The Auction (4 page)

They spoke again in their language, and then the red one left.

“He went to get bandages. He’s sorry he wounded you, but he said he will still punish you. He’ll just have to do it without breaking your skin in future.”

Oh, that was comforting.

The blue one got on the bed and pulled me into his arms, his hand stroking my hair like a pet.

“What’s your name?” I asked, becoming increasingly disturbed by thinking of them as
the red one
and
the blue one
.

He froze at my question and didn’t respond.

I tried again. “What do I call you?”

“Our kind believes names have power. We do not share that information with others. Especially not outsiders. You will call me Sir, and you will call my brother Master, because you’re his.”

Master returned with bandages and left. He didn’t even look at me. It was as if he didn’t want me. Like I was too fragile for him. Well, fuck him. What kind of psycho cuts people up like that? I didn’t ask for this.

“How long will it take you to heal?” Sir asked as he carefully applied and taped down the bandages. A part of me wanted to ask: “Why? So he can do it again?” But his voice was so kind and gentle that I kept my retort to myself. Still, I couldn’t process his kindness completely because it still seemed like he planned to rape me. As did Master. I silently vowed I would escape this place, somehow, once I was able.

“I don’t know. A week or two, maybe?”

He looked at me aghast. “They’ll be open that long? You’ll bleed that long?”

“No, it’ll scab over by tonight, probably. But it could still break open. It’ll still be sore for awhile.” The bleeding had already slowed a lot. Probably only a little bit was creeping through the gauze.

“Oh.”

After I was bandaged, he cradled me in his arms. So far, this one hadn’t hurt me and had rescued me from death and tended to my wounds. So I felt safe enough to ask the question that had been on my mind for the past hour.

“Sir?”

“Hmmm?”

“If I belong to Master, why does he share me with you? Why do you get to have me first?” I somehow managed to get the sentence out without breaking down into hysterics.

“The females of our kind are dying off because of a low birth and survival rate of the gender. They’re considerably weaker than the males.”

He stroked my hair as he continued. “Our kind has always shared mates because it causes all the males in the family to become strongly attached to all the females, encouraging us to equally protect them all. If we don’t know who offspring belongs to, we treat them all as our own. It allows our kind to go on. It’s also about respect. We share what brings us pleasure with the other males in our family. It’s just our way.”

The answer made sense in a weird way, but now I had a new fear which I should have thought of before. “Will I become pregnant?”

“I have no idea. As far as I know you’re the first human my kind has taken. Most likely, no. But it is always possible.”

“How many females of your kind are left?”

“Not enough to go around. Those who are left are mated. We’re hoping they produce more female offspring to balance our numbers again.”

His fingers began trailing lightly over my breasts. It was so subtle at first that I wondered if he was just absently petting and wasn’t aware of where he was touching me. But then he started pinching my nipples to make them erect, and I knew he knew exactly what he was doing.

I sighed. Where was I going to go? The idea of Master punishing me again when I still had such fresh marks on my flesh was unthinkable. And Sir was so gentle, it would be less awful with him. Or it could be, if I didn’t fight him.

It occurred to me that Sir wasn’t a sadist. This was just how his kind were. Maybe the females of their species had been okay with it. Maybe they didn’t fight biology so strongly like human women did.

A few minutes passed and Sir’s hand moved down a little, stroking over my belly. “Are you going to be a good girl for me?” he asked.

“Yes, Sir.” I would go along with what they wanted, and when my back was better, I’d find a way out.

I gasped when his fingers moved lower, stroking my sex, pulling back the folds of skin. It was as if he were inspecting me, making a mental comparison to what his kind looked like. I felt so exposed, like an animal being documented while mating. In spite of that, I was wet. Not a blazing furnace of need or anything, but wet enough.

He picked me up and stood me on the floor, leaning me over the bed. I tensed when he positioned his cock at my entrance.

“What is your name?” he asked, obviously comfortable taking the power he wouldn’t relinquish when I’d asked the same question.

I almost laughed. It seemed so ludicrous at this moment to be having this introduction. “Annabelle, but people call me Belle.”

