Chapter One
“You know you are owned, don’t you. There is no escape.”
I have the sense of being small. But not young. The figures surrounding me make me seem diminutive in comparison because they are impossibly large. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who they are. But I know that they want me. Every bit of me. I can feel their possessive energy focused on me.
Someone grabs a thick handful of my hair and holds me in place. I feel a harsh slap across my ass.
“Naughty pet,” a deep voice intones. “Such a naughty little human mate. What are we going to do with you?”
This is a dream. I know it is because real life couldn’t possibly be this hot. Real life is straws you have to drink from quickly before they go soggy in a soy protein shake, and letters from the building manager about the hours you’re keeping, and an itch on the bottom of your foot that never seems to have any reason to be there. Real life is a series of tasks that stay the same day after day. What’s happening to me now is un-fucking-real in every way.
A massive, scaled hand wraps lightly around my throat, and holds me firmly while another big red hand slides down my stomach, making for the apex of my thighs. My legs spread instinctively. In this dream, I know I am supposed to give myself to them.
“Filthy little animal…”
“Good girl…”
Two strange voices mesh with one another.
I catch little flashes of alien masters… there are scales… a horn… a battleax. Nothing is entirely clear because my brain won’t render the whole scene at once. It’s putting all its effort into the way my hips are grinding against the hand between my legs, the thick finger pushing into my molten interior.
“So wet for us,” the voice comes again. “Such a hungry, desperate little pet.”
I try to move, try to grind my hips down. I want satisfaction. I am so desperately aroused I know the only way out of this is to find release.
A face swims into view. The alien beast has the appearance and bearing of a wild god. Golden hair flows from his head in a brilliant mane. He has bright stellar blue eyes, and the hard, symmetrical features of a creature chiseled from stone. He is hard… in every way.
My eyes run down the length of his body.
“Down, girl,” he says, pressing me down on my knees. The hands help him put me where he wants me. I am not given a choice. Between the three big alien entities, I am as helpless as the animal they call me. I am like a rabbit in a snare, caught so completely all I can do is stare wide-eyed as a collar is latched closed around my throat and the wildness is stolen from me in that universal act of domination and domestication.
“She’s waking up, I think. Her pulse just spiked.”
A voice that doesn’t belong to this place or these creatures breaks through the dream. A shaft of light pierces the sacred darkness we have been trysting in.
“No!” I whine, feeling as though I am about to lose something I will never be able to get back. The sexy fear of being kidnapped by aliens is replaced by a very raw fear of something much worse, of being cut off…
But the light is getting brighter, and the dream is fading, and no amount of holding onto it can stop the rising of my consciousness.
“We’re coming for you.”
That’s the last thing I hear before I wake up.
[divider]
I open my eyes.
I have the warm, cozy feeling of emerging from a long sleep and a very satisfying dream. It is gone instantly, the way the best dreams are, but I feel the chemical remnants of it.
There’s a bird singing out the window. White curtains flutter in the wind. A kindly man wearing a white coat and stethoscope is looking down at me with an air of gentle expectation. He has wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and salt-and-pepper hair, and a vibe of being very dependable, reliable, and safe.
“You’re awake,” he says.
I forgive the obvious statement, because he seems nice, and because I feel so good. Sometimes it feels like I can never get enough sleep, like the long, restorative rests of childhood were also some dream I’ll never get back. But this feels amazing, like I’ve been asleep for a very long time. Or like I’ve had the best nap ever and woken up without being groggy. I’m so rested.
This must be what people mean when they say women are supposed to get ten hours of sleep a night. I feel like I’ve slept a decade. Or a century. I feel like Sleeping Beauty. I want to burrow back into the pillow, close my eyes, and find the dream again. It was good, I think.
But the doctor won’t let me. He has more silly obvious things to say, and even sillier things to ask.
“What’s your name, darling?”
I look at the doctor. My lips part. It’s a simple question. I’ve been answering it for as long as I could speak. I don’t even think about it as I answer…
And then I… don’t?
To my surprise, there’s a blank where I used to be. My lips move, as if they’re going to form the word. But nothing comes out. I search my mind. It remains blank.
“I need your name,” he says. “You’re not in trouble.”
“Why would I be in trouble?”
“You’re not. You couldn’t be. Now tell me your name.”
I try again. I fail again. I feel my face crumple as the realization hits me.
“I don’t know.”
[divider]
Three years later…
I never did remember what my name was. I got discharged from the hospital a few weeks later after they figured they’d done all they could for me. I knew how to function, could talk, knew what year it was, which corporate states were in charge. What I couldn’t tell them was who I was, why I was there, what had happened before I was found in the street.
Fortunately, I landed in New New York, which is Zeal territory, and Zeal is probably one of the better corporate states to wake up in as an amnesiac. I got a starter pack, a little money, referrals for a few jobs, things of that nature.
The people in the hospital looked at me with pity, because all I knew about myself is that I was somewhere in my early to mid-twenties, with brown hair, brown eyes, and according to the night charge nurse, a bad attitude.
But when you forget everything about yourself, you can be anything.
I choose to be a problem.
I’ve made a life for myself, or a living, anyway.
It’s early in the morning, probably two or maybe three a.m., and the bass in Club Eclipse is throbbing through me, making me tingle all the way to the parts of my body that I haven’t used in living memory.
I am wearing a cute little pink skirt made out of a rubbery material; it has pleats and swings out around my thighs. My legs are clad in flat-soled boots that match the skirt, but lace up along the outsides. I have a black tank top on, with my little pink bandoliers crisscrossed over it. They look like they’re just for fashion, but they’re not. And there’s a little body bag too, that’s black because I want it to be harder to see.
My hair is tied up in two high pigtails, and my makeup is on point. I like to wear a lot because it makes me harder to recognize out of it. My brows are drawn on pretty dramatically, and I have a lot of liner and a thick pink slash of shadow that flares out to a white smoke effect. My lips are bubblegum pink and I have glitter everywhere you can put glitter and have it look good, all down my arms so I sparkle when I dance.
It looks like I’m here to have fun, but this is my work outfit, because my name is… who even knows, and I’m an amnesiac.
I like to think that at some stage I had skills I could use to be employed, but I don’t know what they were. The assistance from Zeal ran out pretty quick and I had to find ways to support myself.
This is how I do it. There’s a fun irony to it, too. I need money, but I have no memory, so I sell people things that help them forget. I’ve got several little doses of different pills on me in little clear plastic containers slipped into the bandoliers that I’m wearing across my chest. About half of them are already gone, but I’ve got plenty more to sell. There’re a whole lot more in the cute bag I’m wearing around my waist.
This is Eclipse, one of the biggest clubs in New New York City, NNYC for short. It’s the best place to sell. Some of the girls are wearing cute little booty shorts with NNYC across the cheeks. They’re proud to be from this place, and if they’re not from here, they’re even more proud to be here.
The city orbits what’s left of Earth. It’s about the size of Old Manhattan, and it is falling, always falling toward the ground at exactly the same rate as the curvature of the Earth, so it never crashes.
