Chapter 8 #2
“I wouldn’t fuck you if you had the last penis in the universe,” I tell him.
Right at that moment, Thor grips me by the back of the neck, his hand curling in the fabric of my shirt.
“Stay away from him, or you’ll have a sore ass again,” he says, his firm lecturing in quite sharp contrast to Drako’s intense sexual threats.
“She doesn’t want to be babied,” Drako says. “She wants a baby put in her. She won’t respect you until you dominate her pussy.”
“If sex was enough to make her behave herself, she’d be submissive already,” Thor says.
“Not the right kind of sex. You want to survive this world? You need to untie me. If something comes in the night and eats me, you’ve given me no opportunity to defend myself. Pretty evil, wouldn’t you say?”
I realize, to my complete horror, that Drako is actually going to talk Thor into letting him go. He’s appealing to his honor, and to his notion that we are safer in numbers. That does not apply when one of you is an absolute psycho.
“You have yourself, and a woman you can’t control, and you’re keeping your greatest potential asset trussed. I already showed you what could be eaten. You’ve filled your belly because of me.”
“Because I forced you to tell me on pain of your own death.”
Drako laughs. “We are all as good as dead. This world devours everything with a spark of life. Why do you think it remains unsettled? There are colonies further past it lightyears in every direction. But every expedition that lands here, disappears.”
“We thought that’s because Vikar forces were shooting down anything that came near it.”
“That’s only part of the reason, brother,” Drako says.
Oh, so fucking smooth with the brother talk.
Making Thor think they are on the same team.
It’s a masterclass in manipulation. Drako is even more dangerous than I gave him credit for to begin with.
He’s brutal, but he’s not the kind of monster who only uses force.
He understands when a softer touch is required.
“If you let him go, it will be the dumbest thing you ever did,” I say. “And command will want to know why. Assuming any of us live long enough to face them.”
“And that’s it, isn’t it,” Drako chortles. “None of us are guaranteed to see another day. So you can hold to whatever you might imagine command might say, but my guess is, they’d tell you to survive.”
“If you make one wrong move, we will kill you,” Thor says.
“Yes, I’m sure. Now untie me, before the night hunters start gathering and each of us has our throats ripped out.”
“Don’t…” I say, trailing off before the sentence even gets a chance to get started. Thor’s going to do it anyway. Drako has appealed to the part of him that is logical and fearful at the same time, and that’s a hard sell to beat.
Thor is already on his knees, undoing the knots I put in place when I set the snare.
The fury I feel at being ignored cannot be easily described.
I caught our greatest enemy, and now Thor is just going to let him fucking go because he’s pretending to help us.
Obviously this is going to go terribly badly.
I back into the canopy, out of the light of the fire.
I know I will blend with the forest most effectively this way.
I am pissed. I almost don’t care that the woods are full of predatory things.
I don’t see that much prey in this world and that, to me, indicates that there probably aren’t that many predators either.
I watch from as deep in the shadows as I dare, as Drako shakes off his bindings and stands up.
The two of them make quite an impressive pair. Drako’s thick tattoos running over biceps and chest are even more remarkable for the fact that they are in stark contrast to Thor’s clean lines.
I could think that Drako was all bad, and Thor was all good. The two of them look like two sides of a particularly sexy coin, if you don’t think about what they do, or why they do it.
I wait for Drako to immediately attack Thor. It doesn’t happen. They are talking to one another, but I can’t hear the words. That’s the problem with having put distance between us.
I creep a little closer to try to pick up the content of their conversation. Their words are low and rumbling and the actual messages are still lost.
“She’s going to be the biggest liability if she’s not brought to heel,” Drako is saying.
“I know. She was a stowaway on our ship. Crept on at selection and hid herself until we’d taken off. It’s never happened before. Captain beat her and threw her in the brig and it had absolutely no effect on her as far as I can tell.”
“That’s because you can’t beat the nature out of a thing,” Drako says.
“You can bring submission out in a submissive person, obedience out of an obedient person, violence out of a violent one… but when a woman is rebellious and headstrong by nature, all punishment ever does is buy a little time. Unfortunately for her, that’s all we need to do. ”
To hell with these two. I am not going to stay with them. I might trail them, but it’s obvious that the dynamic of two against one is already established and will do me no favors.