“Belle,” the word sounded sweet, innocuous on his tongue. Nothing at all like when Master had said
Annabelle
at the auction. A shiver passed through me as I remembered Master’s eyes boring into mine as he’d spoken my name reverently, like an oath, yet also commanding.

None of that swirling confusion existed in Sir’s pronouncement of the shorter form of address. I wasn’t sure why. I hated my full name, so it was a mystery to me why Master made it sound like something wonderful.

Sir groaned as he pushed his way inside me. I bit down on my lip to stifle what might have been a cry. I didn’t want him to know he was hurting me because I didn’t want him to feel bad. I know that sounds stupid but he didn’t seem to have a need to be savage with me, and in some weird way I felt I was protecting him. He didn’t compute as the bad guy in my brain. He wasn’t the one who’d bought and taken me. And I’d seen in his eyes how terribly lonely he was. I wanted to ease that feeling.

He was just so large. And that wasn’t the only issue. Inside me, he burned. The body temperature difference came into sharper focus as he fucked me. The heat wasn’t more than I could handle, but it was deeply uncomfortable.

It wasn’t a long and drawn out ordeal. Nor was it particularly brutal. I didn’t come, but then I hadn’t expected to. It wasn’t exactly consensual. But it also didn’t feel as degrading as the voluntary blow jobs I’d given behind the learning center to avoid a fate like this. I shut that thought out because it was so unexpected and shameful I couldn’t dwell on it for too long.

With Sir, it was strangely gentle, but not erotic. He came with a little growl, and then put his pants on and carried me to Master’s room.

“She’s yours now,” he said.

“Thank you, brother. You know you’ll be seeing her again.”

“She’s a sweet thing. Be careful with her.”

Master nodded and Sir made his exit. It was clear that what Sir had just done had been ceremonial more than anything. Yes, he’d been horny, and he’d gotten off, but it seemed to be more a part of their tradition than lust or anger or any of the other emotions that could be associated with sex. Maybe that was why, even though it hurt, it didn’t make me feel particularly violated.

Master turned toward me and my heart started to beat faster in my chest. I wanted to run, scream, cry. But I just stayed on the ground where Sir had placed me.

The look in his eyes terrified me. I’ve never been scared of another person or situation as much as I was scared of this powerful being towering over me. Even knowing he didn’t seem to want to genuinely damage me wasn’t enough to calm the frantic pace of my breath.

I felt that if he touched me, I’d die. And then the thought crawled into my brain that if he didn’t touch me, I’d die. The feelings were completely contradictory, but equally true.

“Come, Annabelle. Crawl to me.”

A very wrong part of me wanted to obey him like a sexual puppet. That part didn’t want to question, such was the carnal, dominant power that flowed out of him. But another part of me couldn’t. No matter how much one side of me wanted to submit, the side of me that was still in control was determined to fight. To the death, if necessary.

I glared up at him. “Fuck you. Take me back to my people.”

“You mean the people who didn’t fight for you? Didn’t even try to stop me from taking you? Those people? The ones who love and care for you so much they’d stay silent with their eyes on the ground while a monster took you away to be his concubine? Those people? Yes, why don’t I take you back to those people? What do you imagine would happen then?”

I shrugged, the tears gathering in my eyes.

“Yes, cry those pretty tears for me.”

“I hate you.”

“I imagine that you do. But you didn’t answer my question. What would happen to you if you went back? Where would you go, what would you do?”

I didn’t have the answer to that, but it didn’t stop me wanting to escape him.

“That’s what I thought. Now crawl.”

“No. Fuck you.”

He moved across the floor toward me so fast I lost my breath. I scrambled back until I was against the wall. I was starkly aware of my nudity and the way his eyes greedily took in the flesh on display. My bandaged back pressed against the stone wall, and I winced as the pain flared back to life.

“There is an easy way and a hard way, Annabelle. Which do you prefer?”

He was wrong. There was no easy way. Just giving in to him would be as hard as fighting him. Even though Sir had already made use of my body, it still hadn’t fully clicked in my brain that this was my life now.