Flying cities, they call them, though they’re more like massive satellites. Cities used to be built down on the world below, but certain events made it more or less uninhabitable down there. There are still millions of people down on Earth, but they don’t really count as actual humans, not to those of us who live in these floating cities, quite literally above all the drama of the ruined planet below.
Most of the clientele at Eclipse are men. I’d say a good seventy percent. Most of the girls here are working in one capacity or other, either for the club itself, or as freelancers. Women are in short supply in this corner of the world. Many are kept at home by their families, and others are living their very best lives off-world.
We lost a lot of women when the aliens first came, so I’ve learned. Overnight, millions of women were scooped up and taken away in what was called the first rapture. We don’t know what happened to them. Maybe there’s a planet out there populated entirely with Earth women. Maybe they got spread across the stars. Maybe they were served with nibbles and dips. Everyone’s got an opinion, and nobody really knows for sure.
Then we got more advanced, and found ways to stop the aliens just stealing us, theoretically. The Earth has an ionized barrier of some kind that stops people from just being snatched. Don’t really know how much or how well it works, but you have to trust it because otherwise you’ll spend your days wearing a tin foil broad-brimmed hat. There’re also rumors that some of the corporates got where they are now, all the tech and stuff that makes the cities fly, by trading with alien civilizations, and that they paid for that tech with women.
The official law is that women cannot be sold. Humans aren’t allowed to be commodified. It’s very strictly enforced, allegedly, but that doesn’t stop women going ‘missing’ from time to time. I think it’s probably human males doing the disappearing given the ratio of women to men is like 80:20 at this point.
From what I’ve been told, mostly by men who are high out of their fucking gourds, the demand for human females in various planets and colonies cannot be overstated. Every woman in here is worth a million at least on the alien black market.
For all those reasons and a couple more, the dancing girls at Club Eclipse are locked down. Literally. There are chains wrapped around some of their ankles. They look very pretty. They’re elegant little things inexorably connected to the platforms they’re dancing on. There are barcodes on the anklets. A man can swipe his chip on them and rent them for thirty minutes, an hour, half a day, or a week. The club owners keep girls up there no matter what. As soon as one is checked out, the platform descends for a minute or two, then slides back up through the floor with a new smiling dancing girl.
It seems inhumane, and that’s because it is, because these girls aren’t human and never will be. One is swaying in front of me right now. You can barely see the seams where her plastic form has been sealed shut. This is a Real Woman TM. She’s waterproof, she’s structurally robust in ways a real woman would not be, and far more flexible. A lot of men say these robots are better than real women. Real women are real happy these bots take the abuse the average frustrated man doles out.
It all comes down to profit in the end. A real female is expensive to keep. She has to be fed and she has to be guarded, and she has to be kept in a situation that is clean and suitable enough to keep her looking appealing. Female robots can dance twenty-four/seven in a club and only need to be hosed out semi-regularly from the use they receive from the clients. Any damage can be covered by insurance, and when they wear out, or a new model is released, they can be sold to the private market.
I don’t mind the Real Women TM. I prefer that to looking into the hollow eyes of a real human female who has to have a good time because she’s dosed to the follicles with mental conditioners that ensure she has a pleasant and willing disposition. I’ve seen some of them too, from time to time, out on the streets with men who use them like… I don’t even have a good comparison.
As bright and sparkling and fun as we’re all desperately trying to make this Zeal night be, the world is a dark place and there’s no getting away from it.
I slide through this mass of heaving hidden desperation, helping people zone out from the horrors one sweet little pill at a time. It’s never been particularly easy to be a human, but they tell me it gets harder day after day, year after year. Sometimes I’m quite grateful for not being able to remember anything. It means I’m free of whatever terrible things probably happened to me in the past.
Anyway, I’m bringing my own mood down by thinking too much. That’s always a mistake. I should be focusing on what matters: profit.
In that regard, it’s a good night at the club. The music is pounding, the lights are dim, and people are desperate to feel… something. Anything. It’d be easy to write the patrons here off as horny sex goblins who have to pay for it, but these days, there’s nothing we don’t have to pay for anymore. Sex is a commodity. The air we breathe is too. It’s accepted that nobody is entitled to anything. Even dying is taxed to the hilt.
A young man with blue half-shaved hair approaches me through the smoke and lasers. His pupils aren’t as dilated as he’d like them to be. He gives me a swift upward nod, a silent question delivered in an environment where nobody can hear themselves think. We lock eyes. Deeee deee diddilee dee… A light tone plays across my cranium and down my spine.
A word appears behind my eyes.
“Happy?”
I nod.
That’s all he needs to know. We touch chips by pressing the inside of our wrists together. A brief swipe is all it takes. I have code running to extract a certain amount from his account. A vibration behind my left ear indicates a successful transaction. We’ve all got the chips in us. They’re the only way to do business. Physical currency is outlawed, and bartering is basis for being defenestrated. They’ll throw you right off the side of the island through a specially prepared window if they catch you swapping goods and services. That’s why, even though what I’m doing is technically illegal, I do it by legal means.
I slip a vial out of my bandolier and slide it into his hand. He pops the cap, throws his head back, and the pill rolls down the smooth interior and into his throat. I watch as it hits his system almost instantly, a broad grin spreading across his face.
Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin are all being dumped into his synapses. He feels like he’s at the birth of his first child, meeting the love of his life, orgasming, getting a promotion, and winning a gold medal all at the same fucking time. Nothing that ever happens in reality will match up to the way he feels right now. He’s made living obsolete in one swallow. For the next three hours, he’s going to feel as good as anybody ever could. And after? Well. There are other pills for that.
I keep moving through the crowd, waiting for the next eye contact or chip tingle to tell me I’m about to make another sale. I close my eyes and check my subscriptions. That sale I just made went toward my clean air count, which is good. I like to keep that at least thirty days in advance. If you run out of clean air subscription, they move you down to the dirtier parts of the city. They can’t stop you breathing outright, but they can make it very unpleasant to do so.
What it really comes down to is private corporate terms of service.
Eclipse bar is owned by Zeal, one of the big four corporate entities. The dancing girls all have cute little Z tats at the back of their heads, up on their hairlines. There’s Z-themed stuff everywhere. Even the toilets are shaped like big pink Z’s.
Zeal is the most fun of the corporates, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have any terms of service. One of the terms is not to perform commerce on their properties. If there is money to be made, they want to be the ones making it. Technically, this is very against their ToS.
But there’s sort of a loophole. They can’t sell what I’m selling, because all mind-altering substances were banned five years ago in one of the many mutual contracts between the corporates. Laws are complex. There are corporate terms of service, and then there are bigger laws, the older kind. Laws everyone is supposed to follow no matter who owns what. Private citizens can technically do what they want on their own land. It’s just that nowhere is anybody’s land anymore.
So anyway, I can pay a percentage of my income to them, and they’ll look the other way. That’s what I do. I break the law, they make money from it, we’re all happy, or at least a functional kind of miserable.
A big guy bounces into me. I have to dodge out of the way. He’s drunk. I think.
“You’re hot,” he says, his breath laced with alcohol. He reaches for my hand. I yank it away. Unauthorized chip hacking is rife, so I have to be careful. I’m not the only criminal in the place.
