Taken and Mated Read online

Page 9


  She opened her mouth, and let the phallus slide into her throat, forgetting—temporarily, she told herself—her spirit of resistance, giving in, attempting to please the commander, and to be good.

  To get the relief she craved, and to avoid another spanking, or worse.

  That was the only reason she was submitting to any of this.

  “Good girl,” the commander said, after she had swallowed the entire phallus and obeyed his commands. As the object slid into her mouth, she had to stretch her jaw wide, and yet another part of her body rejected and, at the same time, welcomed the ache of accommodating a fullness she was unaccustomed to. The commander was encouraging, sliding the phallus from her throat when she could almost bear no more, allowing her to breathe, and then slowly entering her mouth even deeper with the next insertion.

  She finally managed to get the entire phallus in her throat. The urge to gag had left her, and while she would have admitted it to no one, the sensation of fitting the rubbery object down her throat made her pussy drip. She could not help wondering what it would be like to have a live, twitching organ in her mouth, pleasing its owner with her submission and acceptance; trading her obedience and humiliation for the perverse pleasure she was experiencing.

  The commander instructed her on the next difficult task: massaging it with her throat. He urged her to attempt to swallow. When she did so, her throat closed around the phallus, and her eyes watered, but the sensation aroused her. He told her to lick the length of it and she obeyed, throwing herself into the task with genuine zeal.

  She was so humiliated that her pussy was throbbing, that the idea of stimulating a real male this way—this submissive, whorish way—was exhilarating to her. She told herself it was all of the pent-up arousal that she had never been relieved from, but deep inside her mind somewhere she was curiously exploring the idea of a real male, a real male member, hot and thick inside her mouth, her eyes making contact with him in this, the most submissive of positions.

  “I am pleased with your training,” the commander told her, waving away the training ‘materials’ and standing in front of her. “You understand, don’t you, Atrix 12, that my own career rests upon the quality of your training? So, it is very important to me that you are well-trained.”

  I bet, Lana thought, and her desires to escape flared inside of her again.

  “As I told you,” the commander explained, taking her arm and assisting her to her feet, “good behavior will be rewarded.”

  The table was reappearing from a yawning of the ship’s strange material in the floor. Lana’s heart sank as the commander told her coolly, “Turn around again and spread your legs.”

  You have no choice but to obey, she thought. Another spanking? Her bottom was still burning. She thought of resistance but decided against it as the sting of his discipline resurfaced on her skin with a sharp bite, as though he had actually spanked her again. She turned and placed her hands on the table, bending over for him.

  Hating that an increasingly large part of her was enjoying this treatment. She was becoming a slave, enjoying her captivity, enjoying submitting to... the Realm.

  Anger welled inside of her, just as the commander’s hand rubbed her burning skin, igniting the soreness anew. She braced for a spanking, but the next sensation was on her clitoris.

  Oh, Viph—she thought. Not more torment to endure.

  She resisted as long as she could. The commander had placed another pleasure-inducing vibrating machine against her clit, and the pleasure was so intense she wanted desperately to squirm away from it. She was rising up, up, to scary heights of pleasure. She neither wanted release nor wanted for him to stop her torment... her mouth fell open and her eyes watered as she clawed helplessly at the table, willing herself to endure it. Her legs began to shake uncontrollably, and her abdomen spasmed.

  As she came, harder than she had never before experienced, she yelled and her feet gave way. The commander laced gentle pressure on her jeweled plug, keeping it inside of her as her whole body squeezed and spasmed in much-needed, overly intense pleasure that sent her sliding nearly to the floor.

  The commander patted her on the bottom, but she barely felt it over the waves of relief that shook her still. “Good girl. Now come along.”

  Chapter Eight

  Lana fell into a sleep, a mixture of contentment taking over her body and troubled thoughts clouding her mind. Her mind had been a useless pool of mush after she had been returned to her room, still shaking and racked by tremors of pleasure from her ‘reward.’

  But now her thoughts were clearing.

  She had very little time remaining in the training program, if Commander Golan was to be believed, which meant that if she was still resolved to escape before she was exchanged with the Galleons, she had only a few system days to make her getaway.

  She was disappointed in herself and unable to come up with a rational explanation for why she had not done more to secure her escape. Each day that she spent in training, learning to be submissive, her body reacted to her training with desire, and the words of Commander Golan and Anasi began to infiltrate her thoughts and feel less like something she wanted to reject, and more like something she could listen to and believe in. There were dark moments, when she took the ever-enlarging anal plugs inside her body and they rubbed against her flesh, making her wet, when she could hear and feel herself thinking, maybe she should just give in. Maybe this was really what she wanted.

  “You will have a mate who will protect you and treat you like a queen, and all you must do to have this is to give in to the desires you so clearly have. Your body is willing, and once you recognize that your nature, as an Atrix, is to be submissive and to mate with the finest male specimens of the humanoid races, you will be as happy as you have ever been,” Anasi would tell her softly, as he prepared her for training.

