Chapter 12 #3
The absolute fury I feel hearing those words makes my blood run cold and ensures that I have absolutely no lingering sentiment for this monster. He played the role of survivor with us well enough, but the moment he had an advantage, he became cold and ruthless and brutal all over again.
I grab the knife we’ve used to kill and skin animals and I tuck it away under one arm, holding it by the hilt.
“I’ll come out!” I say. “But only if you promise not to hurt him.”
“We can seal two in a cave as easily as one,” Drako says. Thor and I look at one another.
“God, he is such a bitch,” I say, making sure it is loud enough for Drako to hear.
I wonder if he’s playing it up for his little Vikar friends.
He can’t show them that he bonded with us, so like a boy beating up his favorite teddy to prove he’s not a kid anymore, he’s going to publicly bully us.
He has no idea how weak that really makes him look.
“Seal me up! I say. “I’d rather die than see your ugly face again.”
There’s a short burst of laughter from outside the cave. I don’t think it’s from Drako. I think I just got a laugh from his boys. That’s got to hurt.
I might not be good at survival tactics, but I grew up with two sisters, so I know how to hit someone where it hurts.
“Come out right now, and the public beating you get will be given with your underwear on,” Drako drawls. “Keep talking back to me, and you’ll be stripped in front of my crew and…”
“Boring!” I interject in the middle of his threat. “I might care if I were naked in front of a lot of people, but your clan aren’t people. You’re animals. It would be no different than being naked in front of my pets.”
“By the gods,” Thor groans. He’s not actively stopping me from talking, but I can tell he doesn’t think this is a good idea.
“I’m going to cut your boyfriend’s cock off if you don’t come out this second.”
Oh, poor Drako. He must have felt such a surge of satisfaction at having realized he had us cornered, but his shit talk game is weak.
“Makes sense. It’s bigger than yours. Sew it on and improve yourself as a man.”
Again that muffled laughter comes from people who know they’re not supposed to be laughing, but can’t stop it.
“You’re going to get us both killed,” Thor says, though he is smiling too.
“At least we’ll go out with a bang,” I say. “Not from Drako though! Because his penis is inadequate!”
“Holy shit. I don’t think I have ever heard the word inadequate used to quite such devastating effect,” Thor snorts.
We are having a good time again. I know that any moment, that good time is going to violently end and terrible things will happen to us and we’ll be powerless to stop them, but that’s why asserting any kind of rebellion feels so good in this moment.
When someone has you cornered and fucked up, there’s nothing as powerful as letting them know you still don’t care about them.
“Come out. Now. Girl first. If I have to say it again, we will come in full force.” Drako tries to act serious to reclaim some kind of gravitas. I am doing more damage to his reputation from inside this cave than I bet anybody has done to him in years. Maybe decades.
“Don’t act like you know how to come in anything with that little cock,” I shout back.
“Selene!” Drako yells, losing his temper and his patience at the same time. “Out here. Now.”
“Fine. I’m coming. Just don’t hurt Thor. Promise you won’t be mean.”
“Little girl, I am always mean. Come out. Now!”
“Wish me luck,” I say, beginning to shuffle out of the cave. I know Thor wants to protect me, but all that will happen if he goes out first is he will probably be killed where he stands.
I am well aware that what I do next will determine whether or not either one of us survives.
I creep into the light of day and find Drako standing in front of the cave in full Vikar regalia.
He is wearing tall boots that come to his knee, black and fur-lined.
His leggings are likewise black, probably leather, and there is a long coat that covers them almost all the way to the boots.
That coat is also black and fur-lined, but cinched enough that it makes the most of his broad shoulders and powerful waist. He towers above me, his long dark hair tied back in a braid, his beard likewise tamed.
His glinting blue eyes regard me with cold triumph.
He reaches for me and drags me toward him, one hand at my collar.
“You think that was funny?” he says calmly. “You are going to pay for that disrespect.”
And that is when I stab him.
He didn’t suspect a knife. Didn’t think I’d have any ability to defend myself.