Navigating this world is not easy. There are real laws and then there are fake laws, and there’s subterfuge and espionage and split loyalties, and subscription citizenships and… it’s so complicated. I’m not sure that I really understand all of it yet, even after three years.
I’m subscribed to Zeal and Sudo. I got banned from Condor a while ago, and it’s best not to think too much about what’s going to happen next time I have to travel through Peach space. My plan for the moment is to stay on New New York. It’s mostly owned by Zeal. But that means I have to be careful about how many terms of service I break. They’re allowed to terminate their services at any time.
Back in the day, a company withdrawing service would be a mild inconvenience. You might get your power turned off or similar. Now, you get a one-way trip to Earth under your own power when they throw you out the trash chute with all the other garbage. It’s technically legal to murder people as long as you call it a spontaneous unsubscribe.
So I keep sliding through the crowd, doing my best to blend in. I dance for a while, buy a drink, chat with some guys, slap one because he got fresh with me. Just girl things. My bandolier gets emptier as time goes on.
If I can get rid of most of my stock tonight, I’ll have enough money to pay subs on my apartment, keep up my food sub, and keep existing for another two weeks. Living the dream. I might even have enough to put toward memory recovery treatment. I’m not the only person who can’t remember what happened to them. It’s a bit of an epidemic around these parts.
Zeal got mind wiping technology as part of chip tech from an alien species several years ago, so the story goes. Might be true, might not be true. It’s hard to tell these days. As soon as it came into the world, all sorts of people got their brains washed pretty much immediately whether they wanted it or not. I’m not sure what I did to earn my amnesia, but I still don’t have a clue about anything that happened to me before I woke up in that hospital room.
If I get enough money, I’ll be able to undo that process. I’ve been a little ambivalent on that front. On the one hand, might be good to know what happened. On another… maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe it’s merciful.
“Pet.”
Someone growls the word near me. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I am surrounded by conversation of all kinds, most of it high and drunk and crass.
“Pet!” The word comes more insistently. I ignore it again. Doesn’t mean anything to me.
Then someone grabs me from behind. That’s not entirely out of the ordinary. The club can get handsy, especially in the earlier hours. But I am not going to let it stand. I spin around, ready to hit whichever man is stupid enough to touch me.
But it’s not a man who has touched me.
I find myself surrounded by a wall of flesh. Three very big… things… have blocked me out of the crowd, the same way wolves used to pick a deer out of the herd before… well, before. I watch the ancient history channel sometimes. I wish I could have seen the world when it was complete with animals and plants and things besides human debris. They tell us that what’s left down there now is nothing but rats and trash.
“What the fuck do you want?” I ask the question with a real hostile tone while my stomach flips as I look at the predators who have isolated me from my herd.
They’re not human. I’ve never seen aliens before that I know of, though some people insist that there are aliens everywhere around us all the time.
The more I look at them, the more I start to think that these guys are definitely not humans. For one, humans have round pupils, not diamond star-shaped slits in diamanté eyes, or horizontal pupils, or lizard-like slits. I guess eyes could be faked with contact lenses, but then there’s their height. They’re all 6′5 at least. One of them might be 6′8. Stilts? I don’t know.
They’re wearing human-ish clothes to blend in. Denim and leather, or materials that mimic them anyway. One of them is very tall and blond and his shirt is open almost all the way to his navel. His stomach ripples with distracting musculature. He has most of my attention. There’s something about him that draws my eye and… I haven’t gotten laid in three years. It’s usually not a hardship. Suddenly, it feels hard.
I try to think of my alien facts to put my brain in some kind of useful gear. I can feel instinct taking over, a kind of arousal that is dangerous as hell. It feels like my brain is getting fuzzy, like my thoughts are running scared.
Aliens made contact with humans around the year 2028, but most people were too distracted to really notice or care. It was difficult back then, when everyone was stuck on the surface of the planet like basic animals.
It’s 2055 now, and a lot has changed. Various technologies, building projects, and opportunities for work in other reaches of the Milky Way have really taken the pressure off what used to be a crowded planet—and made the whole insufficient women situation even worse.
Some people think aliens blend in with humans. Some insist that everyone around them is an alien. Zeal insists that they would never allow an alien into New New York. The truth is obviously somewhere in the middle. Just like I am now. In the middle.
I don’t know how every eye in the club isn’t on these creatures, but they seem to be making it work. Maybe it’s a mind trick or something. Aliens are tricky. They’re known to fuck with human perceptions from time to time. They have powers that humans don’t, sometimes they steal humans for their personal use, and worse of all they could fuck up the economy at any time. That’s why they’re banned from Earth and her orbit.
I’ve never talked to an alien before, let alone three of them. I know I have to say something, so I default back to my usual spiel.
“Can I get you something?” I have to actually speak, because they’re aliens and they don’t have chips.
They are looking at me with stunned expressions, like they recognize me, but they’re not sure why I’m not responding to them differently.
“Z hires off-worlders now?” I ask the question because I’m pretending that this isn’t nearly as fucked up as it seems. “Are you guys aliens, or what?”
The blond who touched me, whose face is broad, handsome, and almost human, except clearly not, looks at me with an intensity I cannot begin to process. He looks at me like he knows me in a way I do not know myself. He’s evoking something inside me. Something I don’t recognize.
“We have searched the galaxy for you, pet. All these years, and here you are. I was beginning to lose hope…”
Okay, he’s really laying it on thick. I start to get my brain back, and my cynicism along with it.
This is some kind of a bit, I bet. They probably do this to kidnap women. I’ve heard aliens are into humans because of how good we are at breeding. We come from a world that is very good at reproduction as a whole. I once listened to a guy completely off his head telling me about how other forms of life tend to live longer, but have a harder time making new versions of themselves. According to him, humans can fuck almost any humanoid alien and have their babies. We’re like the universal donors of sex. I asked him if it went both ways and if he could impregnate an alien lady, but he started talking about how he had babies with four alien women and that’s why he was trying to stay away from the alien baby support collectors. I thought he was crazy. Now I’m wondering.
It’s so confusing.
One of the hardest things about having no memory is being naive about absolutely everything all the time. I learned pretty quickly if I’m doubting something, I should doubt it hard. So I tell myself these aren’t really aliens, just dudes with stilts and prosthetics and that’s why nobody else is reacting because they know a joke when they see it.
“Okay, if you don’t want to buy anything, I gotta move on,” I say, going to leave.
Three big hands place themselves on me firmly. One on my arm. One on my back, and one wrapped around my neck.
A bolt of something like fear jolts through me. But there’s no moving away from them. They all close the distance a little, pinning me in completely. Fuck. Fuck.
The music seems to slow down, deep bass thudding in a kind of melted tempo. The lights flash in a more languid way too. Time is coming to a halt as these creatures hold me in thrall.
I find my voice again, but I don’t sound nearly as confident as I did before.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Strong start. “Aliens aren’t allowed in this club. If they find you here, they’ll ban you and fine you.” Weaker finish. I don’t think any of these creatures give a damn about some corporate Earth fines.
