It took a second to register. The voice, as dark as the creature’s stare, penetrated her to her core and came rumbling up through the rock at the same time.
Her head spun with confusion. Was she hallucinating? Had the thing just… talked? Or was it some psychological phenomenon? Her subconscious trying to help her get a grip?
But she couldn’t keep all of those thoughts in her head. Not while he was holding her like this, not when the danger was so high, their intentions so… unclear. Struggling was a reflex, and she couldn’t stop herself. Its hand was still around her neck, but it wasn’t squeezing any tighter or cutting off her airway.
Okay, she thought. Intentionally or not, it didn’t seem like it was trying tochokeher.
A burst of anger got her heart hammering even harder. Anger at herself for not listening to Kat. Anger at this… this giantlugholding her captive. Anger at all the otherlugsstanding there staring at her naked body as she struggled.
Her legs kicked out, foot connecting with the creature’s calf.
“Calm yourself.”
This time she saw the lips move: human language from a humanoid mouth. It was telling her to calm down. How thefuckwas it telling her to calm down? How was it speaking her language, intelligibly?
The two forces in her mind and body—scientific curiosity, and self-preservation—felt like they were going to rip her apart.
“I… I… I…” she stammered, legs still flailing, her fingernails scratching at the skin on its wrist. Her limbs were moving without her thoughts guiding them, and her thoughts were still stalled on the question of communication: how?
In an instant, none of that mattered, not her fight or flight instinct, and not her questions. She was spinning through the air, caught completely off-guard. As the blue light and strange cave-like interior blurred and streaked across her visual field, she thought: this is the end. She was going to be smashed to bits on the rocky surface of a cave by the first alien lifeform she’d ever encountered.
She resigned herself to this fate quickly, so what happened next took her so much by surprise that she went limp and her brain refused to process the event. Her body came to a gentle halt, face-down, on a warm, steady surface that was not hard enough to be the floor.
A strong force—the arm of her captor, she would soon discover—pushed at her lower back and bent her over, with herasssticking up into the air.
Her eyes flew open, fighting off her fear to assess her situation, which she couldn’t make heads or tails of. She was lying on its knee.
It… he?… had bent down on one knee and bowed her over it.
But she barely had time to think about the implications of that, because a crack sliced through the air a moment before a sharp spike of pain tore across the skin on her ass.
The sharp bite of the pain rolled away from the place of impact, in weakening waves that faded to a smoldering heat. She was just collecting her thoughts, engaging her core muscles to try and push up from her position and look around, when…
Another painful smack landed, the crisscrossing ripples of pain colliding and strengthening each other, the heat turning up. Another smack—and this time she identified the weapon as the fleshy palm of the creature.
I’m getting a fucking spanking?!
Between each sharp spike of pain she somehow found room in her mind to try and parse what was happening. A beastly alien with whom she’d just made contact was now in the process of smacking her ass with his big, human-looking hand.
It was all so preposterous it made her head spin. Each fresh smack was getting hotter, the pain radiating all over her bottom now. She wriggled on the creature’s lap, trying to find a way to escape the next, and then the next sharp sting.
Her mouth was open in surprise and horror, but no sound was coming out of it. Tears began to well up in her eyes—but they were the tears of acute, sudden pain. Corrective pain.
And now, to her abject horror, it was also arousing her. Sure, fear had a tight grip on her intestines, and her stomach lurched around like she was dropping down a mine shaft, but lower in her abdomen, arousal—sexual, delicious—was blooming.
Thatwas more humiliating than her nakedness, or even the spanking itself.
As the spanking went on and a rain of superheated strokes turned her skin to throbbing, shrieking fire, she realized that fighting him was futile. When she kicked her feet or tried to wriggle from his grasp, she couldn’t even muster enough power to flail helplessly against his impenetrable strength. He was holding her down with one hand, and she was completely immobilized.
This, too, was arousing. She shook her head vigorously, as if she could scatter the sexual heat from her head like water off vegetables in a salad spinner.
When it didn’t work, she decided to submit.
His last command had been to calm herself.
She let her limbs and her core go limp. Her eyes were squeezed shut tightly in anticipation of the next smack and the increased heat that made her eyes sting.
But it didn’t come.
