“Reaallly?”
For a brief second, everything she knew about reality was shunted out of her head and she was left with nothing but a primitive fear of statues that could talk and perhaps even take their vengeance.
She screamed at the top of her lungs and threw the entire paint can at…Darma? Again? What the fuck was with this guy? He stepped out from behind the statue just in time to be gooped in a good pint of paint.
“What the FUCK!”
“Yeah. That’s a good question,” he said, shaking his wing which was now covered with yellow paint, dripping and spraying with the twitching of his feathers. "What the fuck are you doing? You know people notice when you break shit, steal shit, and deface shit, don't you?”
He was starting to use her own parlance. It was funny watching an alien man talk like he was straight out of NYC. It was also funny seeing him covered in paint. Much better than taking her feelings out on a statue with no sentience whatsoever. She should have been throwing things at Darma all along.
“People? Or the king?”
“Yes. Dominax knows you're fucking his favorite city up,” Darma cursed, once again showing a remarkable grasp of human cursing. “I cannot keep saving you.”
“Why are you helping me at all?”
“Listen, anyone fucking with Dominax is alright by me, but I think…”
“What?”
“I think you’re trying to get his attention. I think you’re in love with him. And I think you should turn yourself in before you get arrested, because you’re really not going to like what happens if you get caught.”
She ignored all the parts about the consequences of being caught, and focused on the words which seared into her soul the moment she heard them.
“Uhm. In love!? With the guy who brought me to a lava planet and whipped me…”
“Yeah. He made you love it.”
“Fuck off, Darma.”
“Do you know why Dominax is king?”
“Because he’s the biggest asshole out of all you assholes?”
“Because he sees what others need and he finds a way to give it to them. Our kingdom is perpetually on fire, but it’s peaceful because of him.”
She screwed her face up, not wanting to think about Dominax. The truth was, there was a void inside her where the king had been – and not just sexually. She missed being… ugh, she could barely even bring herself to think the words.
Taken care of.
There they were. Those three little words hanging around out of context and yet still somehow fucking with her head.
She kept getting flashes of being curled up in the king’s arms, safe and catered to, even though she had never really submitted to his will. That would have pissed a lot of guys off, she guessed. But Dominax wasn’t some guy. He was the winged king of this whole entire place and he’d chosen her.
Part of her wanted to go crawling back, but the NYC pride part of her would never let her do that. Not ever.
“Fuck this shit. I’m going home.”
“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said this whole time.”
“Not the palace,” she clarified. “The place I’m staying.”
“You’re just drawing out the inevitable,” he called out as she ran off into the darkness, leaving her rebellious art behind.
13 Sick
“Thirteen… fourteen… fifteen…”
She was still shy of the number of money credits needed to get a ticket off planet, no matter how many times she counted her stolen savings. The cost of living in the Golden City was way too fucking high. She’d thought New York was bad, but that was nothing on this place.
As far as she could tell, it wasn’t actually possible to get a ticket back to Earth itself. The travel agent she’d talked to said the best they could do was a human colony. That sounded like a promising start.
Every now and then, she would think about Dominax. It wasn’t that she missed him, necessarily. But she did miss a certain part of his anatomy. That cock was… mmm. She’d touched herself more than once remembering being in his bed, or in his arms in the middle of the fucking sky. He had given her pleasure like no man ever had — but he’d also been a disciplinary monster who brooked no dissent.
To make matters worse, the search was intensifying. She no longer felt safe going out other than during the depths of night, where people couldn’t see her eyes, which were a dead giveaway. Avoiding eye-contact only worked sometimes.
To make matters even worse, she was sick. She didn’t know what was going on, but every part of her body was achy and she was overwhelmed with nausea on a far too frequent basis.
Katie must have missed the knock at the door in the violent midst of the full expression of that nausea. One moment she was disgorging the contents of her stomach, the next she was hosting an unexpected guest.