gang plank of their ship
lowered and then the commander and one of his men strode down it
and disappeared in the direction of the village.

Expecting momentarily to be ordered
out themselves, everyone merely remained by the windows, staring
out—no doubt thinking as Tilly was that there was nowhere to go
even if they escaped.

She supposed that might be why they’d
chosen such a place for the slave auction.

Tired of standing after a while, Tilly
moved to the edge of the room and sat down, propping her back
against the wall.

The metal paneling was shockingly cold
to her bare skin, which made sitting there less than pleasant, but
she supposed she would have to get used to discomfort given the
life she had lying before her.

She was sorry she didn’t have the
nano-suit, though. She’d hated the damned thing from the start—even
before she’d realized it was in control of her—but she’d worn it so
long she’d grown accustomed to the uncomfortable pinch. And, even
though she was only covered when they allowed it, she hadn’t been
totally naked like she was now.

She didn’t have long to be
uncomfortable.

The second arrived to collect them.
She’d wondered why it was one of the others that had gone with the
commander when the second was highest ranking next to the
commander.

He summoned her.

She’d already surged to her feet and
moved toward him before it occurred to her that she was no longer
wearing the nano-suit and could respond, or not, according to her
own will.

She was still at their mercy, however,
and the second had taught her about defying him in any way. He
caught her chain and led her out of the room and down the corridor
to her own room. Once there, he told her to assume the
position.

She complied.

He studied her for a moment and told
her to turn and hook her heels on the edge of the bunk.

Tilly swallowed with an effort,
knowing what that meant—instantly recalling the last time he’d
begun with oral sex.

She didn’t hesitate, however. She
instantly obeyed, not only because she’d been conditioned to, but
because she was afraid any hesitation would inspire him to do his
worst.

And his worst was pretty
bad.

And the commander and the other men
were gone. She’d seen the one leave with the commander and the
others follow them down the gangplank—to stand guard, she
supposed.

He dropped to his knees and ordered
her to use her fingers to pull the outer lips of her sex out of his
way since she wasn’t wearing the nano-suit anymore.

She complied, realizing only as he
covered her clit with his mouth without preamble that there was an
unexpected side effect to her performing that act herself. She felt
as if by doing so she was offering her flesh to him.

It seemed to make the exquisite
torment all the more intense. Heat poured into her belly from the
hungry pull of his mouth on her clit, churned like a fiery
cauldron. Within moments she was gasping hoarsely for breath,
trembling on the verge of coming. He seemed to sense it in her
twitching movements from trying to remain still for him when she no
longer had the suit to make her be still. He sucked her clit
harder, sending her spiraling into ecstasy. She held still as long
as she could while the convulsions of ecstasy rolled over and
through her, but she reached a point where she felt like she
couldn’t bear anymore.

He was ready for her. The moment she
tried to evade the torture of his mouth, he coiled his arms around
her hips and kept right on pulling at the ultra sensitive nub until
she was weeping from the unrelenting intensity of it.

Finally, he let her go and she
collapsed weakly onto the bunk.

“
It will be better for all
to be rid of you. We are few—and we have little. We cannot afford
to squabble over something as insignificant as an alien slave woman
when all had agreed that we would share whatever fortune brought
our way.”

Tilly was the next thing to comatose
from the moment he finally let go of her clit and allowed her to
come down. She barely heard him over her gasping breaths and the
blood thundering in her ears, but she was in no state to comprehend
anyway—even if he’d spoken English rather than his own
language.

“
Up. Is time.”

Tilly was too weak, she discovered, to
get on her feet without the aid of a nano-suit. He grabbed her arm
and hauled her up. She struggled to put one foot in front of the
other as he half led half carried her back to the room where the
others waited, but it felt as if her legs were made of
jelly.

She didn’t get the chance to go back
and sprawl on the floor to recover. When he opened the door, he
ordered all of them out. They were marched down the corridor and
then down the gangplank.

The first ‘taste’ of the alien world
came as they left the ship. Even the air, Tilly thought dully,
smelled alien.

Despite the fact that the spot where
they’d landed appeared to be a desert, it was also cool and
windy.

But then she was still heated from the
horrendous climax she’d just experienced. Maybe, she thought
vaguely, she wouldn’t feel as if she was freezing to death if not
for that.

Or maybe it was just the fact that she
wasn’t used to parading around outside wearing nothing but
chains.

The ground was mostly sand or at least
sand-like, but there were tiny pebbles that hurt her feet as she
was led across the ground to the village. Walking didn’t get a lot
easier once there, however. The ground was hard packed but still
littered with tiny torture devices that dug into the soft soles of
her feet.

There was a platform near the center
of the village and several pens or cages beside it.

When they arrived, women were already
being led onto the wooden deck and displayed and there was a fair
crowd gathered—primarily men, or males. Tilly thought there seemed
to be at least a half a dozen different humanoid species—but they
looked humanoid, at least.

Of course that was no guarantee that
whatever they had to reproduce with was going to be especially
compatible to her own reproductive organs.

By the time the second dragged her
from the cage and led her up the steps to the platform, the crowd
had actually doubled or tripled.

The auction master took her by one arm
and led her to the front and center of the platform, then began to
speak to the crowd in some language she didn’t
understand.

Well, she didn’t suppose she needed
to. She’d known almost from the very beginning that this was to be
her fate.

She’d dreaded it even before she’d
realized that she would be paraded across the auction block stark
naked.

Oddly enough, though, she felt
distanced from the proceedings as the auctioneer forced her to walk
back and forth on the platform, close to the edge so that the males
below them could get a good look at her, stopping her from time to
time to turn her first one way and then another to show her
‘assets’, even to making her bend over and touch her toes so that
he could spread her cleft for them to get a good look at her
genitals.

She felt oddly numb.

Until she happened to catch a glimpse
of a woman near the middle of the crowd that was as human as she
was and completely recognizable despite the garments and makeup she
was wearing.

Emily was standing next to a humanoid
alien that looked more like a cat than anything else Tilly could
think of—and at that moment, he looked straight at her and lifted
his hand to place a bid.

She’d found Emily! She couldn’t
believe her good fortune for many moments.

And then it hit her.

She wasn’t going anywhere except where
her buyer took her … and neither was Emily.

Chapter Twelve

It was too late to change anything by
the time Torin reached the auction—the bidding had already
begun—but then he hadn’t realized until he saw the auctioneer
parading Tilly back and forth that he could not bear to part with
her.

He
had
acknowledged, at least to
himself, that he was far more partial to her than he should have
been. That was why he had left it to his second in command, Kane,
to handle the sale of the slaves. He knew he had begun to feel far
more possessive of her than he should have—than he could afford to
allow himself to feel.

In point of fact, he had been tempted,
more than once, to break Kane in half for touching her—Kane more
than the others because of the way she responded to Kane’s touch.
Not that he had happily shared her with the other members of his
squad.

Which was unacceptable.

There was barely a handful of his
people left since the war and the destruction of their world. The
few of them that were left had scattered across the universe in an
effort to survive.

They all knew that if they did not
cooperate with one another, work together instead of focusing on
themselves, their species was going to die out.

Not that they would not
anyway.

They were merely delaying the
inevitable and they all knew it.

Because there had not been more than a
small handful of their women aboard the ships in their fleet and
everyone else had perished.

Those women were the only hope for
their species—were cherished and petted and pampered as necessary
to make certain their species at least had a glimmer of a
future.

But most of them had no woman and no
hope of one—not a woman of their own kind—which meant they also had
no hope of off-spring.