The alien with the frankly gorgeous cascade of blond hair speaks in a voice so deep I can hear it even with thundering bass rumbling through me.
“We came for you. There is no place in this universe we would not go to find you, pet. You are ours. And we intend to make sure you know it so well this never happens again. We have missed you.”
Nobody has ever spoken to me this way, not that I recall. It gives me a kind of a weird feeling. Good, but also quite scared. He is a very, very attractive creature. Hotter than any human I’ve ever seen. But what if this is how they get you?
If this is a bit, some way to sweep a human into some kind of alien manipulation, they are good at it. I’d love to believe I know anyone as appealing as this, a powerful alien with two powerful alien bros. I live in a shitty one-room apartment in a shitty building on the outskirts of the orbiting city. There are always men around there, just like there are men here. They look, they leer, they try to touch. The things I’ve had to do to keep them away from me often border on illegal, and sometimes veer aggressively into, well, very illegal things.
That’s the reality of life when you are poor. You either break the law, or you suffer. It’s not uncommon to do both at the same time. That’s why I like being in the club and selling pills. As work goes, it feels almost proper.
I look around again at the three very tall aliens around me. The rest of the crowd still doesn’t seem to notice them. The music seems to be quieter than it was before, as if they reached out and turned it down for our little bubble.
“Stop spoiling her,” the tall alien with sharp, severe features, scales on his face, and short cropped dark hair says. “That’s what got us here in the first place. She knows she’s in trouble. She knows what she’s done.”
“You’d be surprised how little I know,” I say confidently. He doesn’t smile.
He looks down at me with a severe expression that sends a chill right through me all the way to my core—and to the welling heat between my thighs. He’s hot too, in a different way. In a ‘Daddy’s going to fuck me up’ sort of way.
“When I get my hands on you in private, pet, you are going to pay for every single day of the three years you’ve managed to escape us,” he lectures me. “I warned you long ago what I would do, and once we are clear of this fetid human mass, you are…”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t know who or what you are,” I interrupt, annoyed. I don’t like his tone at all. He sounds pissed, and he has no damn reason to be.
The aliens look at one another.
“What if she doesn’t remember us?” the third alien says. He is broad and strong. Built like a bull, or something more mythological. His skin seems to have a reddish hue, but it is hard to tell if that’s accurate under the club lights. Nobody looks like they really do here. We’re all a bit fake. If I am not entirely mistaken, he has tips of horns extending from his thick, wavy dark hair. It’s either the most alien face I’ve ever seen, or it’s an amazing mask. His face looks elongated, the way a bull’s might be. But when he speaks, his mouth emotes sort of like a person’s, but bigger. He has lots of big, flat teeth in his mouth. I stare at him, entirely enthralled by trying to work out what’s going on with him.
“Go easy on her, Sharp,” he says. “She’s only human.”
“She’s pretending,” Sharp hisses back. “This is what she’s like. Breaking the rules, then pretending not to know better. She’s spoiled, just like she’s always been.” His brilliant green eyes flash, vertical pupils expanding when he looks at me, then contracting when he looks at the others and the lights of the club flash at him. He has slick dark hair flowing backwards from his scaled forehead in a widow’s peak. His brows are two vicious slashes angling over his gaze that is fixed on me, and when he speaks, his tongue flickers and I think I see it long and forked. My god. I am terrified and turned on all at once.
“She looks confused to me,” the Minotaur says. That’s what they’re called! Minotaurs. Humans had myths about these things long before they had floating cities, or planes for that matter.
“We’re not here to argue,” the blond says. “We’re here to reclaim our pet.”
I am still looking at the one called Sharp. He is still looking at me.
I don’t like him at all. Or maybe I do. I’m having some kind of visceral reaction to him. His words are rough and his eyes are the kind of piercing that make me feel guilty even though I didn’t do anything wrong. They’re the ones doing something wrong. They shouldn’t be here.
The third alien, the red-skinned, horned one, is not looking at me. He’s scanning the club for danger. I should have been doing that in the first place to avoid this altercation. I’m still not sure what is happening, but I am pretty sure it’s bad news for me. As entranced and interested as I am, I know I need to get away from them.
I’m stuck in two completely different worlds right now. In one, three aliens are telling me I belong to them. In another, I am becoming aware that if security spots them, they’re going to spot me too, definitely. And once that happens, I’m going to get fucking banned from Zeal. And once that happens, I’ll have to find some way to survive in Sudo space, which is as boring as it gets. I’ll have to get a shuttle to the little satellite they run, the one that has nothing but low-slung office buildings. Everyone in Sudo space works as a vibe coder. Everybody wears a beige uniform. Everybody eats Sudo rations. It’s basically prison, with extra steps. But it’s better than falling to your death, I guess.
Practicality wins out over curiosity.
“I can’t hang right now, guys,” I say, using the same line on them that I’d use on any men who weren’t buyers and who were drawing way too much attention.
I know that the whole crowd is being scanned constantly by artificial surveillance. You really have to work to act within the bounds of acceptable normality if you don’t want security alerted. The actual people in the crowd might not be noticing these creatures somehow, but the security bots will, and once they start investigating, we are all fucked.
The Minotaur turns to the others, coming to the same conclusion I already had. They understand how this place works, so it seems. They’re under cover, just like me.
“We need to get her out of here,” he says. “I don’t like this place. Far too much security.”
They press in against me, closing the distance completely. I feel one alien hand against the back of my neck—that’s the blond alien. There’s another on my lower back. That’s the Minotaur. Another one loops lightly around my throat. That’s Sharp, and he looks like he really fucking means the grip.
“Oh, my fucking god,” I gasp.
Their combined touch ignites something in me. A memory, maybe? Or something more primal. A need. I am suddenly so fucking horny I can barely handle it. I can feel wetness between my legs, a literal slickness in response to waves of desire coursing through me uncontrollably.
“You thought you’d run away from us and we wouldn’t find you?” A voice is deep in my ear, resonating with the very marrow of my bones. Holy shit. I feel like hot liquid is running down my spine, circling through my belly, activating my clit.
“I am going to make you pay, you little wretch,” Sharp promises me in a tone as cold as ice.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. I practically moan the words.
“We’ve missed you, baby,” the blond says. I feel his hand running over my ass. I never let anybody touch me like this. If men try, I hit them. If hitting them doesn’t work, I do more. But right now, I’m not doing anything. I don’t want to stop this. I’m being felt up in a club like one of the Real Women TM and I want more.
The bull runs his hand down the front of my body. His thick, powerful fingers rub over the apex of my thighs, over the shorts underneath my skirt. My knees almost immediately buckle, but the hand at my throat tightens and keeps me upright as this alien, this devil, this fucking monster with untold power slowly and competently starts to finger me. He starts over my underwear first. I’m wearing cute little boy shorts under my skirt so if I have a tumble or something I don’t flash the world.
He pulls my shorts to the side and exposes my lower lips. My pussy is drenched, and he manages to slide two thick alien fingers inside me. They’re hot and hard, and they make me feel like I was made for this moment. I’m being fingered by an alien Minotaur while others watch.
