Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 61982 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61982 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
“What would happen if I ate it?”
“You’d be ill, and depending how much you ate, you might even not survive it. So. Human rations only. Understand?”
I tap her nose gently to emphasize the point, which makes her smile.
“I get it,” she says.
* * *
Evie
His food smells so delicious I can barely stand it. My gruel, by comparison, is barely edible. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the prospect of just eating this for the next few months makes me absolutely miserable. I love food. I love all kinds of food. I love savory. I love sweet. I love meat. I love vegetables. I love… I can’t stop thinking about all the things I’d have if I could have them. And then there’s him, Arkon, downing what looks like a truly delicious plate of rolled-up dried meats.
“I can’t have any of that?”
“These come from a toxic predator,” he says. “There’s a venom that we’ve adapted to be able to metabolize over the years.”
“But how do you know I don’t have the metabolic stuff to do it too? I might? It smells so nice.”
It smells like bacon and eggs and Sunday morning and a flea market where you buy a baguette and some fresh butter that was churned by hand and had garlic salt added to it by a ruddy-cheeked farm maid.
I want, more than anything, to eat his breakfast.
I know he already said no, but I suspect that it’s going to be good for me. I wouldn’t want to eat this so badly if it wasn’t. He’s being overly overprotective about everything. He’s trying to stop me from enjoying something yummy.
He gets up to deal with something business-y, and I take my opportunity. I am good at thieving, I remind myself as I sneak my hand across the table and…
“No!” he says, picking me up by the scruff and swinging me about. Two of his hands land on my ass at the same time, delivering two hard, simultaneous spanks.
I cry out in shock. I can’t believe he’s just smacked me. The pain isn’t really that bad, but the fact he did it is setting my whole body aflame.
“I told you not to do that, and you did it as soon as you could,” he lectures. “Unbelievable.”
He has me up off the floor, dangling from his powerful hands, and two more slaps land.
“Here I was, thinking you could behave properly and be obedient and you were waiting for the first opportunity to poison yourself? You are going to be caged for your own safety.”
“No! Please!”
He swings me around to face him and I look into his face, then wish I hadn’t because the expression there is thunderously disappointed, as if I have betrayed him in a way he cannot forgive.
“I cannot trust you to act in a way that does not endanger yourself,” he says. “The collar and leash are going back on.”
“No,” I whine.
But that does not matter. He carries me through to the bedroom where he left both of those items from the ship.
“I will have to get a proper set of these for you,” he says, murmuring more to himself than to me. “And a proper cage. And some kind of tracking chip. Better to have something embedded. And obviously being lax on the discipline was a mistake…”
I try to squirm out of his grip, but I fail. He is holding me close, he is much stronger than I am, and he has all those extra hands with which to keep a hold on me and put the collar around my neck.
It’s not done when that thing snaps into place though, not like I hoped it was. Then he pins me down on the bed, one hand on the back of my neck as he rustles around in a drawer looking for something I know I’m not going to like.
“Stay in position,” he says, his voice deep with authority. “Hips up, legs spread, face down.”
He puts me into that position with three of his hands while the fourth holds the thing that’s concerning.
I whimper excuses, but they stop when one of his hands wraps around my mouth. “I don’t want to hear a word out of you,” he says. “I was very clear. Very reasonable. And I was trying to keep you safe. You decided not to listen, to test me, and now you get to discover what happens when you disobey.”
I feel a crack against my ass. A finger-thin strap has just been applied to my cheeks hard, and it is not the only one. A dozen of them have made rough contact with my ass before I can take a breath with which to protest. My ass feels like it’s aflame. There’s a pulsing ache where each of those slaps landed.
“Pain is an excellent teacher,” he says. “And I will give you plenty of pain if you deserve it. Learn that now, human, and learn it well.”