I palm the gun as I smooth my palms over my breasts. He is smiling, leering. He is enjoying the bare sight of me. Human men love breasts. Dinavri men have a thing for bare bellies. The belly is the most vulnerable point on their anatomy, and they tend to be fascinated by the exceptional vulnerability of a human belly, which has not even a layer of toughened skin to protect it.
He steps forward into range.
“So pretty,” he murmurs, extending his palm toward my belly. I feel his scaled fingers make contact with my body. He's surprisingly warm. They must have put themselves under heat lamps before taking over the ship.
I lift my hand and press the snub nose of the pistol into his belly in turn. It meets armor plating, but that doesn't matter and we both know it. If I pull this trigger, I will put a hole in him the size of a dinner plate, and large as he is, that will be fatal.
“Turn this ship around," I tell him firmly but calmly. “Take me back to the nearest dock, and I will let you go.”
He blinks slowly, that golden gaze so very disconcerting. He is very alien. The Dinavri are notoriously alien. It is why all our diplomatic efforts have failed. They are unpredictable because their priorities do not mirror human desires the way we instinctively expect. Sithren tilts his head to the side and regards me with interest, not anger, and definitely not fear.
“If you do pull the trigger, you may kill me. But you will find yourself surrounded by six Dinavri warriors. Two at the controls now, four in the other room, all of whom have been instructed to kill you in the most painful and humiliating way possible in the event of my death. Can you imagine what that might be like?”
Unfortunately, I can imagine. I have seen atrocities in my time the likes of which are absolutely unrepeatable. I see them when I close my eyes and in my dreams.
“Give me the weapon,” he orders firmly.
I want to squeeze the trigger so badly I can barely stop myself. What happens next, happens next. They could try to hurt me, but I would still be armed.
“I could kill you all with this.”
“No. You couldn’t. Do you know how I know you couldn’t?”
“How?”
He leans in, his voice more threatening than ever.
“Because you haven’t.”
He swats the gun out of my hand like I am a petulant brat, and swiftly tosses me over his lap, sitting down where I once reclined.
“That was very foolish, and more likely to get you hurt than you might imagine,” he growls. “You must be more careful. You are precious. I have not had the opportunity to make you hurt in all the delicious ways you deserve to hurt yet. Do not deprive the both of us of that pleasure.”
His palm meets my ass in a hard stroke, knocking the pride out of me. I scream, and I don’t know why because I never scream. Screaming is what people do when they’re not familiar with fear and pain, and those two things are all I have ever known.
“When I get you back home, you will kneel with my other wives. You will obey me in all things. You will be an example to the Authority of the power of the Dinavri, and they will know that they’ll be broken just as you have been.”
Every word is accompanied by a slap, and every slap not only sends bright heat flashing through my flesh, it makes me somehow smaller. I feel myself shrinking mentally while he grows in equal proportion, becoming a larger, more dangerous thing. One of his officers has swept my gun away, of course. Now Sithren is stripping me of the rest of my attire, taking every little bit of modesty along with my dignity.
I know I have to keep him at bay somehow. I can’t let him rattle me. This juvenile treatment should be easy enough to resist. It’s just a spanking. It’s far from the worst pain I have ever felt and it is certainly not as humiliating as other things I have endured.
I am still shocked that Sithren came all this way for me and risked so much. And for what? To spank me? All my intelligence suggests that a human woman left to the mercy of a Dinavri lord will be ravaged in very short measure.
A half dozen slaps have landed so far, and then another dozen follow. He is not just spanking me. He is baring me and thrashing me. I can feel my pants clinging to my shins uselessly. Every other part of me is displayed. He has likely never seen a human female naked before, and certainly never touched one. A flash of concern spikes through me at the idea that he won’t know how to handle me and might cause untold damage simply through ignorance. We do not have the same physical resilience the Dinavri do.