Page 15 of Joven's Bride
Chapter Seven
The big man looked her up and down and made a growling sound in his throat. “If only you weremeomee, you are utterly delectable.”
“I ammeomee,he is waiting for me. We all have mates expecting us. Why are you doing this?”
“Profit, little sapien female.” He grinned, revealing a set of four sharp canines in his mouth. “We have families counting on us to provide for them.”
“What about our families?”
“That’s not my concern.”
“It would be if someone were stealing them from you. What would you do, then?”
“We would hunt them down and kill them.”
“What do you think ours will do to you?”
The feline curled one hand around her throat and pressed her against her cabin door. “It’s been tried before, but here I am. You will be long gone before they ever get to me.”
“Don’t count on it,” Carly rasped, refusing to cower to this pirate. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Crazell, Captain Zaif Crazell.” He pressed a little harder against her throat, enough to make breathing difficult without cutting her air supply entirely.
She wanted to kick him and claw at his wrist. She had been afraid at first when the whole ship was shaking, but now she was angry. This despicable gangster was keeping her from her husband.
He was a bully, who took what he wanted from people who worked honestly for what they had. It was that mentality that brought the Drayids to Earth to kill millions of people.
Carly wanted to kick him and pound him for all she was worth, but she knew she had no chance against this handsome brute. Instead, she glared at him and rasped, “Take your hand off me!”
For just a second, he pressed a little harder, and his eyes narrowed. Carly wondered if he was deciding whether to kill her or not. His next words confirmed it, “I could kill you little female sapien, but you will bring too good a price alive.” Crazell pressed even harder and held her there, unable to breathe until fear overwhelmed her anger.
Carly’s eyes widened, and she gripped his wrist and tried to wrench his hand from her throat. Crazell grinned, his eyes sparkling with malicious humor. Then he released her. “Don’t test me, female, or next time I might just choke the life out of your pretty face. Return to your cabin.”
“Bastard!” she muttered in English as he strode away.
Carly went back into the cabin, berating herself for backtalking her captor. Her journey to Joven was long enough without damn pirates making it worse. Now she couldn’t even com-chat with him.
To make matters worse, Carly later learned very unpleasantly that Crazell found out who she would be mated to if she made it to Glasica. Joven had been his Captain during the Drayid war. Crazell blamed Joven for sending him ground side into an ambush. An explosion had left him in pieces, and the only way to save him was to turn him into a cyborg. The war was over by the time he was discharged from medical, and he lost track of his unit. Angry and bitter, Crazell joined a space pirate gang, and now he had his own ship.
Crazell decided to take his revenge on Joven by tormenting Carly. As a feline, the thought of touching her sexually was distasteful. But using a pain stick, he could make her scream in agony without causing her lasting damage. And he needed something to entertain himself on this miserable ship.
Carly always looked both ways down the corridor outside her cabin before she left for the dining room. The second day after her encounter with Crazell, he was on the other side of the door when she opened it. He grabbed her by the throat and pushed her inside, pressing her against her bathroom door. When he started pushing up her shirt, she fought him. Carly thought he was going to rape her until she felt something cold pressed to the skin just above the waist band of her slacks.
Burning throbbing pain shot through her body, pain so excruciating it took her breath away. Every breath after that was exhaled into a scream until Crazell drew back for a few seconds before he pressed it to her skin again. She screamed until she was hoarse, and to her horror, she wet herself. That only made him laugh as he released her and she slid to the floor to sit in her puddle of urine, sobbing.
It was a long time before she could get up and clean herself in the bathroom. A small cleaning droid dispatched the puddle on the floor while Carly showered and changed. She put her urine-soaked pants into the cleaning chamber. No longer hungry, she collapsed onto her bed and fell into an exhausted sleep.
Her body ached from the muscle spasms induced by the device the pirate used on her. But she woke up hungry. Carly trembled with fear as she opened the door to check the corridor. She almost sobbed in relief as she scurried down the hall and into the dining room. She grabbed several handfuls of protein bars and some bottled drinks. She wrapped them in a t-shirt and hurried back to her room.
She ate one and drank one of the drinks then curled up on her bed in a fetal position. She berated herself for calling Crazell’s attention to her. Suddenly, Carly was more frightened than she had ever been in her whole life. She wondered whether he was going to kill her and feared that he would.
Carly barely left her cabin for fear Crazell would find her and kill her on a whim. Was he trying to kill her? The pain was so excruciating, and she never knew when he would come for her. She slept fitfully, waking to any sound. Days passed, and Crazell had stayed away but this time Carly woke to see him in her cabin standing over her playing with the pain device.
“Oh, please don’t,” she murmured as tears filled her eyes.
But he did. It was never sexual. It was done to hurt her. She didn’t put it together until much later why. All she knew is that it went on for the rest of the trip to Se’Nar. Sometimes he did it for one long session and others he would start and stop in multiple short episodes of torture.
Carly took comfort in replaying the com sessions she had with Joven. As the days or rotations as they called them passed, she seemed to become less susceptible to the pain device. It still hurt terribly, but it seemed to diminish every time he used it on her. Every time she wished him dead. She would have killed him herself if she had a weapon.