Sharp is examining me. His grip on my neck is firm, not cutting off my breath, but keeping me in place. He’s not going to let me go. He’s never going to fucking let me go. I can feel that deep inside me, in some place where things I didn’t know I still knew seem to have been hiding all this time.
The fingers plunge deep inside me, stretching me, all the way to the base of his fingers, the fat of his palm presses against my clit, and the Minotaur starts rocking his hand against my pussy, grinding my clit and filling my pussy at the same time. Behind me, the other alien pushes my legs open with his foot.
“That’s right, good girl. You’re being so good for us,” the blond purrs from behind. “You’re going to make up for all the time we’ve missed with you. We’re going to wrap you around our cocks, fill you with our seed, breed you nice and deep and hard, and you’re going to remember what it feels like to be happy with us again, our little stray.”
His hands slide up to my chest, squeeze and play with my breasts. Sharp is just holding me, but that seems to satisfy him, and it seems to satisfy me too. That grip on my neck feels like an anchor, and a reminder, though I still can’t remember.
It doesn’t matter, because I am feeling real passion right now, true pleasure of a kind no pill could impart. I’ve taken my stuff, once. I wanted to know what I was saying. It felt like flying, like being part of everything at once. It felt like peak pleasure—and somehow this feels better. I don’t understand how that’s possible. It shouldn’t be chemically or physically possible.
But here I am, writhing on the fingers of a massive alien who insists he knows me and owns me, and being kept in place for it by two others.
“She’s lost nothing in her responses,” Sharp says. “Look at her, wriggling around, soaked for us. Do you want to be bred here, pet? Do you need our cocks in you, one after the other like old times? Should we show these other pathetic humans what it means to have alien masters?”
His words make my stomach flip, my pussy clench, and my brain wake the fuck up in ways it hasn’t in years. I haven’t had a memory come back this entire time. Not so much as a flash of reminiscence.
But Sharp’s words and the Minotaur’s fingers lead to a sudden flash of my having been in bed with all three of them, all of us naked. This one holding me, he has scales in intimate places, and if he is not careful with me when they penetrate, then it can be very rough indeed.
The fragment of memory makes me blush and astonishes me deeply. I assumed that my lost memories wouldn’t be all that interesting. I figured I maybe saw something I wasn’t meant to see, or just got caught up in something messy. I had no concept that my life before this one involved group sex with hot fucking aliens.
I guess I do know these guys. But I still don’t know how or why or what I’m… the bull pushes his fingers deep inside me, twists, the pad of his thumb presses against my clit, and I am instantly so fucking close to orgasm my legs start shaking. Right here on the dance floor, surrounded by throngs of people, an orgasm is starting to build inside me.
I don’t touch myself much in my private time. I’ve been too distracted to do so lately anyway. I’ve been thinking about selling stuff and not getting caught and keeping stray males out of my tiny apartment.
I’m not worried about any of that right now. All I’m worried about is the pleasure running through me in swift, peaking pulses that follow the motion of the bull’s fingers.
There’s a sense of arousal rushing through me that make me swoon and go weak at the knees. In their hands, I feel protected. The crowd is all around, all the terrible things I have been trying to survive are right behind them. But none of that can get to me right now as I give myself to the sensations and almost collapse in orgasmic pleasure.
It’s the first time I’ve felt safe in a very long time. Maybe since I woke up in the hospital. It’s also the best I’ve felt in the same amount of time. The orgasm overwhelms my physical senses and wraps me in a sense of pure ecstasy.
I shudder and shake, pulled up against the strong body of a strange creature who seems to know mine as well as if it were his own. Slowly, thick fingers slide from my pussy.
“It’s time,” I hear someone say. “Let’s get her out of here.”
The aliens move even closer around me, sandwiching me between their three bodies. I am unable to move, and there is no reason for me to want to. The lights around me seem to glow brighter and brighter around me until the club simply phases out of existence.
Schwoop!
There’s a big pop, like I was suddenly surrounded by a big soap bubble that lost containment. The club is gone and I am standing inside some kind of spaceship. I can tell because I can see Earth out the window. I can see the curve of the blue and green world and the shades of the corporate stations orbiting it.
“Did we just fucking teleport?” I’m more excited than I am afraid. That was amazing. I am also still trembling from orgasm, my pussy contracting around a cock that isn’t there. I want to grind my hips against something. I want to be held. My body is crying out for a long-lost touch.
The aliens step back a little. We were all so close it was impossible for us to look at one another properly. They want to look at me. They want to inspect every inch of me. The lighting in this space is much brighter and more revealing than the intermittently lit shadows of the club. The ability to see one another is mutually taken advantage of.
“Something like that,” the alien with the glorious hair and the muscle in his cheek says. He smiles at me and his cheeks dimple and the scaling around his hairline sort of seems to shift a little. He looks like a galactic barbarian prince, I decide. He’s the most human of the three of them, though there is no way he could be mistaken for a person. His eyes are a little too big, his jaw a little too strong and broad. His nose is sort of flat across the bridge and down to the tip. When he smiles, his teeth flash with points, and a couple of very pronounced canines.
The tall one, Sharp, is quite imposing. His eyes are interstellar green, and his general features are not that different from Benedict Cumberbatch, whose reruns still play on Zeal TV to this day. They are sharper though, and haughtier. His eyes are narrow and the edges slant up toward his ears. He has a cosmic case of resting bitch face, but he is beautiful nonetheless. The scales on his face and hands gleam in the ship’s light. He is dangerous, I decide. They all are, but he has a particular kind of menace to him that makes me curious as hell.
The bull who made me come is the most shocking or perhaps alien of them all. His skin is thick and deep red. His face is more like an animal than like a man. He has a snout and a mouth filled with the teeth of a beast who chews plant matter. His eyes are big and soulful. He has a thick plume of dark hair between his horns that runs down the back of his powerful neck. He is wearing pants, but not shoes. He has hooves, and a tail that ends in a pointed tip. His upper torso is naked and so muscular every movement he makes causes a ripple that draws my eyes so completely it feels like there’s nothing else happening in the world. Or off it, I guess.
He snorts as he looks at me, then the corner of his lip curls up in a remarkably sexy smirk.
“Holy shit,” I say. “What the fuck is happening?”
They give each other a look I don’t understand. Mostly because I don’t know if alien expressions translate to human ones. I’d say they look a combination of relieved, skeptical, and something else.
“You’re back where you belong,” Sharp says. “That’s what’s happening. And you’re going to pay for making us come this far and look this long.”
“You might enjoy pranks,” the barbarian says. “But this goes way beyond a reasonable joke, pet. It took us years to find you.”
I stare at them blankly. “Am I being detained?”
I don’t know why I ask it that way. Abducted is really a better word, I guess, but that seems cliché. Also, there’s something about their demeanor and all their words that makes me feel like I am in trouble. So it feels a little more like being hunted down by alien cops and… made to come?
I’m excited, horrified, scared, and probably a whole lot of other feelings as well. It’s hard to categorize them all. It’s impossible to feel them all. Part of me is just relieved that anything is taking place at all.
