“You were the one who screamed. You dress like a warrior but fight like a girl. I fight warriors. Not girls.” He tossed the knife aside. “I am your master now. Do not attack me again.”
“Fuck you!” I snarled.
I raked my nails over his face, leaving a trail of blood down one cheek. His eyes narrowed.
“I do not fight girls. But I punish females who disobey me.”
He got off me and I tensed, getting ready to make a run for it. But before I could move, he’d flipped me onto my stomach and yanked my pants down to my knees.
Dear gods. This alien bastard was about to rape me.
That’s when I screamed. “Jaden! Zeke! Help!”
Crack!
The sound of a hard palm connecting with soft flesh came a millisecond before the lick of fire seared my backside.
“Silence!”
He whacked me again, so hard the breath whooshed out of me. “They are not coming. They are dead.”
“Murderer!” I screamed the word at the top of my lungs.
His hand came down even harder than before, this time in a flurry of harsh swats.
Though I’d taken my share of blows in sparring matches, I’d never been spanked before. The searing pain stunned me. Spanking was an archaic form of dominance, practiced by primitive beings, primarily males, who lacked the capacity to use reason to control the behavior of their mates or their young. It had been outlawed on our world eons earlier.
And now I understood why. Not only did it hurt like hell, it was humiliating. Being held down and having my ass bared, then spanked like a naughty child, destroyed my dignity. Made me feel helpless and weak.
But it also awakened something deep inside me, a dark need I’d never felt before. Each stroke sent a fresh wave of heat through my backside and another kind of heat straight to my core.
I blamed my response on my amygdala. A vestigial remnant of the brain dating back to our earliest ancestors, it was known to trigger instinctive responses that originally evolved to ensure the survival of our species.
I told myself it was my amygdala that stirred the primeval urge to submit to this bigger, stronger male. One whose firm domination demonstrated he could just as easily use that strength to protect me and my offspring from nameless danger. Though I hated what he was doing, when his hand came down again, I felt my pussy gush.
The minute I became conscious of the thought, I banished it. How could I even think of such a thing when my dearest friend lay dead? At his hand. “Damn you to the seventh moon of Cyres!” I shrieked.
“I told you to be silent!”
He started spanking me again, his rough palm striking the same tender spots over and over. I concentrated on the burning pain, refusing to acknowledge the darker heat pouring through me. “Why? You’re going to murder me like you murdered Andreu. So get it over with. Kill me. Kill me now!”
He flipped me onto my back, clapped a hand over my mouth. Brought his face within inches of mine. “I do not kill females. There is no need. You are weak and easy to subdue. And I do not kill in cold blood, only to defend myself.”
He was a lying bastard.
I glared at him and started flailing. Kicking wildly, pummeling him with my fists. If I was about to die, I wouldn’t make it easy on him. I’d go down fighting till the end.
I caught him square in the nose, hard enough to make him wince. He let loose with a string of harsh sounds I didn’t recognize, probably primitive cuss words, and ripped off my shirt. Taking it in his teeth, he tore off a corner and crammed it into my mouth. Then he reduced the rest of it into strips and bound my hands together before running another piece over my mouth and tying it behind my head to keep the makeshift gag in place. Only then did he sit back on his haunches to stanch the blood streaming from his nose with the last remnant of my shirt.
We were both splattered with it. He daubed at a few spots on my face, then gave up.
“I need to see to the bodies,” he muttered.
Lifting me like a sack of grain, he draped me face down over his shoulder and made his way into the cave. He glanced around, then dumped me unceremoniously against one wall on my backside.
He sized up the cache of stripped-down weapons across the room. “No wonder you fight like a girl,” he remarked. “You rely on metal sticks to defeat your enemies.”
Unable to speak, I settled for shaking my head angrily and glaring at him, then realized my current situation proved his point. I’d thought I was proficient in hand to hand combat, but here I sat trussed up like a game bird ready for the oven. Nearly naked, pants down around my knees, bare ass hot and stinging. All because for once I hadn’t had my photon blazer on my hip. It was humbling to face the fact that our modern technology was useless if we came up against a savage’s brute strength while unarmed.