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  Maggie felt ill. “Please,” she whispered. “I can’t…this can’t be right. I’m not supposed to be here. This can’t be happening to me.”

  “Well, it is,” Sura said shortly. “Sorry to be the one to give you the bad news but I figured you’d rather know than find out on your own when the button really gets going. Look, maybe you’ll get lucky and find a master who wants to take you every day.”

  “Seriously? That would make me lucky?” Maggie’s head swam. Having a master who wanted to rape her daily would be a fortunate turn of events?

  “Luckiest thing for a girl with an implant like that.” Sura yawned. “Look, just keep it covered, all right? I need my sleep. Have to look my best tomorrow if I’m going to get a halfway decent master. Don't want some buster who hit it rich with a lucky lotto tix and wants to try the high life with his very own love slave.”

  “But I—”

  “Good night,” Sura said firmly.

  There were restless shifting sounds from the other corner and then the sound of soft, steady breathing. Apparently her fellow slave-in-waiting had gone to sleep.

  Maggie wanted to ask her more, wanted to wake her up and demand more answers to the awful questions that were crowding her brain. But her tongue seemed as numb and frozen as the area below her naval.

  What was she going to do?

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Early the next morning Maggie and her fellow slaves—it turned out there were more than a dozen—were washed and dressed and herded through a long narrow corridor into a vast room the size of a football stadium. It had a high, vaulted ceiling and was filled with…well, Maggie didn’t know what it was filled with because all she could see were colorful blurs.

  From the sounds she heard it seemed to be some kind of a marketplace. Vendors called from every corner, trying to attract the attention of buyers.

  “Fresh meat! Slaves so fresh they’ve never felt the touch of a master’s hand before.”

  “Lovely little virgins! Just captured the lot of them on Caprika Three. Every one untouched!”

  “Proper, obedient females, ready and willing to cater to your every whim.” That voice seemed to come from the thin green alien Lady Pope’nose had called Zamir. Maggie shivered as she heard him shout, advertising her and the rest of the women in her group as though they were so many cuts of meat.

  And a cut of fresh meat was exactly what she felt like. She was wearing nothing more than a thin ribbon around her breasts—a bright red band that barely covered her nipples and left the rest of her bare. Lower down she had a tiny red skirt which didn’t even come down to her thighs. The skirt covered her pussy—barely—which was a good thing since she had no panties on. Her midsection was also naked, showing off the blinking red ruby firmly lodged in her naval.

  As if her outfit—or lack thereof—wasn’t bad enough, she was also positioned for display. Her arms were stretched above her head, chained in place to keep her exposed and her thighs were spread wide, allowing anyone who wanted to come by and flip up her skirt to “check out the wares.”

  The pedestal she’d been forced to kneel on was white stone with a thin red pad that barely cushioned her bare knees. Maggie shifted restlessly, trying to ease the pressure but if she moved too much or failed to keep her legs open, Zamir shocked her with the little wand he’d used to activate her “slut button.”

  The wand seemed to act as a kind of taser. It made her gasp with pain but the pain was an almost welcome relief from the unquenchable desire throbbing between her legs.

  The sexual need had begun when she woke up from a broken sleep that morning and had been slowly growing throughout the day. It seemed to have a correlation with the ruby implant, which was blinking faster and faster. And with each blink came a pulse of pleasure, buzzing through her clit, making her helplessly hot and wet.

  Maggie never would have believed that too much pleasure could be a bad thing but she was rapidly finding out that having constant stimulation without gratification was the worst kind of torture. With each little jolt, her nipples got harder and her pussy got wetter but no matter how hot she got, she wasn’t able to reach any kind of orgasm. It was torture.

  Not that she wanted to orgasm in a room full of strangers, Maggie told herself. Not at first, anyway. But after a couple of hours of the slut button working on her, she thought she would have done anything for some relief. If her hands hadn’t been chained above her head, she would have been groping between her thighs, just like the woman Sura had described. It wouldn’t have done her any good though—no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t feel her own touch from her lower pelvis to her upper thighs.

  The jewel in her belly button blinked again and another jolt of pleasure raced through her quivering pussy. Maggie squeezed her eyes shut and held back a whimper of pure distress. God, would this ever end? Or would she be doomed to live the rest of her life in unfulfilled desire so intense it made her ache inside and out?

  “Now here’s a nice specimen,” Zamir’s voice said to her right. “Very fresh—just plucked this little flower on Yonnie Six, though I understand that’s not her planet of origin.”

  Maggie set her jaw and got ready to endure the coming inspection. After being here for several hours, she already knew the drill. The customer would want to examine her—her teeth, her breasts—and probably flip up her skirt to see her crotch as well. Luckily for her, Zamir usually kept the contact to a minimum—he said he was trying to keep his merchandize “fresh”—but it was still humiliating to be looked over like a prize pony someone was looking to buy.

  “Interesting.” The prospective buyer was huge but that was about all Maggie could tell about him. He seemed to be draped all in black including his face—was he wearing a mask? It seemed that he must be because his deep voice was oddly distorted. “Where does she come from?” he asked.

  Zamir shrugged. “A small blue and green planet on the far arm of a nearby spiral galaxy. I think her people call it ‘Earth.’”

  A large hand encased in a black leather glove lifted Maggie’s chin.

  “And is she eager to please? I won’t have a frigid bed slave.”

  “More than eager, good sir! May I draw your attention to her midsection—observe the implant you can see there.”

  “Implant? What the hell is that?” the man demanded.

  “It’s a Denari Eroticus—top of the line, I assure you. This one was grown with great care for six solar months until it was ripe enough to be activated. The activation occurred only last week and the subject has been in stasis again until last night. So you’d be the first male to have the full benefit of its…ah influence.”

  “What the hell?” the man muttered. “Does it come out?”

  “Never,” Zamir assured him. “This species is bred and engineered on the Dragon’s Mouth in the Maw Cluster and it’s quite permanent—it will live as long as its host unless removed by its maker.”

  “Damn,” the man muttered. “Of all the fucking—”

  “Excuse me? Is there a problem?” Zamir sounded offended. “Most of my customers like the idea of an implant. It makes a slave so much more eager to please.”

  “I’m sure it fucking does,” the man said harshly. But though his voice was rough, his hand was gentle. The black leather glove slid around to cup Maggie’s cheek and then moved lower, tracing the curve of her neck and her collar bone.

  Maggie shivered as the large gloved hand moved even lower, cupping the curve of her right breast and thumbing the nipple lightly through the thin scarlet ribbon she wore.

  “My apologies, good sir,” Zamir said smoothly. “But I must ask you not to over handle the merchandise. She must be kept fresh if she’s to be sold.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that—I’ll buy her,” the man said. “I just want to know how responsive she is…how this damn implant thing you’ve got in her is affecting her.”

  He stroked her nipple again and then pinched it lightly, sending sparks of pain and p