4. Baths and Bastards

Lettie

I wake in Shan's arms, big, scaled, fleshy limbs wrapped tight around me. As my consciousness returns, I become aware of his muscular frame up behind me, my back pressed against his lower abdomen, my legs curled up against me, and one of his large thighs up behind my legs. The next sensations I become aware of are the aches in my ass and my sex. He made me sore. He made me sorry. He bred me, and when I shift slightly, I feel the stickiness of that seed between my legs.

The memories come flooding back. My capture, my slight escape, my recapture, and then the taming and claiming of my flesh. I remember what it felt like to have his monstrously large alien body over mine, his cock spearing inside me, scaled, pulsing flesh taking the most sacred and private parts of me.

It really happened. He took me, and I gave myself to him. It hurt, and I wanted it to hurt. He punished me and he made me feel good. Even now, a delicious trickle of memorable pleasure runs down my spine and radiates out into my limbs. I feel so relaxed. So kept. So contained.

I close my eyes again and snuggle back against him, feeling him stir as he wakes up too. There are long, delicious moments in which I get to simply be his female mate. There is a certain simplicity to the moment that I have never been able to enjoy before. I like it. I think I could stay here forever…

I let out a small squeal as I am hoisted up in Shan's arms, then lifted out of bed in one smooth motion. He sets me on the floor in front of him. He doesn't look sleepy. He looks quite alert, instantly so. I wish I felt that way, but sleep is still clinging to me all over.

"Stay," he says. "I want to put something on you before I take you to the bathroom."

"There's no bathroom here?"

"The outlaw caverns don't come with ensuites," he laughs. "There are communal baths. I assume you need to clean yourself."

"Communal baths? I don't want anyone else to see me…"

"That can't be helped. Here. Put this on."

The only bit of help I get for what is left of my modesty is an oversized undershirt taken from the wardrobe. It feels a bit like pajamas. It is not at all flattering, but it is coverage, and that is more than I expected to be allowed. When the girls who tried to save Sullivan came back to the ship, they told us all about how they found her naked in a cage. She was being held by the alpha of Grave City, and that is what he did to her. I cannot imagine her submitting to such a humiliation, and yet now here I am, terribly pleased with a shirt that balloons around me, loose neck open almost to my breasts, big hem billowing around my knees.

Shan

She is adorable. That shirt is tight on me. On her, the holes for my shoulder spikes are down by her elbows. It barely covers my midsection, and yet on her it is like a dress. Her hair is messy from being slept upon. I reach out and brush my fingers through it lightly, settling it around her face in a less chaotic fashion.

Lettie looks at me with a hint of confusion in her deep brown, round human gaze and I feel a rush of tenderness, along with the certain knowledge that what happened last night was no mere connection of obligation. We have established a mate bond, and that is no small connection.

Wrath perhaps knew this would happen. Or maybe he didn't know at all. Maybe he didn't care. Maybe this is a tit for tat, the alpha has a human and the enforcer has a human so he ensured that one of his men would have one as well.

I'm surprised he didn't take her for himself, but Wrath has always been wily. The reason he's alive, and rich, and powerful is because he doesn't take unnecessary risks. Grave City's populace see him as a legendary outlaw, rakish and uncatchable. But I know better. And the alpha knows better. This is an experiment for him. But Lettie is no longer an experiment for me. She is my mate, and I will look after her at all costs.

"Come with me," I say. "And do not leave my sight nor my arm's length. I cannot guarantee one of the others won't try to take you. You are a delicacy down here. And you belong to me."

She blushes at that. I wonder how deeply she understands it. Does she feel the same bond I do? Or is she merely a pretty little soft fuck toy with a welcoming body which she would give to any master who demanded it? I do not like the second thought one bit. I want her to know that she is mine. I intend to make that fact abundantly clear.

