Twisted: Brides of the Kindred 23 Read online

  Nikki frowned. Had Mistress Hellenix taken Dark’s brother then? It seemed like she remembered it the other way around—like someone (the man with the silver eyes) had told her that the little brother escaped and only Dark himself was taken. But it must not have been so.

  “You’re right of course—you can’t leave your brother. I’m sorry,” she said soberly.

  “Landing now,” Dark informed her. “I think Mistress Hellenix is already here.”

  Nikki watched as he landed the long-range ship neatly on the sandy beach and then the two of them got out. They stood side-by-side on the beach and Nikki put a hand to her eyes to scan for her evil twin.

  Soon enough, she saw a car pull up and Mistress Hellenix got out. Stalking around to the driver’s side of the car, she opened the door and dragged someone out—a man, Nikki saw, as she squinted against the strong Florida sun. He had on some kind of a collar and the alien dominatrix was dragging him by a long leather leash.

  Now who can that be? Nikki wondered, frowning. If her evil twin had been half as busy living Nikki’s life as Nikki had been living hers, she shouldn’t have had time to go out and capture some poor man to drag around behind her. She—

  Suddenly she recognized the man. With a shock, she realized it was Gary.

  Her ex-husband had on the most bizarre outfit—a pair of black leather shorts so tight they looked painted on. They were short-shorts too—meaning they went up his ass and showed plenty of his pale, skinny, hairy legs. His beer gut spilled over the top of them, though it looked a little smaller than Nikki remembered. Had Mistress Hellenix put him on some kind of crash diet? Maybe she’s just been running him ragged, forcing him to drive her all over town and never giving him a minute to himself in his man cave—that sounded likely.

  In addition to the skin-tight shorts and collar, her ex had on a black leather skull cap that covered his balding head and a black leather harness decorated with silver studs criss-crossed across his rather flabby abdomen and chest. Black , thigh-high ladies high-heeled boots completed the outfit.

  Gary wobbled on the boots uncertainly, as though he wasn’t sure how to walk in them. No surprise, since he had never shown any kind of proclivity for cross-dressing—at least as far as Nikki knew. She wondered where Mistress Hellenix had gotten the bizarre outfit and how she had persuaded Gary to put it on. Then again, from the way she was yanking on the leash, it didn’t look like she’d done much persuading at all. She had probably just told him what to do and expected him to do it.

  “Come, Garrison—no time for dawdling,” the Yonnite Mistress said, hauling heartlessly on the leash. “Your new life begins now.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” Gary panted, scrambling to keep up with her long strides as she dragged him across the parking lot and over the sandy dunes of the beach. It took some time, because Gary was having trouble walking in the sand wearing the high-heeled boots, but at last they came to where Nikki and Dark were standing.

  “Hello, Velka,” Nikki said, speaking directly to the Yonnite Mistress. After the past couple of days, she felt she had certainly earned the right to address the other woman by her first name.

  “Hello, Nicole.” Mistress Hellenix inclined her head regally. “I’m glad to see you’re finally here. Your life here is so horribly dull. Positively awful. The only fun I’ve had at all is disciplining your cheating ex-mate, here. Isn’t that right, Garrison?” She yanked on the leash again and Gary fell to his knees, looking up at her.

  “Yes, Mistress.” He sounded out of breath and no wonder—walking in sand wearing four-inch platform heels was probably no easy task, Nikki thought. Especially since the most exercise he ever got was getting up to get a new beer during the commercial break while he watched the game.

  “Anyway,” Mistress Hellenix went on. “I did all that you asked of me and fulfilled my end of the contract. Now I would like my life back as well as the E’lo stone which got us into this mess in the first place.” She held out a hand imperiously, waiting as Nicole untied the little velvet bag from around her neck and handed it over.

  “So that’s it?” she asked, as Mistress Hellenix inspected the stone and nodded in apparent approval before slipping it back into the bag. “We just…switch back?”

  “Of course—that was what we agreed on, wasn’t it?” the Yonnite Mistress demanded. “Though I do have a tiny tweak to the deal, which I’m sure you won’t mind.”

  “A tweak? What tweak?” Nikki asked, frowning.

  “I want to keep this one.” Mistress Hellenix yanked on Gary’s leash. “He amuses me more than all my other slaves put together. Probably because he is so different from them and has never known a Mistress’s firm hand before. He had no notion of what it was like to be ruled by a strong woman until I came along.”

  Well, that was certainly true, Nikki thought wryly. Gary had never been the kind to knuckle-under before. The one time he’d had a female boss at work he’d done nothing but complain and call her a “brass-balled bitch.” Nikki had met her at a company function and she’d seemed perfectly lovely—not at all like Mistress Hellenix. Now she was a real brass-balled bitch and Nikki was betting that Gary had found that out the hard way.

  Still, it would be heartless of her to just give away her ex-husband to her evil twin—especially knowing the discipline techniques the other woman used. She could just imagine Gary getting a flogging with the pain whip or, even worse, getting the rod. He had lived a comfortable, easy existence up until now with first his mother and then Nikki to wait on him. That kind of treatment might just break him.

  “I’m afraid not,” she said reluctantly to Mistress Hellenix. “Gary isn’t for, uh, sale.”

  “Oh, I’m not asking you, Nicole—I’m telling you.” The alien dominatrix yanked on Gary’s leash again, making him sit up in the sand like a dog begging for a bone. He whimpered softly but didn’t seem to dare to voice any louder complaint. “I am taking him,” Mistress Hellenix continued. “After all, he cheated on you and separated himself from you legally—which means you have no rights to him anymore. I have claimed him and you cannot gainsay my declaration.”

  “But he’s the father of my children,” Nikki pointed out, thinking fast. “What will my boys say when I tell them they’ll never see their father again?”

  “They were never going to see him again anyway,” Mistress Hellenix informed her. “I got the whole story out of him, you know. He and the female he was cheating with were planning to run away and live in a foreign land called ‘Atuba’ or some such name.”

  “Atuba? You mean Aruba? You were going to run off to Aruba?” Nikki demanded, glaring down at her leashed ex-husband.

  “It’s…a tropical paradise,” he choked out. “Rene and I were going to start an on-line consulting business. It was going to be beautiful. No responsibilities…no kids…no nagging spouses.”

  “Wait a minute, Rene?” Nikki could hardly believe her ears. “Not my cousin, Rene? Not her?”

  “Yes, indeed—he was going to run off with your kin,” Mistress Hellenix said briskly. “After taking all your mutual assets out of your account and leaving you with nothing. Now how do you feel about letting me take him?”

  Nikki’s blood was boiling and she was seeing red at this new piece of unwelcome news. She and her cousin Rene had always been close—almost like sisters. How could Gary even think of being with her—let alone cleaning out their bank-account and running off to Aruba to start a whole new life?

  But still, looking at her ex crouching miserably in the sand wearing the collar and tight shorts and thigh-high ladies platform boots, she knew she couldn’t condemn him to the kind of life Mistress Hellenix proposed to give him. It was too cruel—too inhumane.

  “I’m sorry,” she said reluctantly, trying to hold back her temper. “I agree he’s a cheating dog and he doesn’t deserve much, but I just can’t let you take the father of my children off to God-knows-where and do God-knows-what to him.”

  Hellenix frowned.