“Be a good girl for me,” he said softly, leaning down to brush his lips against her mouth.
She drew in a sharp breath. He’d never kissed her before. She’d come with him multiple times, but he had never been so very intimate. This was all he could give her now with the eyes of the Dinavri on them. It made all the difference.
Jerri sank slowly down to her knees and put her hands to the floor. In this position she was explicitly exposed. When standing up, the most intimate parts of her were hidden, but this way her pussy was on display. She could feel the cool air playing across her lower lips, and she could feel the eyes of the Dinavri on her too.
“I apologize for the behavior of my mate,” Atlas addressed the gathering. “She is reckless and impulsive, and she acted out of fear and not out of sense.”
“She did not seem afraid to me,” Sithren replied. “She seemed proud of herself.”
Jerri bit her lower lip. She was not proud of herself now, that much was certain. She was wishing she had simply kept the shuttle doors closed and waited for Atlas to come to her rescue, or at least not decided to do the flyby at the end of her escape from the Dinavri fighters. At the time it had seemed like too much fun to resist. Now it felt like asking for trouble of a kind she very much wished she was not in. Regret was the theme of the moment, though it was nearly overwhelmed with a unique and particularly poignant sense of humiliation.
“Pride is a failing most humans have in one form or another,” Atlas recovered smoothly. “I have learned that I cannot assume a human is not afraid simply because they are full of bravado and sass. Most of the time, those moods are covers for the inevitable concerns of their weak and fleshy kind.”
Lord Sithren laughed and agreed far too vociferously for Jerri’s liking. She shut her eyes and wished for this all to be over.
A brief brush of Atlas’s hand through her hair gave her small comfort. He couldn’t have made this easy for her if he wanted to. She knew that. It was not hard for her to whimper and tremble in anticipation.
“Use this.”
Sithren handed Atlas an implement. She opened one eye and saw an absolutely terrible thing. There were long leathery lashes hanging from a thick handle. They were braided into three main straps, each of which was tipped with a series of leather ends terminating at a wicked angle. It was a tool made to hurt.
Atlas swished it back and forth through the air a few times. The sound of the braids cutting through the breeze was terrifying to Jerri. She shrank away from it with a whimper.
“This is a harsh tool,” Atlas mused. “She will not be able to tolerate much in the way of this. Her skin is thin and her flesh is not capable of absorbing much in the way of punishment.”
“That is a toy used in our lovemaking,” Sithren replied. “It would not be considered harsh in our culture. I understand your human is considerably weaker than our women.”
Jerri’s ego had taken about all it could take. She was bared and on display, being talked about as if she were a weakling when in reality she had just made the proud Dinavri pilots look like they didn’t know a flight stick from a cheese stick. She was strong, and that was why this was happening to her.
“Where are your women, then? Hidden away in a…”
Jerri’s offended outburst was cut off by Atlas’s harsh implementation of the lashes with a hard flick of his wrist.
“Quiet!” he snapped, his voice rough over her plaintive yowl. The fucking implement was just as awful and intense as it had seemed to be. There were three lines of burning pain searing diagonally across her ass, one on each side of her pussy where the lashes had extended all the way down to her thighs. He could so easily have caught her clit with one of those infernal tips if she weren’t lucky.
“Fuck!” she cursed at the top of her lungs and came bolt upright, her hands going back to grasp her poor punished ass.
“Back into position,” Atlas snarled. When she did not immediately comply, he put her where she needed to be, his massive hand on the back of her neck pressing her face to the floor while his other hand manipulated the Dinavri whip down across her tender ass and even more sensitive thighs in a series of strokes that made her squirm and wail at the top of her lungs. It hurt. It hurt intensely and completely. It hurt so much it drove every other thought and consideration out of her mind and left her completely focused on it, and on ways she might be able to avoid it. But it was too late. There was no avoiding this. There was no stopping it, either.