Lettie

The underground baths are much more impressive than I had imagined they would be. When he said communal baths, my mind conjured up images of dingy tile with years of built-up filth and mold because none of the outlaws can be bothered cleaning. What I find is much more palatable. It's a massive natural subterranean cavern. Light trickles through fissures in the rock above in a way that makes me wonder if the whole damn roof of this place isn't in immediate danger of falling down. There are plants growing down from those same fissures, and the rocky earth beneath my feet is soft in places where mats of moss grow thicker toward the waters.

The baths are not baths in the traditional sense. They are hot pools, a series of irregularly shaped basins of water in the ground, filled with crystal clear water that seems to be bubbling up from beneath. The air is warm and humid, and there are quite a number of saurians lying in the sunbeams, both in and out of the water.

A few open an eye to look at us as we go past, but for the most part this seems to be a communal but not strictly social space. There is no conversation. All I can hear is the sound of bubbling and fizzing from various streams making their way up from beneath us.

He leads me to a smaller bath away from the others and gestures for me to get in. So I do. I do not take off the shirt. I do not want anybody to see me.

The fact that Shan saw me last night is enough to make me blush now, remembering how I was spread open and displayed before him. I can still feel him inside me. There are echoes of his flesh stretching mine every time I move. There is an ache that I do not want to go away.

Shan strips, removing his attire carefully and folding it next to the bath. He stands above me, naked entirely. My eyes are immediately transfixed on his cock, that instrument of destruction of purity and innocence. I gave myself to this monstrous creature who cannot possibly have any feelings for me. He fucked me out of duty, and out of a desire to make me behave. My desire betrayed me and delivered me to him, and I think it will do so again.

He slides into the bath beside me, the water rippling up against his scales. He reaches out for me and draws me from the warm shallows to deeper waters in the center of the bath. I do not know how far down the pool goes, but I know I can feel the bubbles rising up around me. Shan keeps hold of me, wrapping one arm around my waist and holding me fast.

"These springs are known for their healing properties," he says. "This will help soothe any discomfort from last night. I know it was not easy on you. You have a delicate body. Does it ache?"

I hide my face in his neck and nod slightly. I don't want to admit it out loud, but I cannot deny it. The waters of the spring have a slight effervescence to them, a certain bubbliness that is making its way up under my skirt and playing against the most sensitive and still swollen parts of my anatomy. It excites as much as it soothes, and I find myself squirming in his grasp.

"What is it? Is it sore? Is it too hot? Is it…"

He is trying to understand, but I do not want to explain. Admitting out loud that desire is once more overtaking me is just too shameful. I don't want to want him. I don't want to be the breeding mate of a saurian criminal who I met fucking yesterday. I am on this planet to rescue my captains, not satisfy carnal urges stirred up by a taciturn saurian male.

"I am okay," I say. It feels like a lie, because it is. I am not okay. I am on heat. I can feel desire coursing through me with every motion of the water swirling around me. Pressed against Shan's naked body with only a soaked scrap of cloth between him and me, we may as well be naked.

"It does things to me when you squirm," he growls. "But you are too freshly ravaged, too sore to take me again. Aren't you?"

Again, I cannot answer. I know that if he was to mate me again, not only would I suffer quite a lot with the ache and sting of a well-fucked pussy subjected to a saurian cock, but I am supposed to be resisting him, and this, and everything. But there's some part of me that does not want to submit to good sense and self-preservation. There's a part hungry for pleasure, even at the cost of pain.

I want him to do it anyway. I want him to be overcome with passion and use me as he used me last night. I want to have no choice in the matter, because he wants me. I want everything that is wrong, and nothing that is right.

"SHAN!"

Shan's name is shouted across the baths, interrupting our little moment.

Shan swings around in the water with me. Wrath is standing a few feet away, having entered through one of the many portals. These baths must serve as some kind of a hub. The entrance Shan and I came through is one of half a dozen of such portals. I notice this now only because Wrath has used one closer to us than I noticed was there.

He looms over the pair of us in the water. I cannot reach the bottom, but Shan can. He holds onto me as Wrath comes to stand at the edge of the bath.