Master sat on the ground and reached for me. Automatically, my fists shot out and made contact with his chest. It was like beating on a large hunk of steel. It was so pointless, but still I did it. My actions didn’t bother him a bit. In fact, they seemed to amuse him.

It wasn’t hard for him to shift my body and hold me so I couldn’t fight. I cried out at the pain as my injured back pressed against him. He shifted me in his arms. My chest was heaving as I tried to catch my breath.

Then his claws came out, and I resumed the fight.

“You will want to be very very still,” he said, his voice quiet and calm. The struggle had left me out of breath, panting for oxygen, but not him. He wasn’t even fazed.

I froze as one of the claws moved closer. It trailed lightly up my inner thigh, almost tickling me.

“Address me properly, now,” he said.

“Master, please.” Proper address was such a small thing in light of this new threat. I couldn’t think about rebelling as he tightly held me, with his claw at the entrance of such delicate flesh. “W-what are you doing?”

“If you don’t move, not an inch, it won’t cut you. I have to use pressure to break skin, and no matter what you think, I’m not that evil. If you get hurt here, it will be your own fault, so be still.”

Intellectually, I knew he was right. His claws didn’t seem primarily meant for cutting, but for gripping onto rocks and such, for climbing. Despite what he’d done to my back earlier.

“Spread your legs, little slut.” His tone wasn’t cruel when he said it, more amused than anything. That amusement was starting an odd reaction in my body, such that I almost wished his tone had been crueler, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the confusion churning through me.

My legs fell open, and he eased the claw inside me. He was right, it didn’t cut me, didn’t hurt, but it was so scary I thought I’d combust from the fear. I could barely breathe. I couldn’t think. Then he eased back and thrust in hard.

I screamed, expecting pain, but there was none. He’d retracted the claw before pushing further in, and now his finger worked inside me. The fear and desperation had set up an inexplicable sexual hunger.

“Good girl,” he said, as I coated his finger with my arousal.

What he’d just done could have been a strange form of trust-building exercise, a general mind fuck, or a display of dominance. Possibly all three.

I didn’t understand what was going on with me. If I was to be attracted to one of them, it should have been Sir, the kind one. But he didn’t spark that thing in my belly, that mad and ravenous need like Master did. Master completely unmade me with only a look.

He leaned forward. “Kiss me,” he said.

I didn’t think, I just opened my lips and joined with his, accepting his tongue as it moved into my mouth, thrilled by the strangeness of that tongue. In the back of my mind, I kept telling myself I was going to run away, this was just for now—what I had to do to stay safe and alive so I could escape. I pushed his admonishment about my people and how they had behaved to the furthest recesses of my mind. I refused to accept it into my reality. The only thing that mattered was getting home. And, of course, the orgasm he was wringing from my hungry pussy.

I came then, bucking against his fingers. When the spasms stopped, he moved away from me and stood. “Wait here.”

He left, and I heard him talking to his brother down the hall in their language. All I knew was that the discussion was intense. He returned several minutes later. I hadn’t moved from where he’d left me sprawled. I had only turned onto my side to keep from pressing against the marks on my back.

He crossed his arms over his chest, and then sat beside me and spread my legs. I closed my eyes while he inspected me as Sir had, only this time it seemed his purpose was different.

“He says he may have torn you a bit, but I don’t see any damage. Your opening is very small.”

I blushed. Stephen and the others I’d been with had always remarked that I was very tight. In fact, it had taken several of them getting together to exchange stories to convince themselves I hadn’t been a virgin when each of them had first penetrated me. Much to their chagrin.

Then Master said the words that started a kind of mindless, groping terror inside me. “I’m a bit larger than my brother.”

That pronouncement got me moving away from him again. But before I could make much progress, his large hands had stilled me.

“Shhhh, Annabelle. Do you think I would willingly harm my mate?”

“Yes. I do.” He was insane. It didn’t matter that my stupid body wanted him. He was a lunatic, and I had to get away. “How can you even ask that after what you did to my back?”

“I didn’t know your kind healed differently. It wasn’t meant to scar or damage.”