I have been waiting for something to happen, I realize. Years have passed me by while I’ve been in a sort of haze of just trying to survive. I woke up in the hospital, needed money, and just had to get on with things.
These aliens are promising me the one thing I don’t have: context.
“I know you don’t believe me, but my brain got scrubbed,” I tell them. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Let me explain, then,” Sharp says, leaning down a little so his reptilian gaze locks more intimately with mine. “You belong to us, and you are going to suffer the consequences of your actions whether you claim to remember them or not.”
“You have got to stop talking to me in that tone,” I say. “I really don’t like it.”
The bull smirks and then laughs. “Nothing has changed,” he says. His voice is a deep baritone that would give the club’s speakers a run for their money. “Even if you can’t remember anything, you remember how to be…”
“A problem?”
“Trouble,” he finishes his sentence.
“Oh, in that case, I have changed. Trouble doesn’t interest me nearly as much as causing problems does. Trouble sounds like a kid who did something wrong. Problem is worse.”
“You were enough of a problem when we had you,” Mr. Grumpy says. I’m just going to start mentally naming them, because for the most part, they’re not bothering to introduce themselves. I know his name is Sharp, but I don’t want to think that right now. That’s kind of hot, and I don’t want to find him hot.
I do, however, find the sharp-toothed barbarian incredibly attractive. It’s not hard to name him.
Mr. Hot runs his fingers through my hair lightly. It’s a gentle, affectionate, knowing sort of touch. It makes a little shiver of excitement rush through me.
“You’re ours. Our pet. And we are very glad to have you back.”
Outside the window, the Earth is getting a lot smaller. It takes me a second to realize that’s because we’re moving away from it.
“Uhm. Seriously. Are you guys… are you… abducting me?”
“We’re reclaiming you,” Mr. Hot says.
“And it starts with removing this clothing that stinks of Earth,” Sharp adds.
Before I can come to terms with being stolen from the only planet I have ever known, the three of them start stripping me, removing every scrap of the clothing that stands between me and them. There’s no reason to allow them to do this, and there’s no way to stop them. They are all so much bigger and scarier and hotter, and my already skimpy clothing is no match for their huge alien hands.
“You were gone for far too long, pet,” Mr. Hot says. “I missed you. We all missed you.”
“I don’t remember… Ow!” I gasp as someone smacks my ass. I can’t tell which of the hands just made sharp contact with my ass, but it hurt.
“You are such a naughty little brat,” Mr. Hot says. “Pretending to forget us while your body clearly remembers us. Look at how you respond. How wet you are…”
He runs his hand up the inside of my leg, letting his fingers start to drift toward the apex of my thighs with carnal intention. I am still wet from the orgasm in the club, and he takes that as some sign my brain works, which makes me think he doesn’t know humans at all.
“Anybody would be wet for you,” I say, meaning to argue, but accidentally sexually complimenting him.
He grins broadly. God, he really looks like a sexy alien angel. He looks like a fucking demigod. It feels like he is twice my height, and that is before he puts me on my knees, which he does by pressing gently on my shoulders at first. I resist out of habit, because I’d never, ever kneel for anybody. I’ve spent three years creating a personality from scratch, and one of the things I definitely decided about myself is I don’t do what men want me to do. Men, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain for the last thirty-six months, are not worth the trouble of associating with.
But these are not men. And they do not follow the rules.
Behind me, Sharp takes hold of a thick fist of my hair and pulls me the rest of the way, until my knees hit the ship’s floor. I feel him kneeling behind me, a dark and dangerous carnal force that makes me quiver.
“Look at me,” Mr. Hot says. He reaches down and tilts my chin up toward him.
“Would have been easier to look at you if you didn’t decide to make me even shorter,” I say, sassy.
He smirks. I learned a lot of people don’t like being mouthed off to. I also learned I enjoy it even more when they don’t like it. This guy seems to practically expect it from me.
“Now, pet,” he says. “We’re very glad to have you back, but you should never have run away. So you know what that means?”
“Means I’m… hide and seek champion 2055?”
“No,” he snorts. “It means you’re going to be spanked for this. You’re going to be punished quite a bit, and you deserve it, so I hope you won’t throw too many tantrums. We’ll talk about why you did that later, but for now, you need to be punished.”
I can’t believe this. Their touch is making my body go repeatedly silly and making it hard to think. My knees are still like jelly from the last orgasm, but I need to defend myself. This isn’t fair. They can’t treat me like I’ve done something wrong. (But I kind of like that they’re treating me like I’ve done something wrong. It’s kind of hot.)
“I didn’t do anything! I don’t remember you!” I protest. I don’t sound quite as desperate as I might, because of the husky tone in my voice from orgasm and the little giggle that escapes because I am nervous as hell.
“That’s enough,” he says firmly. “Who do you want to punish you?”
“None of you.”
He chuckles, and I feel amusement from the Bull, too.
“Fair answer,” he says. “But there’s no getting out of this, pet. This has been years in the making, and you know it. If we didn’t do this, you’d be disappointed.”
He’s so handsome, and he seems so kind. And they made me come when they found me, so maybe this won’t be that bad.
I look around at the two in front of me. I don’t need to look at the one behind me. I already know he’s the worst. I can feel it in my fucking bones. If he gets his hands on me, I am fucked.
“Do I have to pick one of you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so,” he says firmly.
I look around, but there’s nowhere to go, and my body is still full of arousal and a strange hope that this might somehow be real. I want to know what’s going on, but they have this whole punishment going on and they don’t want to explain things like who they are, or what they want, or how we know each other.
“Pet,” he says. “Focus.”
I realize this isn’t really a hard decision. Who do I want to punish me? Who do I want to put their hands on me and show me what a bad girl I’ve apparently been?
“You,” I say.
“Me?” he confirms with a little smile.
The scary one behind me is not one I am going to choose, and the big horned one looks like he could be scary and dangerous as well. I am drawn to the barbarian.
“I choose Mr. Hot,” I say.
There’s a round of laughter. Mr. Hot crooks a brow at me and smirks broadly. “Maybe you have forgotten us,” he says. “I can’t imagine you’d ever choose me.”
“Why? Are you secretly mean?”
He smirks again, enjoying something I don’t understand. This is starting to get really frustrating.
“I don’t remember you!” My voice is a little squeaky, and a lot frustrated. “I don’t remember any of this! Did you steal me? Was I sold to you? What…”
Behind me, Sharp unfurls a silky length of cloth, which he uses to gag me so smoothly it feels practiced. They’ve made me shut up this way before. Or he has gagged a lot of girls. I don’t know which of those is true.
“I want you to listen to me,” Mr. Hot says. “We have missed you greatly, but you are going to have to pay for this. Remember that when I am punishing you.”
He picks me up and carries me through to what I can only describe as an alien lounge. There are couches, alien sized, and chairs, also alien sized, and what looks like a bar, also—you guessed it—alien sized. The furnishings are in a kind of teal blue fabric and the bar is a sort of brown wood type finish. There’s something very mid-century modern about the interiors. I almost wonder if I picked them out.