He assumed I’d come out of that cave as useless and passive as he always imagined me to be.
That was a mistake he will not soon recover from.
The knife goes into the space where his neck, his shoulder, and his heart all meet.
It pierces his ribcage and probably splinters a rib on the way in.
He drops me and I fall to the ground, spattered in an arc of his blood. It is warm, and the warmth is pleasant for many reasons.
His men move quickly. Two train weapons on me, bayonets in my face. The need to affix a blade to a gun has always fascinated me. I always thought it was stupid and redundant. Now I get it. They’re very intimidating.
“Leave her!” Drako says. “Arrest her, but don’t hurt her.”
“She stabbed you.”
“Hardly. Barely. I am fine,” he says, lying. His face is pale. Probably shock, but it’s also possible I hit something important. I hope I did. I hope it hurts like fucking hell.
“I’m not going to let this little thing think she has the ability to affect me,” he mutters to his men. “I’m fine.”
One of his subordinates tries to talk some sense into him. “She’s done some damage, sir. It’s going to need medical attention.”
“Obviously. She fucking stabbed me,” Drako deadpans.
The knife is still in him, because all these soldiers have done their first aid courses and know better than to try to retrieve an object in the body. That should always be done by medical personnel in a sterile and controllable situation.
“We need to get back to the ship. Call the shuttle. Get the man out of the hole and make damn sure he’s not armed,” Drako says, as if the fact he didn’t check to see if I was armed was also somehow their failing.
I am then put under arrest, Thor is taken out of our camp hole, and we are both put on a shuttle bound for the Vikar mothership.
Drako was going to spend the whole time gloating and maybe monologuing, but he sits down in a chair very carefully and avoids eye contact with me for the duration of the very short voyage.
It would be funny, if not for the fact that our lives are genuinely very much at risk. He might kill Thor in retaliation.
When we reach the mothership, we are separated.
Drako goes off to have his stab wound looked at, and Thor and I are taken to different places.
I don’t know where they take him. Me, I end up in a small bedroom.
It’s not a cell. It has too many furnishings for that.
It’s also not Drako’s quarters, because it’s only slightly larger than a shoebox.
I get a little sleep, because I am fucking exhausted, so one way or another, it is not all that long before Drako comes to see me. He has more color in his cheeks, and he has been patched up.
“Looks like you’re going to live,” I say upon seeing him. “What a pity.”
“Last time I saw you, you were trying to save my life, thinking I was going to be taken to your city and hung,” Drako says. “And today, you almost killed me.”
“I did?”
“No need to sound excited about it,” he says. “That was an incredibly dangerous thing to do.”
“I know. That is why I did it.” I pause for a moment, cocking my head to the side. “Did you ever really know me at all? Because if you did, me doing something impulsive and dangerous is very on brand. Especially in a situation where I have nothing to lose.”
“You have a lot to lose. Thor’s life hangs in the balance of your behavior.”
“Well, he’s fucked then, isn’t he,” I say with a flippancy I do not really feel. That thought makes me sick. I could be controlled forever with threats to Thor’s safety. They could hurt him to punish me. That is truly sick, and not even in a hot way.
“Do you want me dead, Selene? Have you lost all affection for me? Have you allowed him to brainwash you into hating me?”
I snort at the last part. “Thor’s not really the brainwashing kind.”
“Of course he is. Always about proper this and appropriate that. He turned you in when he discovered you were a stowaway…”
“To be fair to him, I was causing a serious error in the ship’s computers, and trying to fix it was causing more problems. That might even have been why your Vikar ship snuck up on us. We weren’t paying attention. Because of the glitches. Because of me.”
“So you think he did the right thing now?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, it doesn’t matter. It’s in the past. I don’t think he’d do it now.”
“Interesting. I think he would.”
“Well, that’s fine because your opinion doesn’t count.”
In an instant I find myself pinned on my back on the bed, Drako’s good hand at my throat as he leans over me.
“You were brave in that cave,” he says. “But there’s not several feet of rock between you and me now. Take that into account when you speak.”
