Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54388 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 272(@200wpm)___ 218(@250wpm)___ 181(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54388 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 272(@200wpm)___ 218(@250wpm)___ 181(@300wpm)
Serenai continued to turn the problem over in her mind.
Maybe I ought to get a bodyslave. All the other Mistresses have them.
The only thing was, all the bodyslaves she’d ever met were male. Yonnie Six was a female-run planet where only women were allowed to hold positions of power. Males were only deemed fit to serve a woman’s needs and indeed, most of the men on the planet were owned by women. There were a few free males outside of Opulex, but they were only tolerated as long as they didn’t make trouble.
Serenai didn’t really know what to think about men. She’d grown up most of her life never seeing any of them at all. Well, except for Geordo—the eighty-year-old gardener who slept in a hut near the vegetable garden at the Convent. He was a kind old soul but almost completely deaf, so you had to shout in his ear to talk to him.
The men she saw around her in Opulex, however, were completely different. Most of them were big and muscular and often they were half-naked, showing off their oiled chests as they followed their Mistresses around on long leashes attached to the pain collars around their thick necks. They seemed like a whole different species to Serenai and she was more than a little afraid of them.
“Males simply cannot be trusted!” Aunt Nibblegrim had warned her. “You must keep a pain collar on them at all times or they can turn on you!”
Aunt Nibblegrim was her mother’s younger sister. She wasn’t quite as rich as her older sister had been—in fact, she lived in the building that Serenai now owned, on a lower floor—but she was still willing to offer advice.
She had even offered to manage the whole estate, if Serenai wanted to sign a few legal documents she’d had drawn up on the off-chance her sister died early, but Serenai hadn’t been willing to do that. As much as she wanted a protector and someone to help her manage things, she wasn’t quite sure that her Aunt Nibblegrim was the one to do that. She seemed a little too eager and her quick, pushy way of speaking put Serenai’s nerves on edge.
Still, she didn’t know anyone else in the whole city, so it was her Aunt who she wound up taking advice from more often than not, even if she wasn’t ready to let her manage her inheritance completely.
Serenai risked another peek over the edge of the blanket to see if the red eyes were still there—they were. She wished she dared to turn on the light—maybe that would frighten whatever it was away. But what if she reached out from under the covers and felt a cold hand grab her wrist in the darkness?
Then she remembered something—the lights in her mother’s bedroom were voice-activated. In the Convent, nothing was automatic—everything had to be done by hand. If she wanted to turn a light off or on, she had to get up and go do it manually. But in the extravagant penthouse suite everything was automated. She wished she had remembered this during the past two nights when the eyes had menaced her, but she’d been so sure they were just a bad dream.
“Lights on,” she whispered, but her voice must not have been loud enough because nothing happened. Clearing her throat, she forced herself to speak louder. “Lights on!” she almost shouted into the dark room.
At once, the glows in all four corners of the room popped on. The brilliant light blinded Serenai for a moment and she thought she heard a skittering sound—like a rodent scrambling across the floor. She tried to see if the red eyes were still there, but for a moment she could only blink as her own eyes adjusted.
When she was finally able to see straight, the room seemed deserted. At least, the red eyes weren’t there anymore. Though Serenai supposed they could be hiding somewhere behind one of the pieces of heavy, ornately carved furniture which filled the suite.
She stared across the room to the large mirror hung on the wall and saw nothing but her own frightened face peering back. She had long black hair, creamy brown skin, and large, dark eyes. Her mother had chosen DNA from a small planet called “Earth” when she’d gotten herself impregnated at the Procreation Center. It meant that Serenai looked different from the other girls she’d gone to school with at the Convent, but she didn’t mind—she loved how she looked. Even down to her extra-full curves, which many of the other Yonnie Mistresses sneered at when they met her.
But the Sisters at the Convent had always preached tolerance and understanding as well as accepting yourself the way you were. Serenai had absorbed these lessons early and she wasn’t willing to hate herself just because she wasn’t thin and pale like most of the other high-ranking women in Opulex.