Page 38 of Hostage

“Yes,” Malik says. “I’m Malik. That’s good recall!”

It is good recall. It’d be nice if she had remembered me first, but I’ll take what I can get. The scientist told us it would be almost random, the way her memories returned. He explained that the programming very much relies on the routine of the Colony to stay intact. That means Zeki will be out of our way as long as she stays at the box factory, and Dreamy will be my Dreamy again the more I immerse her in our world.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” she says. She’s remembering, but what she’s remembering is coming out at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Trust Dreamy.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Natural justice. Poetic justice.”

Dreamy looks up at me, her eyes searching my face.

“Shah?” She says my name in a much more knowing tone. It’s as the scientist said, breaking the routine is the same as breaking the programming. What they’ve done to her won’t be undone immediately, but there are already cracks in the facade of her repression, because it’s not just words when I say she is mine. Dreamy belongs to me, and I belong to her.

“Yes,” I say. “It’s me.”

“I know it’s you,” she says. “Can you put me down for a moment? I promise I won’t run away. I just want a drink.”

A drink at club Omega. Why not. Everything comes full circle. I set Dreamy down, knowing I don’t have her fully back in mind, but in spirit she never left. She gives me her sweet smile and proceeds to order the highest percentage beverage the bar has.

“Slow down, Dreamy,” I caution her as she proceeds to gulp it down. “That’s potent.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “If I get too drunk, you can spank me.”

More memories are clearly surfacing. She’s got a mischievous little glint in her eye. I wonder if she remembers that I don’t always take her to a private place to teach her a lesson. If she doesn’t, I’m about to remind her.

“That’s right. I can.”

“Shah!” She squeals my name as I take a seat at the bar and turn her over my knee. The worker uniforms are not attractive, but there is something cute about the way the skirt flies up to reveal the plain white underwear stretched tight over her curvy ass. My palm makes satisfying and much missed contact with her upturned cheeks, spanking her sassy butt.

I’m not mad at her. How could I be? But I’m also not going to let her get away with being a brat now she’s back in my care. Dreamy still needs to learn her place. Or maybe this is just a good excuse to hold her and see her ass and show everybody that she’s fucking mine.

There are cheers as I spank her, cheers interspersed with her cute little gasps and moans. She likes to be punished. Underneath all her sweetness, Dreamy is a bad girl who wants to be taught a lesson.

Within a dozen or so good, solid spanks, the gusset of her underwear is starting to show signs of getting damp. There’s a darker streak at the seam of her lips, and I know that the Colony hasn’t touched her sexual response to discipline. Maybe they find it useful to have workers who embrace punishment — I think It’s one of Dreamy’s natural little kinks, the part of her that is her true self.

Dreamy

Every time Shah’s big palm lands on my ass, jolting me against his big, hard thighs, and making me squirm the most tender, sensitive parts of myself against his rough muscles, I remember more.

I remember love, loss, betrayal. I remember adventure and danger, passion and intensity.

I’m also remembering things I never remembered before.

Things like the very first time Shah and I had sex. It wasn’t on his ship like I thought it was when I first woke up there to find myself in deep trouble with him. It was years before that, in the roof of the conjoined houses while we waited for the Colony patrols to pass below.

Seven years ago…

“So,” I whisper to the huge outlaw. “What’s it like being a criminal?”

He shrugs and looks at me with an expression that seems to indicate he’s surprised I have the nerve to ask that question.

“I’m joining the workforce tomorrow,” I tell him. “I’m going to be part of the team that makes the Colony strong. But you don’t care about the Colony.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t give a fuck. I’m going to get off this shit hole soon as I can and I’m going to make my own empire.”

“That’s not allowed.”

“Says who?” He looks at me, so fucking handsome and wild. I find myself drawn to him; drawn to the possibility he represents. Shah’s name has been whispered among the students for as long as I have been studying. The authorities want him dead. He refused to be coded, that’s the story they tell. Instead, he turned to a life of crime. “It’s always allowed to be free.”

“You’re scuttling about like a rat, though,” I point out, logically. “There’s not much freedom in this.”

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