I wish I didn’t feel sexual thrill pulsing deep in my belly as I am manhandled, but I can’t help responding to him with a kind of animal instinct.
He is dangerous, he is wounded, and he is in complete control of me.
Thor cannot help me now. The world in which we evaded Drako has gone, and a new one exists now, where I am Drako’s captive prisoner.
“What kind of punishment do you think you should suffer for stabbing me, hmm?” He murmurs the question while looking down at me. “See, sweet little thing, I already had quite the lineup of penances for you to perform, and then you went and behaved so badly, all of them feel a little trite.”
“I was defending myself,” I say. “It’s allowed.”
My hips are instinctively rising as he stands over me, and I know he is not missing that motion. I am so wound up by the adrenaline of being caught, of fighting, and then of being captured. All that energy has to go somewhere, and it wants to manifest sexually.
“Everything is allowed,” Drako murmurs. “All things are permitted. But the consequences for them are often unpleasant.”
I had forgotten how intoxicating his presence is.
There is a darkness in this man. He does not deny it, as some weaker men would.
He doesn’t pretend it is not there even as it is on full display for all who know him.
He wields it artfully like a rapier, and I feel myself being seduced by him and his energy without him having to bother to touch me at all.
“I missed you,” I whisper softly.
He looks into my eyes, searching to see if I am telling the truth or trying to manipulate him.
Then he remembers, I don’t have the constitutional wherewithal to do manipulation.
I tell the truth, always, impulsively. When I am happy, I smile.
When I think something is funny, I laugh.
When I am angry, I stab a guy. And when I find myself immersed in his essence and remember how the chemistry between us works, I tell him I missed him.
“I missed you too,” he says. “You are messed up in that head of yours, aren’t you. You don’t know who or what to be loyal to. You’re Thor’s good girl, running about in ditches with him, following his every order, breathing in mud if he tells you…”
“How did you know about all that?”
“Surveillance footage,” he says. “We didn’t see it at the time, but we reviewed it later. We had a network of drones across this side of the planet. You were never going to escape. Watching you try was amusing to us all.”
I feel a surge of embarrassment and humiliation. We were never going to escape. They let us run to toy with us, the same way a cat lets a mouse run, because it is amusing to see how it might try to get away.
I think perhaps we knew that on some level, Thor and I. But we did our best in case there was some slim chance of what we might call escape.
“You love us both,” Drako says. “But you’re not the same person with each of us.”
“That’s not true. You just bring out the stabby in me,” I say.
Drako reaches down and cups me between my legs, squeezing my pussy in a brutish kind of way that satisfies some need of mine immediately and makes me both relax against the bed and moan. I am far too easily sexually controlled, and we both know it.
He speaks, the devil that he is, and he makes me that kind of offer.
“I am willing to let him live, if you promise to be good for me.”
“But you don’t want me to be good for you…”
“And there, little one, is the problem,” Drako agrees.
He massages my pussy while thinking.
“Let me make another arrangement,” he says. “You accept the punishments you are due, and I allow Thor to live.”
He knows he can say and do whatever he wants right now. I want Thor to live more than I want anything. More than I want to go home again, and I want that badly too.
“Deal,” I say, because it is the only thing I can say. I have to accept whatever terms he offers me, and this is likely the fairest I am going to get.
“Then come with me, and take your punishment, and know that it is essential for us both to play our roles in this thing.” He slides his hand away from my sex and offers me it instead to take as he helps me rise.
Very gentlemanly, given he only has one properly functioning arm thanks to my earlier stabbing.
I don’t know why Drako seems slightly reluctant to punish me. He loves any excuse to be sadistic. It’s quite literally his whole thing.
“What’s wrong? Did you miss me?”
Drako turns to me, his eyes bright under dark brows. “In your absence, I discovered that I had come to love you, and that I would have torn this planet apart atom by atom if it were necessary, to find you.”
“Oh,” I say.
“You do not need to tell me you love me,” he says. “Save it, if it is true. After all, I am about to do a series of terrible and entirely unseemly things to you.” He flashes that dark, rakish grin, and I feel myself melt.