This is not the first time I have been in Wrath's presence, but it is the first time I have seen him in what passes for the light of day. I see now why he holds so much sway over this group of renegades and criminals.

Wrath is a big, lumbering gray saurian with intense green eyes. He has a big, flared protrusion extending from the rear of his skull, and a large horn growing from his forehead. He is broad, almost impossibly so. I imagine he can only fit down some of the passages of this place without having to turn sideways. There are thick, natural plates on his shoulders that give him a sort of biological armor. He is built to take damage, and to make those who attempt to damage him regret the moment they made that decision for the rest of their days.

I notice that a lot of the outlaws appear to have physical differences from the everyday saurians. The alpha and those who serve him are peak specimens. It makes me think there's some prejudice in this society correlating to appearance. Saurians who don't look the way they're supposed to look end up in this lawless group, run by the most fearsome creature I think I've ever seen.

There's something about Wrath that cannot be trusted. Something violent and dangerous. I could say that about all of them, of course, but there's a darkness in him that isn't in the others. He is a walking volcano of some kind of repressed rage. I know it would be best if I never, ever encountered him directly. I should try to avoid any and all contact with him. I should fade into the shadows, become a meaningless, pointless, nonexistent space where a memory used to be.

The outlaws are just as appealing as those who make and enforce the laws, but they are rougher and they are less predictable, and their goals seem to be…

"Did you breed her, Shan?"

The crude question cuts through any sympathies or insights that might have been brewing inside me. I feel the heat of shame rush through me as I think about all that was done to me, and all that is being asked about. What details does this saurian think he is entitled to? The question is invasive and the intent quite infuriates me. He wants to know the most private things. He wants to expose the intimacy Shan and I shared, and turn me into an object being used on his orders.

"She has been bred," Shan says. His response makes me flush with heat all over again.

Wrath lets out a laugh. "Very good! Very good! In the months to come we will see what fruit your breeding bears. In the meantime, we will keep seeing about capturing the rest of them. The ship is in orbit for the moment, but we know it can be brought down."

"How?"

"We have one of theirs now. We will display her in distress. They are unable to help themselves when they see one of their own in trouble. They inevitably attempt a rescue, and they are inevitably caught when they do. Three for three is a good catch rate."

When he puts it like that, we do sound like a pack of idiots.

The problem is that we are actually quite stupid. Not individually. Individually, each of the crew is fucking brilliant. But without leadership we are the dumbest of the dumb. The saurians work together in ways that make us entirely vulnerable. Every catch I've seen or heard about so far has involved teamwork. We were in orbit when Sullivan was taken. We saw how they hunted her down on wheels and on wings. She was like a rabbit fleeing a pack of wolves. No matter how wily or wild she got, another one was there to waylay her. And we saw what happened with Raine. She wasn't able to fall off a cliff without being captured. My own attempt at escape was not really an attempt at escape, but I ended up narrowly avoided being blown up and then I was most certainly bred.

I feel a tremor of something like excitement mixed with fear at the notion of being somehow impregnated by an alien I barely know. Shan is a dominant stranger who has spilled his seed inside me. This makes me think of Sullivan and Raine. Are we all pregnant? Will Raine give birth to a baby with wings? What the hell is going to happen to us all? And who the hell thinks this is a good idea?

"You're stupid."

The words escape me before I can stop them. We don't usually bother trying to stop our words on the Mare, so I am out of practice. Fragile male egos are not a consideration aboard the ship. Not that we go around calling each other stupid either, but what I just heard out of Wrath's mouth is top tier dumb.

Wrath hasn't really been looking at me until this point. He has been talking to Shan, because of course only males matter to a creature like Wrath.

"Am I?" The question comes with relative calm.

I heard his plan for me and for the others. Maybe I can dissuade him from it by pointing out how stupid it is.

"Motherhood is not something to trifle with. You're not going to make a whole slew of obedient hybrids. You're going to make people with scales who love their mothers and loathe their oppressors. Which would be you, by the way. And it would take twenty years for any of this to even begin to come into fruition, but the effects would linger for generations."