I don’t get to ask, because Mr. Hot sits down in a chair with no arms and pins me over his lap. I squirm naked and confused as he reaches out to a side table, opens it, and pulls out a small wooden brush-shaped object a few inches long and round. It’s maybe a quarter inch thick.
“Remember this?” He shows me it.
“No! That’s the point, idiot!”
There’s no more talking after that. He holds the brush in one hand, grips me with the other, and starts spanking me hard and fast.
I start yowling from the very beginning, because the first hot burst of pain shocks me. It bursts across my ass in a hot flash that is followed by a sharp ache and no part of me, flesh or mind, knows what to do with it.
I haven’t been hurt in a long time. I don’t really remember the last time I felt pain. And I absolutely do not remember the last time someone hit me. If they ever did, it was long before I woke up in that hospital. It better be anyway.
“Settle down, pet,” he says, pausing for a moment. “You’re not taking this well at all.”
I reach up and wrench the gag from my mouth. It wasn’t tied that tight and it just falls loose.
“Oh, am I not?” I bite his leg as hard as I fucking can. All I get is a mouthful of denim and muscle, and I don’t think it makes much of an impression on him because he just starts spanking me again. It feels so deeply unfair, like I’m being punished for something I didn’t do. And fuck, even if I did do it, this is fucked up.
I howl with rage until he lets me stand up, or I buck off his lap. Not sure if he meant to let me go or not. What I do know for sure is that my ass is burning and my pride is horribly bruised. I can’t fucking believe this has happened to me. I can’t fucking believe he just did that. He hit me. Like he had some right to do it?
He makes it worse by keeping on talking. These guys might be aliens, but they make the same fucking mistakes that human men make. He’s not reading the room, and he’s definitely not reading me.
“You’re ours, and maybe you have forgotten. Three years is a long time to be running free. It’s a long time to remember what happens when you disobey your owners. But I think you remember now, don’t you.”
Oh, god, he’s being smug about it. He’s talking to me with this tone like he’s in charge, and I’m some… animal he gets to punish as he wants to.
“Fuck you.” I spit the words. “Fuck you.”
Swearing at him isn’t enough. It doesn’t go anywhere toward making me feel better. So I slap him in the face. There’s a crack as my hand makes contact with his massive alien cheek. It makes absolutely no impression on him, but it makes the flat of my palm sting like hell.
“Easy,” he says, reaching for me. I don’t know what the hell he has in store for me, but I know I don’t want to find out. He’s not going to spank me again. Fuck that. I dart away, hurt, angry, and scared. I feel betrayed, like I trusted him and he did something so mean to me I won’t ever forget it.
“I told you I don’t remember!” I yell. “I don’t know who any of you are!”
I pick up a vase, or something that looks like a vase and I throw it at the barbarian. It misses him by quite a way and smashes on the floor. The sound of something shattering is satisfying, and makes me feel guilty at the same time. Weird feeling.
At that point, Sharp picks me up from behind. He loops his arm around my waist and holds me like a sack of some kind of root vegetable. The grip makes my head droop and my feet hang. It does keep pressure off my sore, naked ass, though.
“Maybe she has forgotten,” he says. “She’s acting out of character. We all know that she knows what a punishment feels like, but the way she just acted, she might as well never have been disciplined, and we know that’s not true.”
We’re next to a wall of decor, so I grab for something else. I don’t even know what it is, but I know it smashes the same way the other thing did. I guess I’m really fucking up their alien interior design today.
“Let me go!” I yell. “Take me back to Earth!”
I grab a third thing. It’s glassy and shiny and oh… it also breaks.
Sharp still has me in his grip, but there’s plenty to hand. He tries to move me away from the breakables, but the fun thing about life is just how many things can be broken if you really fucking try.
“Alright,” Sharp says. “You are coming with me, young lady.”
“Sharp…” the barbarian starts to speak.
“Don’t worry about her, Kronos. I’m not going to hurt her.”
Sharp carries me away still in that same grip. He’s so much bigger, so much taller, and I hate it so much because I know I can’t defend myself against one of them, let alone all of them. I am outnumbered and I am outweighed. I start to sob as I squirm and find it absolutely hopeless. I don’t want this. I want to be back where I feel like I have some sense of control over myself, even if I’m in a fucked-up dystopian world where the air isn’t free.
He takes me into a room with much lower lighting. Here, there’s a sort of orange glow emanating from the lower part of the walls, which are soft and rounded and earth tone. It feels like I’m in a cave. Almost immediately, I feel my heart rate slow and my tension start to flow away.
There’s a bed up against a wall at the narrowest part of the room. It has a lot of blankets piled on it, all soft and orange and yellow and brown in hue. It has sheets that are white and soft, and many pillows, enough to bury into.
Sharp releases me naked into this pile of bedding and lets me burrow into it. I dive in, pulling the blankies around me, crying to myself with a great deal of miserable self-pity.
I do that for what feels like quite a while, before I realize I never heard him leave. I poke my head out of my damp fortress and see that he is still there.
“What the fuck do you want?”
He frowns at me, and I feel my ass pulse with the memory of what it feels like to be spanked. I didn’t like that. I don’t know why the barbarian did that to me. I was being nice to him. I hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t fair…
“Quiet,” Sharp says, running his hand over my hair gently. He has scaled markings on the back of his hands and fingers. He also has them around his hairline. They’re blue and green, slightly iridescent in this low light.
“I didn’t do anything to him and he hurt me for no reason.” I start to get annoyed again, but there’s nothing to throw this time. I wish there was. I wish I could break this whole damn ship.
“You need to calm down,” Sharp says to me. “It was not for no reason. We have been searching for you for years. We thought we might never see you again. I know it hurt, but you can’t lash out like that. I thought we trained you out of breaking things.”
“Apparently not,” I say bluntly.
He smiles, just a fraction, and it softens his features and makes him look incredibly handsome for a brief moment.
“Apparently not,” he says. “You say you don’t remember us. Will you tell me what you do remember? Do you remember this room?”
“No. I don’t. This isn’t my room.”
“This is your room. It’s the place you felt the most comfortable. We installed it for you. And, to be honest, a lot of what you just broke are things you bought either for us, or you bought for yourself, or we bought for you. You smashed a lot of sentimental things.”
“Am I supposed to feel guilty about that?” I say, instantly feeling pretty guilty about the whole thing. I’ve been wanting my memories, but I’m apparently destroying them as fast as I can.
“I don’t want you to feel guilty. I’m trying to save you from feeling worse later than you do now,” he says. “Please, pet. Tell me what you do remember.”
“This is a change,” I say bitterly. “Weren’t you the one telling me I was going to pay and you weren’t going to let me get away with it? And then I chose him because I thought he’d be nice, and…” I let out a little sob.
“You really don’t remember much,” Sharp says with just a hint of something like amused pity.
“I don’t remember anything. I woke up three years ago in a hospital in Zeal’s New New York, and I didn’t know anything about myself. That’s it. Since then I’ve just been getting by. Doing work. Selling pills. Then you guys showed up and hit me.”
He frowns at me. “You really don’t recall anything prior to the hospital?”
“No. Somebody melted my mind. They can do that now. They have all kinds of toys. They can fuck with your brain. It’s known. I was trying to get my memories back, but it’s really expensive and I couldn’t sell enough pills.”
