The skin on her bottom flared up again, urging her not to do as she knew she must. She struggled to open her mouth and say the words.
“I beg of you to punish me further, so that I may thoroughly repent my shameful behavior.”
Her voice cracked a little at the end—because really, who the hell were these barbarians kidding, spanking people and publicly humiliating them?—but she managed. As she begged for more punishment, her body reacted strangely again, and a throb of arousal blossomed in her womb, making her pussy overflow again.
The Herstrakaa spoke to the Draquun, and Mina had a hard time even making out the language that he spoke. A reply was given, equally unintelligible. Mina stared at the floor, awaiting instruction, trying desperately to remember what would happen next if she had followed the correct etiquette—and what would follow is she had not.
“Arise and conduct yourself without shame. You shall walk around the parliamentary ring to your place.”
Mina stood up. A final humiliation awaited her, she realized, recalling the protocol that followed the spanking. She began at the far end of the parliamentary ring, where she had entered. She lifted her eyes and met the gaze of each Draquun—all males, as their customs prohibited females from holding parliamentary positions. They barely tolerated females of other species and only for diplomatic purposes. Each Draquun’s eyes bored into her, burning her from the inside out with humiliation. She felt fairly certain that some of them snickered as she bowed her head at each of them.
The walk—she would have called it a parade—around the ring took no more than five minutes, but it felt like an eternity.
When she at last took a seat in the box reserved for corporate agents, her entire body was tingling with the clash of burning humiliation and the cool arousal that would not be quieted. She felt mildly ill.
A Draquun in purple robes rose and moved two seats to sit next to her. He was clothed in the traditional attire of a diplomat, and she recognized the patterning on his face: it was her liaison, Marmeth.
He sat down in silence. Mina sat up straight and stiffened her spine.
“Mina Groza of the BKG of Earth,” he said, in excellent English. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Marmeth of the Draquun, your liaison.”
Mina turned to him, shocked by his breaches of etiquette. He had extended his hand to her.
She looked at it warily, then reached for it.
He smiled—another very un-Draquun gesture. “I am fully assimilated in standardized Human etiquette,” he said, “so there is no need for Draquun formalities with me. I apologize that I was unable to reach you upon your arrival and detain you before you made… such an error. I was told that you were briefed in Draquun customs prior to your arrival, but the error was nonetheless my own and I humbly request your forgiveness.”
Mina faced the parliamentary ring. “Yeah, well… just try to have my back from here on out, and it’s all forgotten.”
She didn’t bother to look at the Draquun to see how he was handling her informal English, because she was still pretty peeved.
She turned her attention to the proceedings and tried to put the whole sordid mishap out of her mind. It wasn’t easy, because she could feel the eyes of the Draquun present looking at her from time to time, and because her bottom was red-hot and flared up in pain occasionally.
She stole a glance at the Herstrakaa who had punished her but didn’t dare to look at him for long. He was large, even for a Herstrakaa, and the features of his face showed no signs of emotion. The scars on his vibrant skin served as testimony of a past as a warrior, and melded titanium images—art that, like tattoos, was implanted into the wearer’s body, but as a bonded metal rather than ink—indicated that he was a superior warrior with numerous kills and honors.
Like most Herstrakaa, a conquered people, the warrior wore thick bracelets made of metal and the blue stone of the city walls. They were a symbol of his status as a servant, and oddly—or at least Mina thought so—they were worn with pride. They connected him to a Draquun in a relationship of service, but also brotherhood, and a lot of other complicated interconnections that defied Mina’s imagination. She hadn’t dwelt on them long, because they definitely didn’t concern her, but she remembered that they had seemed very strange.
Well.
It wasn’t going as great as it could have been, but hopefully the worst was over now. This would definitely amuse Paolo when it got back to him, and that burned Mina up with fury. At least Marmeth was here, and he seemed reliable, and she’d been told he was trustworthy.
It just would have been nice if he’d shown up at the spaceport.
CHAPTER2
Voso was unsettled throughout the first phase of parliamentary proceedings, and if there was an emotion he liked least, the feeling of being unsettled was it. Voso did not feel fear, and his many years as a warrior had also wrung from him nearly all emotions that were of no use, impatience and anger among those he had worked hardest to conquer. But “unsettled” could be an asset, and so he had never wrangled it to submission in his psyche.
He knew that the Human female was looking at him from time to time. His vision, like all of his kind, was passed to his race through the aviary branches of their evolutionary lineage, and he could not only see, but see clearly, those things at the edges of his own sight that the Draquun and Humans alike described as “peripheral vision.”
Each time her eyes went to him, he felt a pang of remorse, and a pang of something else that he could not understand. Both sentiments were foreign to him, and they opposed each other violently. He did not like the feeling of unsettledness this created, and yet he could not dismiss the Human female from his conscious thoughts. This, too, was a foreign problem to Voso: as a warrior, he had trained himself to think only of the mission or task at hand, only of orders, only of an ultimate good. Distractions—particularly irrelevant distractions that caused un-useful feelings—were excised with haste.
Mozok arrived late, perhaps escaping the notice of the dim-sighted Draquun with his stealthy movement. Perhaps not, but then, it didn’t really matter: Mozok could arrive at anything whenever he wanted, without repercussions. Even if he had crossed the parliamentary floor and defecated on it, no one would dare subject him to sanctions of any kind.
When the tones of the intermission sounded, Voso waited, seated, momentarily, as was his habit: the true feelings of Draquun males were best ascertained at these moments. He watched, but his mind returned continually—and therefore, so did the focus of his vision—to the Human he had punished. His palm itched with the memory of the feel of her soft Human skin, and a familiar pang of regret and shame filled his chest. Voso did not believe in hurting the weak and frail, even if custom demanded it. He had tempered his spanking a great deal because the creature’s flesh—curiously monochrome, pale as the stone of the city buildings—seemed like it would shred if he punished her properly.
He reassured himself she seemed fine. He knew a great deal more about Humans than he let on, and a great deal more than any species would expect from a Herstrakaa. He was much more intelligent—intelligent in the way that Humans and Draquun were intelligent—than most knew.
Most. Mozok was the exception.