"Our young do not love their mothers. Our young do not know who their mothers are."

"Well, our young do. We grow inside our mothers. We love them and are loved by them in a way that shapes our very souls. It takes unspeakable cruelties to sever the bond between us. You will not make what you think you are going to make. The only thing you're going to make, Mr Wrath, is a huge fucking mistake."

"Quiet!" Shan hisses the word and clasps my ass in his hand hard enough to make me yelp. It is an embarrassing end to what I thought was a rather good tirade. I'm not usually good at things like that, but that was as argumentative as any of the girls on the Mare could be.

"Bring her up out of the water," Wrath says.

I feel Shan's hesitation, but I know he is going to do as Wrath requests, because he is pretending to be obedient to him. There's not a bit of true obedience or deference in Shan's body, but he is putting on a show. That means I am going to be on show as well.

"Show me where you were connected," Wrath continues.

"You have earned this," he growls in my ear. "Speaking out of turn and earning his ire. If you learn nothing else from this, learn how to be quiet."

"Shan," I hiss. "Please don't. Please…"

He is already pulling me out of the bath, right in front of Wrath and all the others.

Shan upends me, turning me around in his grip and bending me over while holding me around the waist. I do not have to look at Wrath, and that is a small mercy, and the only mercy I shall receive whatsoever. I feel the wet clinging shirt pulled up over my hips, and I am put on display. I know Wrath can see my ass and everything between my thighs…

"She's well marked," he says. "A good thing for a mouth like that. The humans haven't proved easy to tame. Thorn's got his hands full with the one he took, and I've met the enforcer's girl. She's a wild thing."

"This one won't be wild for long," Shan promises. "She's new, but she'll learn not to talk back soon enough."

I wish he'd let me down, or at the very least cover me up. This is completely humiliating. My face is burning bright red, and adrenaline is surging through me. I do not want to squirm, because I know that would be ineffectual and expose me all the more. But it is almost impossible to stay still when on display this way. I end up wriggling miserably, hoping that with every moment Shan will take mercy on me and cover me up.

He follows his comments up by slapping me on the rump with the flat of his hand. I let out a yelp of pain and kick my feet, knowing all the while that this puts me on display all the more. I am relieved when Shan flicks the soaking wet hem of the shirt down over my rear and covers me up. The fabric is still clinging to my hips, sticking to my cheeks. This is still far from a modest predicament, but it is better than it was.

"They're so pretty," one of the saurians flanking Wrath grunts. "Delicate and fleshy. She's lucky she's not mine. If she were mine, I'd have her wrapped around my cock again and again. She'd not have a minute to eat or sleep in between rounds of servicing me."

The saurians nearby laugh in the way males laugh when another male says something sexually aggressive. Wrath does not laugh. Wrath does not say anything at all. Shan puts me down and I chance a little glance over my shoulder. I can feel the truth of the fact that this underworld alpha is perhaps the most dangerous creature I will encounter down here. And I just called him stupid.

"She's got a mouth," Wrath says. "You'd best find some way to occupy that, Shan."

"Indeed," Shan says, in his usual taciturn manner. I feel his arm snug me a little tighter, perhaps protective, but more possessive. I can't see what is happening behind me, and I don't really want to look around and see all these criminal saurians leering at me. That snug grip is comforting. It lets me know nobody else will be getting their scaled hands on me.

"I need to get her dry," he says. "Human skin does not repel water the way ours does. She's already starting to shiver."

I am shaking a little, but not because I am cold. The initial shock of capture has worn off, and the warmth of the bath and the embrace of my saurian lover has made me soften just enough to be able to feel things again. I feel fear. I feel exposed. I feel everything I have never wanted to be.

Noticed.

Every eye in this place is on me. Every saurian outlaw is observing me with rough, painful, carnal intentions. They could, and perhaps even would, tear me apart if I was not under Shan's protection. They respect him. Even Wrath, I think. Or maybe something else is happening. Maybe this is a test.