“Okay,” he says, running his hand through my hair and scratching my scalp lightly. “It’s okay. We’ve come for you now, and you’re safe again.”
“Am I? I don’t feel safe. He hit me! Really hard! Does he do that often?”
“You used to take a lot more than that,” Sharp says. “We’re used to you needing to be corrected roughly and thoroughly.”
I peer at him from the blankets, scowling quite furiously. “You used to do that to me all the time? No wonder I ran away and blanked my mind.”
“You think you did this to yourself?”
“I don’t know. That’s the thing about not being able to remember. You can’t remember.”
There’s salt in my tone, and it makes his scaled brow rise a fraction in a warning I somehow feel very low in my stomach.
“I don’t know,” I repeat in another, less aggressive tone. “I don’t know me, and I definitely don’t know you.”
“Alright. Get some rest. We’ll talk and decide what to do with you.”
The arrogance is extreme. How dare they decide what to do with me, as if I am some possession to be managed and handled. I’m going to make them regret coming for me, I decide. If I ran away from them once, I can do it again. And this time, I’ll make damn fucking sure they don’t come after me.
“Who the fuck are you people? What are your names?”
“I’m Sharp,” he says. “The one who spanked your ass is Kronos and the one with the horns is Boss.”
“Is Boss in charge?”
“Not really,” he says. “We have a flat management structure. There is no true captain.”
“So I am also in charge, as much as any of you?”
“Oh, no,” he says with a sexy, indulgent smile. “You’re our pet. We look after you, and in return, you occasionally do what you’re told.”
The door opens and Kronos, the alien who just beat my ass comes in.
I have an animal urge to hiss at him and retreat into my blanket burrow, so I do both those things. I don’t know how I ever stood being handled that way by them. I hope I made his life hell before I ran away. Stupid sexy beautiful mean alien.
“Pet? I’m sorry that hurt you so much,” Kronos says. “I didn’t want to frighten you.”
“I wasn’t frightened. It hurt. Idiot,” I answer from inside my blankets, treating them like an invincible alien force field.
“Your mouth has gotten coarse over the years,” he says. “You must have suffered.”
“I’ve been having a really good time, actually,” I say. “I’ve been in the club most of the time. I’ve been dancing every night, partying, enjoying myself. I haven’t remembered or missed anything, and I’ve definitely not been hit by any massive aliens who want to hurt me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. “I thought you were misbehaving. And you did choose me to punish you.”
“I didn’t know that’s what was going to happen,” I whimper. “I told you I don’t remember.”
“You used to lie a lot,” he says. “I thought you might be lying again.”
“I’m not lying! I’m not a liar! Fuck you!” I curse. He has all these reasons, but he still did what he did and that was not okay.
“Okay, pet?” he says. “I am trying to take care of you, but for someone who doesn’t like being punished, you are practically begging for another punishment. You are acting like a spoiled little girl.”
“And you’re acting like a massive fucking asshole,” I shoot back.
The blankets get pulled off me at that point.
Sharp and Kronos look down at me sternly. I make a rude gesture at them both.
“I forgot how much trouble she is,” Kronos says to Sharp.
“Absolutely constant,” Sharp says.
“Take me back and let me go,” I say.
“Never.”
They reply in unison.
“I hate you,” I say. “I hate you both, but especially you, Krogor.”
“Kronos,” he says, reaching for me and picking me up. I bite him as hard as I can, and to my surprise I actually leave a ring of teeth on his arm.
Sharp takes me from him. “I have scales, pet,” he says. “And all that will happen if you keep throwing this tantrum is you will blunt your pretty teeth.”
Sharp holds me against his chest in a hug and sits down with me on the bed again. I try to resist being comforted by this alien, but when you’re upset, you lean into anything that feels good. I am so exhausted, so scared, and so sore. When he starts to rub my ass, it feels good. Like he’s soothing some of the ache away.
“We’ve got to treat her like she has full amnesia,” he says over my head. “We need to get her to a vet and see if there’s anything that can be done.”
“Agreed,” Kronos says. “I feel bad about spanking her that hard.”
“Don’t,” Sharp replies.
“No! Do!” I pipe up.
Sharp’s hand pats my ass gently, and I fall silent again.
“She needed to know what it feels like to be disciplined,” he says. “She’d forgotten that, too.”
“I am right here,” I mutter. “You’re talking about me like I have no ears, not no memories.”
“You should hear this too,” Sharp says to me. “You should understand how we are with you, and how you are treated. You’re a very naughty creature at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.”
“Can I hold her?”
Kronos sounds like a little boy asking for a puppy.
Sharp releases me a little, but I recoil from the barbarian.
“Come here,” he says, reaching for me. “I promise I won’t spank you again.”
I reluctantly let him pull me away from Sharp, and draw me into his big, muscular arms. He cuddles me close and rubs my butt, and it doesn’t hurt that bad anymore. His hands are big and warm and almost human in the way they feel. I’m still angry at him, but something inside me tells me he will make me feel better. I’m giving him the chance to soothe me, and it’s kind of working.
“You were wet when I was spanking you,” he says. “Do you want me to make you feel better?”
“Is that another one of your trick questions?”
His fingers are drifting up the inside of my thighs very lightly, the tips of them making my pussy clench. I’m saying what I think I should say, but I’m not saying what I feel. I want him to make me feel better. All the way better.
I let out a light moan, and he lays me down on the bed. He is on one side, and Sharp is on the other. I am facing Kronos as the pair of them start to touch me all over, giving me a gentle massage that finds all the right places.
A flickering tongue curls around my earlobe, sending pulses of excitement through me as Kronos’ fingers run very lightly over my clit and back down to the entrance of my sex.
I am blushing with embarrassment, because this feels very, very intimate with complete strangers. I am acting like one of the Real Women TM. I’m making myself available and allowing myself to be exposed by them.
“I like the way your ass looks when it is bright red from a well-deserved spanking,” Sharp growls in my ear. “You might not like being punished because you’ve always been a brat who wants her own way, but it looks good on you.”
He emphasizes the point by slapping my ass. It’s not hard enough to hurt, but it is hard enough to sting and reignite some of what Kronos did to me earlier. My hips jolt forward, onto his fingers.
“I want to fuck her,” Kronos says. “But I’m afraid I’ll be too rough.”
“She hasn’t earned a fucking yet,” Sharp says, his tone slipping back into that stern register. “She needs to behave herself before she has our cocks inside her. Good pets get fucked. Bad little pets get spanked and teased and sent to bed wet.”
“No!” I gasp, as if he just said the worst thing in the world.
Both alien men chuckle at me.
“Our little pet gets so grumpy if she’s not allowed to come,” Sharp says.
“Oh, I know.” Kronos pats my pussy affectionately, then gives it enough of a rub to make me squirm.
I am getting sleepy. I’d been up all day anyway; it was like three in the morning when I got abducted. And now I have been petted and made to come, and punished, and now soothed. I really am so tired. Maybe I will be put to bed wet.
In the liminal space between waking and sleep, memory floods my mind…
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