But the little Elite didn’t even hesitate.
“Ten thousand apiece,” she declared, glaring at the other Mistress. Truly, she was magnificent in her fury, Gaze couldn’t help thinking. Her dark eyes were blazing and her full breasts were heaving—she looked like an avenging angel! He thought he’d never seen a more beautiful female in his life
“Twenty thousand apiece,” the other woman countered.
“Forty thousand!” the lovely Elite declared.
And so it went. They kept going until they got to the price of five hundred thousand credits apiece for himself and Bound, which Gaze could hardly believe. If the Elite was trying to rescue them, they were going to have a damn hard time paying her back, he thought uneasily. He and Bound had their own small shipping business but they never saw the kind of credit these two women were throwing around like it was nothing.
But once they reached that ridiculous, astronomical price, the skinny Mistress in the red strap dress suddenly seemed satisfied.
“Fine,” she said, her lips curving into a cruel smile. “You can have them. Five hundred thousand apiece is too rich for my blood. And speaking of blood, my dear Mistress Alexa, you might like to check out the teeth of the fine specimens you just purchased for such an outrageous price. Or should I say fangs?”
“What are you talking about?” the Elite, whose name was apparently Mistress Alexa, scoffed. “You’re just trying to scare me away from them. Well, it won’t work—you aren’t getting these two for your Death Mines!”
“I already said, you can have them.” The other Mistress smirked at her. “Or maybe they’ll have you—for lunch!” she added triumphantly. “Oh, and please don’t bother calling your private ambulance to treat the poor, dear boys—I don’t think they’ll answer.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Mistress Alexa demanded.
She pulled out a personal communicator and punched a few buttons. She put the device to her ear and waited for what seemed like a long time…but no one appeared to answer. With a very unladylike curse, she pulled the device away from her ear and glared at the other female.
“What did you do?”
The other female smiled cruelly.
“I spoke to your crew earlier and as it turns out, they were more than happy to come work for me instead, when I offered to pay them double wages.” She made a sad face. “So I guess now you have no way to transport your new acquisitions to your treatment facility and you’ll have to handle them all on your own. What a shame.”
“You…you nasty bitch!” Alexa exclaimed. “How dare you?”
“How dare you interfere in the running of my mines?” the other women snapped back. “I’ve been buying Down Market slaves for years to work for me—it keeps profits high and expenses low. And now you come here from Zetta Prime, acting all high and mighty, as though it matters what happens to a few stupid males, trying to disrupt my profit margin!”
“Your profit margin is built on death,” the little Elite spat. “And as long as I have breath in my body, I’ll fight you!”
It seemed to Gaze that the other Mistress was about to shout something nasty but then she took a deep breath and seemed to make an effort to calm herself.
“Fine,” she said shortly. “You win today. Enjoy your victory…while it lasts.”
Then she glided away, her head held high, and a secret smile twitching the corner of her cruel, red lips.
SEVEN
Lexi wasn’t quite sure what to do now. Yes, she’d won, but her personal private ambulance—the one she called every time she bought new slaves—was now without a crew. She depended on them to give temporary medical treatment to those slaves who needed it and transport them to the facility on Zetta Prime’s moon. Without them, she didn’t know what to do with the huge males she’d just bought.
To start with, how was she going to get them treatment? The dark one, especially, looked like he needed it. And after that, how was she going to get the two of them to Zetta Prime’s moon? Also, what was all that nonsense Mistress Crueltongue had been spouting about the two of them having her blood for lunch or whatever it was she’d been saying? What was that all about?
She took a closer look at the two of them, studying them to see what exactly she had bought.
The first thing she noticed was that the two of them were absolutely enormous. It was a bit hard to tell how tall they would be standing up, since the blond one was sitting and the dark one was lying on the ground with his head on the other man’s lap, but Lexi guessed that both of them would tower over her. And it wasn’t just their height that gave her pause—both of them were extremely muscular.