It is hard to think with all these feelings shutting down my brain. I need my wits about me, but my wits have fled. I am an object now. A thing possessed. I am nothing but something that belongs to Shan, and in the moment I am content to act that way.

He carries me out of the baths, and it is the first merciful thing he has done all day. I keep my eyes focused on the ground so I don't have to look at anyone. This is what pure, unfettered shame feels like.

"Be careful with your words," Shan says once we are once more safely ensconced in his room, away from prying eyes and spying ears. "Do not tempt Wrath."

"Why? Because you're worried he'll hurt me? Or he'll hurt you?"

Shan's eyes narrow a little.

Shan hasn't outright told me that he is undercover in Wrath's organization, but that's pretty obvious. I wonder if Wrath is already suspicious of him. I wonder if that's why he let Shan keep me. I wonder if I will become the demonstration of Shan's loyalty to Wrath. Every publicly fucked up thing he does to me is proof of his obedience to the outlaw. He exposed my ass to Wrath and the others. He made me a sort of sexual spectacle.

"I won't warn you again."

He doesn't like to talk, and he definitely doesn't like to explain himself. We're strangers in every sense of the word, and the fact that we fucked doesn't change that.

If I was bolder, more like Sullivan, I'd let out the "or what" that appears in my mind when he says he won't warn me again. Instead, I let him strip the wet shirt from me and replace it with another of a similar kind. I feel like a ragged little orphan in this unsuitable attire, barefoot, and possibly pregnant in a subterranean lair.

I need to escape this underground labyrinth, and I need to make contact with one of the captains in the city. That's my plan. If I allow myself to stay his captive, I will end up pregnant with some kind of hybrid that is thus far only theorized. I'm not ready to be a mother to a creature that has never before existed on any planet anywhere. I'm not ready to be a mom at all. I'm ready to get my captains back and continue my nice, quiet life of crime.

He seems satisfied by my silence, mistaking it for agreement, maybe.

"I know this is a very strange, and probably very frightening situation for you, but do as you are told, and no harm will come to you."

"No harm except being forced to give birth."

He has no response to that. His expression is grim, and I wonder if it has occurred to him that he is making a baby with me for demonstration purposes, more or less. I'm not entirely innocent to the ways of the universe. I know that people of all kinds of species get conceived for all sorts of reasons, including none whatsoever.

I need to get back to the ship and take a pill. We have a lot of contraception on board. Some of the crew on the Mare have gotten pregnant from time to time, and some of them have kept their babies, but none of them stayed aboard once they got close to giving birth. A pirate's life is not suitable for an infant. It's too dangerous. And infants notoriously lack the coordination to man the weapons banks. So.

Before we can continue not discussing what is happening between us, there is a banging at the door.

"Shan! Wrath needs you! We're going out!"

"Stay here," Shan says. "Don't try anything. Don't touch anything. Don't attempt any kind of escape. If you do, I will make you regret it."

I sink away from him, lower my eyes, and do my best to appear small and compliant as I let the tremors that have been running through me since the baths and Wrath's appearance take over to a greater extent. I tremble before Shan, and I let him believe I will do anything and everything he says.

I feel his scaled hand slide beneath my chin, lifting my face so that I am forced to look into his dark saurian gaze. There is something about Shan that is more than simply otherworldly. He is alien even among aliens. There is a part of him that is forever reserved for him, and him alone. But I can sense it when he looks at me. I can feel it when he touches me. It is cold. It is dark. And it makes me quiver.

"Be good for me," he says, his voice quiet and even. "You will not like what happens to you if you are not."

With that, he straightens, and begins to put on his harness and weaponry and a jacket and pants other such accoutrements. Whatever he is about to do, it is something very wrong, and absolutely illegal. I feel a little jolt of arousal as he gets dressed. There's something very satisfying about the way his clothing is all tailored to fit over his shoulder spikes. He is dangerous in so many ways.