  Anasi himself, she had realized after a time, was a eunuch, which was why he was entrusted to her care and appeared to be both man and boy. He was fully brainwashed, accepting of his fate, and even seemed to enjoy it.

  Moments of her own weakening will became longer and longer, dark hours during training when she would give herself over to submission, and allow herself to dream of a real alien man, large and imposing, vital and strong, claiming her as his own.

  It was only when she was alone, in her room, away from those influences, that she would try to recoup her strength and her will. She reminded herself that they were brainwashing her, that she was playing a game to get them to relax on their security, and that what she wanted, more than anything, was to escape.

  But the desire to escape felt like it was eroding. She had to fight to keep it at the forefront of her mind.

  She twisted and turned at night, when she awoke, which happened almost every night. She lay in the dim light, looking out at the endless stars, and tried to think of her plans, of the plan of the ship, of the doors and the airlocks, of the places she believed held escape pods.

  But the plans were tiring, and also felt impossible to implement. She didn’t know where they were in the galaxy, let alone in relation to a planet. She didn’t even know if she could pilot an escape pod, even supposing she could contrive to reach one. And in her quest to feign submission so that she could surreptitiously look for clues to weaknesses in security, or an escape route, her body betrayed her again and again, taking her mind off her plans and igniting her with desires she did not want to admit to having: to please her mate, to be filled again and again with the pulsing, hot member of a virile male, to lie submissively for him, submitting her body to his every desire...

  Lana sat up in her bed and pushed her hair from her face. She was damp with sweat, and it did not come from fear. She was pulsing between her legs, a sweet agony that only increased when she thought of how she could not relieve it.

  She lay back down, aware that she was being monitored at all times. There seemed to be no escape for her. She had no choice. The commander had repeated this sentence so often that s
he could hear him in her head: you have no choice, you have no choice...

  She closed her eyes and tried to summon all of her willpower to focus on what she had learned of the ship, but her thoughts inevitably returned to the promises of a Galleon mate, of being disciplined by him, of submitting to his needs in exchange for his protection... maybe it wasn’t so bad...

  She was just beginning to drift off, when she heard the first of many terrible noises.

  A metal clang, accompanied by an abrupt shift of everything in the room to the side of her quarters with the door to the bathroom. Her body slid, not very rapidly, to the side of her bed, and it felt almost as if the centrifugal gravity had suddenly started to come from her left side, and not from the floor.

  She was pressed to the side by the force, which started to feel like she was in a vehicle moving rapidly in the opposite direction. Her room was bare, but a blanket from her bed had slipped down to the floor and was now being gently tugged to the left, where it seemed to behave like an animal and curl up against the wall.

  Another loud crash, and high-pitched sounds like something moving at high speed and cutting through air sounded around her. The light around her window turned red and began to pulse, and above her—on what was the ceiling, once—a bright, flashing light began to wink.

  Then all light disappeared, except for the starlight outside her window. It was black inside her room, terrifyingly so, and she could see nothing.

  The pressure on her side had eased, and staring at the only light she could see she felt suddenly, instantly disoriented. The stars seemed to be moving, and at the same time her position next to the window appeared to be changing, but it was hard to tell which was which.

  Her mind was just getting to the idea that she was floating, and that the gravity was gone, when the stars whipped across the window and began to roll enough to make her stomach feel queasy. Just as she got her head around what that could mean, she was slammed against the wall again, this time harder.

  And then, as the stars began to spin faster and faster, the pull to the side became stronger and stronger. Outside her door, she heard banging and yelling, even though it was nearly soundproof.

  She had a terrifying thought: they were caught in the orbit of an enormous planet. She’d heard of these accidents before. Ships in unexplored regions of the system, underestimating the mass of an unknown planet, were pulled into orbit and could not escape the pull, plunging into what was usually a very dense, molten core of metal.

  She closed her eyes, certain that she was about to die. The pressure increased, and she felt that she was going to be crushed against the wall. The slamming and crashing outside her door continued, but the yelling died away slowly.

  She held her breath, though she couldn’t say why, as if it would stop her from dying or seeing her death. Perhaps that was why she was still conscious when the forces pressing her to the wall began to abate, and she was only drifting off, out of consciousness, when the gravity shifted abruptly back to the floor, where it should have been.

  The shift startled her into taking a breath, and her vision promptly narrowed, closed in by blackness and colorful stars. She decided she was going to die but didn’t have time to have a feeling about it one way or the other. And then everything was black.

  * * *

  But she wasn’t dead.

  Her eyelids felt heavy, and she was as sleepy as she had felt in a long time, but it was cold, and her shoulder felt uncomfortable, so she was forced to muster the strength to open her eyes.

  The red light had returned, as well as the bright flash. Sounds came to her as though through water at first: a high-pitched alarm, the pounding of footsteps. Smells reached her next: she couldn’t recognize them, but they were scorched and portended bad things.

  Emergency.

  The voice accompanying the alarms was not speaking Anglais, but it didn’t have to: humanoids might be different in some respects all over the galaxy, but they had somehow all evolved to express emergencies in the same tone of voice.

