Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 79941 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79941 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
He had told her often of his home world and how he had lost his twin and brother, a male called Shouts Loudly. Ketha got the feeling that if his twin had still been alive, Speaks would have tried to escape. But when he lost his brother, he also lost the ability to call a mate and to have a normal life—well, whatever was normal for a Twin Kindred, anyway, which seemed strange to her. So he was content to stay in bondage to her mother and to act as a surrogate father to Ketha.
Unfortunately, Speaks had died recently—passing peacefully in his tiny room at the back of the penthouse. He’d had a short illness and Ketha had refused to let her mother send him away to the Dream Gas mines—which Mistress Morebutt had wanted to do because he “wasn’t useful anymore.” She had nursed the old bodyslave herself—though her mother had complained it was beneath her—and had done her best to make his last moments easy.
In the very end, Ketha had been holding his hand and she knew she would never forget it. Just as Speaks had been about to breathe his last, his faded blue eyes had opened wide, as though seeing some glory that no one else could comprehend.
“Oh, it’s you, Shouts…Brother, I hear you calling me. Goddess—I’m coming home!” he had breathed and then his hand had gone limp in Ketha’s and she’d known he was gone.
“Now why did you have to think about that?” she muttered to herself, because her eyes were suddenly stinging with tears. She still missed the old Kindred bodyslave, she admitted to herself. Missed him more that she could say. It had only been six solar months since his passing and she still felt his loss deeply.
If Speaks had still been alive, she might have consented to have the baby her mother so desperately wanted for her second heir. The old Kindred bodyslave had been excellent with children and he would have helped Ketha raise her daughter. (And it definitely would have been a daughter—the Conception Centers only used seed that was guaranteed to produce female heirs.)
Of course, she could always use a nanny-bot—a specially programmed AI robot which was made specifically to raise the heirs of Yonnite Mistresses. But Ketha herself had been given over to a nanny-bot at birth and she remembered how cold and unloving it had been. Without Speaks to care for her, she would have had a loveless childhood, since Mistress Morebutt couldn’t be bothered to come see her more than once a week or so, when she was little.
So if she did ever have a child, she was going to raise the little girl by hand and not pass her off to a machine, Ketha swore to herself. She sighed. If only Speaks was still around. He was always so good with children—they trusted him instinctively because they could sense his gentle nature and kind heart.
She wondered if the new bodyslave would be anything like him. Her mother had ordered another Kindred from their usual slave dealer, but it had taken him some time to procure one.
Apparently the Kindred—which were a race that was ninety-five percent male—now knew that they were considered prime candidates for bodyslaves by Yonnite Mistresses and they were being more careful. So it was getting harder and harder to buy one—even at the elite dealers of the Flesh Bazaar. Still, Mistress Morebutt had stuck to her standards, refusing to even think of any other species when she decided to replace Speaks.
“I won’t have any other kind of male running my household!” she’d told the slave dealer, who was a shifty-eyed Saurian with scaly skin and slitted yellow eyes. “I simply must have a male I can trust, and the Kindred are the only males who absolutely will not harm a female.”
“They are getting difficult to procure, Missstresss,” the dealer had hissed doubtfully. “It may take me sssome time to get you one.”
“I’ll wait,” Mistress Morebutt had said. “Ketha and I will simply have to make do with a robo-butler until you can get me a Kindred.”
Actually, Ketha didn’t mind the robo-butler. True it was clunky and its hands were too cold and metallic to give a good massage—the one time Ketha had tried its massage function, she had found it was like being rubbed by an ice-cold metal rolling pin. But it was good at keeping track of her mother’s appointments and it was easy to fool, so she could sneak out at night if she wanted to.
Shouldn’t have to be sneaking anywhere, she thought to herself resentfully, as she continued through the Bazaar, waving off a chuni-meat vendor who was trying to sell her a candied Koo-lock penis on a stick. I’m a grown woman, past the age of maturity. Mother needs to stop treating me like a child!