Page 7 of Tortured

This one seems roughed up pretty bad and my hands clench as I wish I allowed my men to take more time on the pieces of filth that carried these women off.

She shifts in the tube and I glare at Gardon. “Why is she moving? You are not hurting her, are you?”

He glares at me, his deep, black eyes narrowing. “Have I ever seemed like I hurt females for pleasure, my Captain? She’s hurting, yes. But it’s fear not pain. She’s in a stasis that’s being held in place with a painkiller and a sedative. Trust me. She is fine. Or as fine as a woman that’s taken the beatings that she has.”

Her golden eyes are closed and her light hair is matted with dirt and blood to her head. She’s tiny but graced with flared hips and a small waist that my hands loved touching. Scraps of fabric are all that’s left of her shiny, dark blue dress. It’s dirty and there’s what feels like miles of pale skin bared to my eyes. Unfortunately, that skin is traced with patterns of dark bruises and cuts that make me wince. It seems like she has hundreds of them along her limbs and I’m mystified by that.

These granthing filth were looking to make a fast amount of credits and the only way they could do that is if their cargo was in reasonably good shape.

“Gardon, why is this female so injured? Are the other ones in the same shape? I move around the room and eye the other females in stasis. All of them are different. Tall and slender or curvy and short. Dark, short hair and long, light hair. One of them has skin with almost no color like the finest Fanduna flowers. Her hair is short and wild and untamed, gleaming like the sunsets at home.

Gardon shakes his head when I come to the last one. She fidgets in the z-tube and her heart rate fluctuates like a wild thing. Her full lips twist and she moans like a hurt animal.

“No, Commander. A few small bruises here and there but there is nothing major other than on the small, light-haired one that you carried.” He nods at the woman in front of me. “There is one that’s in worse shape but I don’t think it’s physical. She’s apparently more traumatized than the others and I’m not sure why.”

My brows lift and I grunt under my breath. “Have any of them been touched physically?”

He shakes his head, his lavender hair settling around his broad shoulders. “No. Not that I can find. I think they were looking forward to a large amount of credits but they wouldn’t get those if the females were not relatively free from injuries of all kinds.”

“They are intact?”

His lips lift. “I don’t think they all are. As a matter of fact, that one might have had small ones.” He points to the one I carried and I wince.

“Vreck!” That complicates things. I can try and petition the council to get her home but I know how they think and once someone has been exposed to the intricacies of the galaxy around them, they don’t like to return them as they may tell their friends or loved ones of our existence and that would not be good. The council fights that with all the power that they have.

We don’t need the lower beings on Earth finally realizing that they’re not alone and trying to make their way to the darker regions of the galaxy looking to find us. Any of us.

He comes to stand beside the one in the tube in front of me and his hand gently caresses the machinery like he’s touching her soft skin. His lips twist when she curls in on herself and moans, whining, her arms coming up to wrap around herself. He adjusts the meds and she stills, her face pale, her heart rate jumping and falling rapidly.

“This one is very bad. Her head is not here. I saw her eyes and it was quite clear that there was nothing in there. She hasn’t been eating as evidenced by her bones and weight.”

I can see her ribs sticking out and her wrists are so slender and pale that she looks like she would break from the slightest contact.

“Is she going to recover?” I ask quietly, not sure if I want to know the answer. I’ve seen many enemies die, some at my own hands. But the thought of bearing witness to an innocent’s death is a special form of hell that I’ve witnessed before on our home planet, when we were invaded by a neighboring tribe. That day changed all of our lives in some way.

I lost my entire family at the enemy’s hands and I really hate to bear witness to another death in this way.

He runs another scan over her and shakes his head. “I do not know. I think that it is shock but it is so deep into her mind that I’m just not sure if she’ll ever come out of it.”

Pity fills me at the horrible waste of a female that could be another male’s. That he’ll never get to know that his future faded away to nothing at her loss.

Our males have one female that is made for them although we do not stay pure until we find that female. All of us are free to enjoy the pleasures of the body with another female. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t long for that female that is our whole world.

“Take care of them and check them over well. We’ll go ahead and move our ships over here and get them inside the ship.” Varnack nods his head like he’s about to go to war. The male always looks like he’s about to burst into a wild war cry and then tear someone apart with his bare hands. His long, silver hair is braided tightly to his head and wrapped around as he prefers to make sure the enemy can find no weakness on him that they can use to their advantage.

He strides out of the room with one single backward glance at the tall female that almost tore him apart. Her eyes are closed and her breathing is even and light. She actually looks the most relaxed of any of the women. Her hands are lifted on the clear cover of the tube.

Gardon grins. “That one is a wild one. She’s strong. I’ve already upped her dose repeatedly and you can tell by the way her hands are up that she’s still fighting it.” He adjusts the meds again and her hands drop one by one to lie on her hips.

Shaking my head, I take a look at the tubes. “Keep a good eye on them. We’re going to have to head to home base and contact the council and ask them to meet. I already know what they will say but it needs to be done. We’ll transfer them to the med bay on the base and keep them in stasis until they’re healed and then we’ll move them. It would be better if we didn’t have to do that in the z-tubes.”

That can be a risky move. Sometimes beings do not awake.

“How the vreck are we going to move them to the base without them hurting themselves?”

“I know. I’ve been thinking that we’ll have to use stratha to knock them out for a time and then we’ll move them. I feel that they will be less likely to hurt themselves.”

Gardon grunts. “Or us.” He nods towards the dark one that gladly looked like she’d break our necks.

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