“Phyrax!”
When he still got no response, he tapped his comm device on his wrist and held the camera under his chin. “Phyrax! The door to the cargo bay is shut and my access code isn’t working. Can you open the door?”
“No.”
Bralix blinked and stared down at the comm. “What do you mean ‘no’? Open the door.”
“No. I suggest you brace yourself; I’m putting us in low orbit around this planet while you come to your senses.”
Bralix blinked, his mouth gaping in shock. “Have you completely lost your mind?”
“No, but I’m more than happy to help you find yours.”
There was a small pause, and Bralix could hear murmuring in the background before Emery’s voice came over the comm. “Bralix, put Samulin on.”
“Emery—” Bralix snapped.
“Samulin, honey, go find something you can hold on to and brace yourself until we reach orbit. Everything is going to be alright, okay? Bralix might be an asshole, but he won’t hurt you. If he does, I’ll castrate him, and Phyrax will launch him out of a torpedo tube.”
“What is a torpedo tube?” Phyrax asked in the background before the very faint hiss that told him his comm was active, went silent. Bralix seconded his confusion, but Samulin snorted a delicate laugh, covering her mouth with her hand from under the bed covering.
Bralix sighed and shook his head, then regarded his new pet. At least she didn’t seem terrified of him anymore, but she still didn’t want to come too near. He held out his hand to her again, palm up. “Come here.”
She sighed, but she came to him and he led her over to a bank of crates and pushed down on her shoulder to make her sit on the floor.
He slid down to the floor beside her; unlike the high-velocity escape when they’d fled Gavora, this take-off shouldn’t be too taxing, but it was still not a good idea to be standing when the ship started moving.
She didn’t pull away from him, which he counted as a win. The engines started, the deep hum spreading through the bones of this vessel, and as the ship shuddered, she gasped and whimpered, squeezing her eyes shut and hiding her face against her drawn up knees.
“Hey,” he said softly, feeling urge to comfort her. “Come here.” He gathered her onto his lap and held her, and she buried her face in his shoulder instead. “It’s going to be okay, hey?”
He held her like that long after they’d reached orbit and he’d felt the engines power down. Her trembling had stopped, and the tension her left her body, and when he ducked his head down to look at her, he saw that she was asleep.
Heshouldtransfer her to her pallet on the floor.
He opted to hold her instead.
The man wasevil.
Samulin had woken feeling warm and cozy. She’d still been wrapped in her duvet from her bed on earth, and she hated to admit that the muscled arms around her was the best part. But she didn’t want this to end, so she didn’t move, not wanting to draw attention to her wakefulness.
She’d thought the green pigmentation on his skin had been her imagination before when he was in her apartment—a trick of the light. It didn’t look like a tattoo; this looked deeper, somehow, as if the skin itself was almost translucent, and the green was a three-dimensional thing living in the thickness of his skin.
But just when she thought being in his company was perhaps not so bad, he started trying to boss her around, and shehatedbeing told what to do. Previous Doms had known that obedience was just within a scene; outside of a scene they could forget about giving her orders. Her submission had to be earned and negotiated for.
But this asshole was evil.
She hadn’t felt like eating that morning when she woke, with low-grade morning sickness robbing her of her appetite, but a few hours later it had passed, and the bastard was holding her breakfast hostage, doling out morsels of it to her as rewards for following his orders.
It didn’t help that she didn’t know his language, but with repetition she’d learned a few words.
She’d already figured out thatdhavedadmeant ‘come here’. By the way he croonedveine grooneand petted her head,she guessed it must mean something like ‘good girl’, and he’d pushed down on her shoulder, rearranging her limbs into a kneel, often enough thatlaftmust mean ‘kneel’. Or maybe it meant ‘sit’; she couldn’t be sure—apparently she was the human equivalent of a dog.
She hated that she felt like purring whenever she earned aveine groone.
CHAPTER FIVE
Training was coming along nicely.