  Emergency.

  Lana was jolted awake by a rush of adrenaline. She sat up, even though her body was sore and her head felt as though it had been stuffed with foam. Stop and think, she told herself.

  She quickly replayed the events that had taken place just before she had blacked out. The shifts in gravity, the loss of power... maybe they were having a malfunction.

  Her heart began to beat rapidly, and a cool thrill traveled through her chest. This was it. This was her chance. Some kind of terrible malfunction had occurred, and she would be able to take advantage of the chaos to escape.

  Shivering, she got to her feet. She was momentarily surprised that she felt lighter when she rose, and she quickly ascertained that, whatever was happening, the centrifugal gravity had been affected. Maybe that was the malfunction, and it would be fixed momentarily.

  She considered sitting back down, resigning herself to the inevitable.

  But no, she had to try.

  This was the only chance she was ever going to get.

  She walked to the door, trying to adjust her gait to the changed pull of gravity, which let her bound like a gazelle rather than walking. She placed a hand against the exit key, fully expecting nothing to happen except for perhaps an alarm to reach the commander. She certainly wasn’t expecting the door to open immediately, or the corridor to be filled with a red light.

  She leaned her head out cautiously.

  A Pratean guard was stumbling along the corridor, hands against the wall as though he had been blinded. He turned toward her door, his big, animal eyes blinking and staring in her direction, at a slightly off angle. It was as though he were staring into darkness... until the flashing light winked, and his eyes jerked in her direction. A growl escaped him, and he lunged toward her, hands in front of him, eyes evidently unseeing.

  Lana was overcome with fear for a moment, and her body froze. But her mind moved like lightning, piecing together the tidbits she had absorbed over the years listening to the myths and legends that the travelers and traders had brought to her homeland: Prateans could not see the same spectrum of light that humans could. The Pratean was fumbling through his uniform, waving his hands blindly in front of him, growling.

  The flash of light was coming soon, Lana thought. She was surprised that she had a sense of it, when it would flash. Surprised that she moved stealthily toward the guard, pressing herself against the corridor opposite, in time for him to blindly pass by her, hands flinging in all directions. He missed her by mere inches. And continued forward, grunting angrily when the flash illuminated what must have been total darkness for him, and he could not see Lana.

  Lana stepped away, her eyes on him, unable to believe that he couldn’t see her.

  He was sniffing the air, turning in her direction.

  He would be able to smell her, she knew that.

  Lana froze for a millisecond, unsure of what to do.

  And then, she turned and ran, not caring about the sound she was making. The Pratean was coming after her, and there was another one, also fumbling about in the dark, speaking his gibberish language into his comms device. But he couldn’t see her.

  And one more thing, a brilliant thing she was just realizing she had noticed as the fragments of the events unfolding were put together in her mind: the flash was coming only from her room.

  Here, in the corridor, the Prateans were blind as bats, and there was only the briefest flash from a small door to shed any light on their predicament.

  She dropped to the floor and froze just before the flash shed a weak, rapid light into the corridor. The beast in front of her looked around wildly, his eyes never dropping to where Lana was crouched. He growled again, bellowed into his comms, and guided himself along the corridor with one hand. Behind her, the first guard was growling and shuffling in their direction.

  One thing was clear: they did not know where she was.

  Lana afforded herself a smile and felt the rush of reso
lve flooding her veins. She crouched on one knee, foot tucked beneath her ankle to push her up quickly, her muscles coiled for quick and soundless motion.

  She had, after all, been born a refugee, and lived her life as a fugitive. If there was one thing Katalana Scott could do, it was move with stealth and remain undetected. Especially when the odds were so wildly stacked in her favor.

  She moved quickly and pressed herself against the wall, then scampered like a ballerina past the guard, turning left at the corridor and scanning the doors as she passed. Behind her, she could hear them grumbling, but she had long ago left the flashing light behind, and they would not find her unless they found some other source of light, one that they could see.

  She did not know how to read the languages on the doors and signs—she barely read Anglais—but she knew enough about ships and escaping them to ferret out where the escape pod was. She was running now, becoming used to the strange gravitational pull that let her leap just slightly longer distances and land quietly. A guard was struggling to his feet at the end of the corridor—never mind him.

  This was it, this was her chance, she was going to escape.

  It was the only thing on her mind as she skipped through the crimson corridors, blissfully invisible to the guards, seeing no one else. Headed to an escape pod. No plans beyond that. It didn’t matter; this was her chance, and this ship had a vibe of impending doom anyway.

  It was getting colder, which took her some time to notice. Her breath was visible in front of her as she padded down another corridor, her heartrate growing steady, her old self returning.

  She slowed, feeling her fingers aching. Her thoughts started to feel muddled. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  Oh, Earth, she thought, as she stopped to read a sign with difficulty, and peer into the small porthole to confirm that it was, indeed, an escape pod. Her hands were shaking so badly as she lifted a hand to the biometric screen that she had to hold one with the other to get it onto the screen.