If Thor wants to consort with the enemy of our state, he’s welcome to do so. I won’t be forgetting who I am just because I’m stranded on a scary planet.
“Where did she go?” Thor looks around.
I hold my breath in an effort to ensure I do not laugh. The absolute cluelessness of these two, talking about me as if I was not there only to realize that I wasn’t. Did they think I’d stay to be discussed like an object? Ridiculous premise.
“Girl, if you don’t get out here this moment, I will drag you out of the bush and make you regret everything you’ve ever done,” Drako threatens me. He’s not looking in my direction, though. He doesn’t know where I went. He couldn’t see me leave because he was behind Thor.
I stay right where I am.
Fuck him.
Thor will kill him if he touches me. I am sure of it.
A moment or two later, Drako walks around the perimeter of the clearing. He is still not appearing to look at me directly, and I am pretty sure he does not know where I am. The light from the fire is creating a barrier of darkness in which both men stand. They cannot look out, but I can look in.
“I can smell you,” he says, looking in completely the wrong direction.
He is such a ridiculous creature. He thinks he is so above it all, so strong and so competent. But he just sat there while his entire crew got eaten, and Thor snuck me away out from under his nose. So he’s not infallible. He makes mistakes. A lot of them.
He walks into the forest, but not where I am.
He’s no longer in my field of view, which makes me a little nervous.
But I stay very still and I try to stop making noise of any kind.
I crouch down close to the ground and I watch the shadows.
I can’t hear the crackling of twigs, or the swishing of leaves.
It’s like he walked into the forest and just fucking disappeared.
To say I am surprised when a hand grips me by the back of the neck, and I am dragged into the clearing kicking and squealing, is an understatement. My adrenaline is instantly pumping from the shock of being captured so swiftly.
“I put you on your knees once and you escaped. You won’t escape again, because this time, he will not save you,” Drako says, dragging me into the very center of the clearing, next to the fire.
I look over at Thor with a helpless, pleading expression designed to activate his chivalrous instincts. Surely he will not allow this.
“Time to make a decision,” Drako says, still holding me by the back of the neck, and directing his attention at Thor.
“What’s that?” Thor asks.
“Do you want to be the good guy who gets walked all over by a scrap of a girl half his size, or do you want to be the one who makes sure she survives by any means necessary?”
“I want her alive,” Thor says pretty much immediately. Gods, I cannot believe how he falls for Drako’s shit. Drako would do very well as an appliance salesman, if this whole, leading war crews who get eaten thing doesn’t pan out for him.
“Then she needs to be put in her place,” Drako says. “She doesn’t know what that is right now, but she will. It’s up to both of us to ensure it. Do you want to coddle her, or tell her off, or do you want to give her the show of force she needs in order to understand?”
I see Thor shift slightly.
“What does a show of force entail?”
“Nothing that will scar her,” Drako starts off encouragingly. “Not physically anyway.”
That part is less encouraging.
“She has to learn to obey. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to keep her safe.
And talking to her, appealing to her common sense, that does nothing.
She just walked right into the dark because she didn’t like your decision to untie me.
That could mean death for us all if the wrong creature happens upon her.
This is a ruthless planet. There are no second chances. ”
“I’ll handle her,” Thor says.
“Will you? Have you not tried to do so already? Has the result not been this sort of thing? This dangerously rebellious bullshit that makes it seem as though she does not care if she lives or dies?”
Thor rumbles somehow without saying a word.
“Do what you have to do,” he says once he finds language again.
“No!” I cry out. “I can’t believe you’re doing this again. You let the captain take me, and then you were sorry about that. This guy is going to be so much worse…”
“You are so much worse,” Thor says. “You are out of control.”
“I’m not supposed to be in control!”
“Quiet,” Drako says. “There are better things for you to be doing with your mouth than arguing with your masters.”
He moves his grip from the back of my neck to my chin.
“Open your mouth,” he says, unzipping his pants.
“Thor!” I call his name. He’s surely going to intervene.