So this is it, the final chapter!
Thank you so much for the encouragement through votes and comments - I hope you enjoyed reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
*
"What took you so long?" he repeated, but I just stood there, with clenched fists and an open mouth. That was not the reaction I had expected.
I was staring at George as he sat behind the desk, looking awfully smug, his hands folded in front of him.
"Cassidy, what did I tell you when we first met?"
I looked at him with wide open eyes, trying to figure out what he meant. George had caught me on the wrong foot; I helplessly threw my hands up.
He smiled and leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. "I told you that the most important thing ..."
George raised his eyebrows, waiting, until I finally got it. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I felt like the dumbest person in the galaxy.
"The most important thing is that I respect myself and don't take crap from anyone."
He laughed. "Something to that effect, yes. And yet, you walk into that shop and take more than a thousand lashes, like a lamb to slaughter. You let Kessler chain you up and allow everyone to fuck you for pennies. And you wear that stupid collar. Kid, you really tested my patience."
I couldn't believe it. He put me through all of this, just to see me snap? That was the lesson he kept talking about? Really?
"You're tough, everyone knows that," he said. "But you will never amount to anything in this business if you don't stand up for yourself. You have to take what you want, the universe owes you nothing. Look, I know it must be harder for a woman, a lot harder, I'm sure, but how can you degrade yourself like that? Remember, I offered you a job and you never took me up on it."
"I did work at Everton's," I protested weakly.
"Yes, you did. But you should have demanded to get paid. And what did you go for to make money? A job in maintenance and prostitiution. Really?"
He had a point and I was disappointed in myself for not pushing back harder. In a pinch, whoring was my universal fallback - it was time I reconsidered that approach.
"Was Nora in on it?" I asked slowly
"No. I had to send her on some charity mission to get her out of the way. These last couple of weeks I think she would have killed me. That whole operation cost me another fifty million bucks - for her war orphans or whatever it is this time. She's not cheap, my lovely wife."
George grinned and took a key from his desk's bottom drawer.
"Want to keep it as a souvenir?" he asked after he had removed my collar.
I thought about it for a minute, still not sure whether I should be angry or relieved. Maybe when I had my own ship, I'd put it on the wall, above my desk. All things considered, it was a nice memento; I had met the most notorious thug this side of the Riva nebula and lived to tell the tale.
"Actually, yes, but I need the explosives removed."
He chuckled. "There are no explosives. Do you think I would let anyone with a bomb near my wife?"
"What about the other features? What does it do?"
"Besides the tracker? Nothing. It just looks pretty."
I buried my face in my hands. At the very least, I had expected a punishment zapper, maybe a neural gag, or some surveillance equipment. And it had all been a bluff.
"Wait a minute," I said. "You're playing the same game with Nora, right? Pushing her until she stands up for herself?"
He leaned back in his chair and scratched his belly.
"You know, when we married she was this shy, submissive little thing. No opinions of her own, afraid of the world and her own shadow. And look at her now! I couldn't be more proud. People are already asking her to run for office, but give her ten or fifteen more years and she'll have the world at her feet."
"So that was your plan with her all along?"
George laughed and showed his teeth. "The original idea was getting back at her father, that spineless old weasel. But I've grown very fond of her and I knew that without a certain amount of pressure she'd never reach her full potential. You can criticize my methods, but they do get results."
I wasn't convinced. "She was so unhappy that she ran away. Multiple times."
"And every time she came back stronger. Did she tell you about her home planet? She was little more than a slave, barely educated and with no control over her life. Her own family sold her out, it wasn't even my idea to marry her."
"I know. But still, you cannot play with people's lives like that."
He just sat there for a while and said nothing.
"You're going to tell her, don't you?"
"She's my best friend. I have to."
He sighed and turned his head towards the observation window, looking into space. "She's going to divorce me. I'm eighty years old, women have left me before, but this one, this is going to hurt."
"It would be her final declaration of independence. That's what you worked for, now you have to let her go."
"True," he said and got up from his chair. "I knew this day would come, but I'm going to miss her. And not just me, everyone. Maybe she'll visit me sometimes if I keep funding her charities."
"Maybe she will, that's her decision," I said. "And what about you and me? Where do we stand?"
"When you've stopped being mad at me, you can still work in my organization. I have a wide range of opportunities and some of them are even legit. Excellent pay, first-rate health care-"
"Free brothel visits on deck nine ..."
He laughed. "That's for the lower ranks. My top personnel gets better service."
"I sure hope so. But first I have to find my sister, then I will consider it. And I want to get paid."
George shrugged. "Very well. Go talk to Ahmad, he wanted to pay you a bonus anyway."
*
With money in my pocket, I was finally able to take care of an extremely annoying problem that had troubled me for weeks. I made an appointment at the clinic on deck twelve that Nora had recommended. Removing my slave registration number cost me fifty bucks and for six hundred, they restored my ass to virginal state. They even threw in a vaginal tightening - the standard package for overworked whores. Finally, accidents were a thing of the past.
I decided to keep my unlimited Everton's customer account for now - you never know what the future holds. When it came to corporal punishment, I would still go for Mendez if I could afford it, but saving a hundred bucks on a whipping at Everton's was nothing to sneeze at. And besides, I was sure customer support would soon improve dramatically.
Still exhausted, I considered taking a couple of days off, but I couldn't sit still, not with Amara out there; I had to go to Naridia myself and help with the search.
*
It was my second trip with Terras and this time, I was better prepared. Equipped with plenty of books, a comprehensive porn collection and a few of Nora's toys, I was confident I wouldn't get bored.
"Ready for takeoff?" he asked as I entered the cockpit.
"Yep," I said and lowered my pants to show my unmarked pubic mound. "See? I'm a whole new woman; no slave tat and no collar either. Did you clear things with Donnie?"
"I did," he said after he had sufficiently validated my claim. "I'm ready to go beyond mission parameters. But let's get on course first."
*
The Naridia system was five days away and we got there on major trading routes. Terras and I shared cockpit duty and talked a lot, but we never ended up having sex. After all my shifts chained up on deck nine, taking dicks in every hole, a break was exactly what I needed and Terras didn't press the issue either.
I was a bit conflicted though and had to admit that since he rejected me on our first trip, I had spent way too much time thinking about it. Like most women, I love it when men desire me - especially when they are as handsome as this one - and when someone plays it cool around me, it even increases the attraction.
He would fuck me this time, no doubt about it, but would he do it because he was genuinely attracted to me? Or just because I happened to be the only other person on this ship? Or worse, was I even a charity case to him?
You're an adult woman and you're acting like a schoolgirl with a crush, I thought. Where is all of this coming from? You just solved some of your problems and now you're creating new ones. Get your act together, you're on a mission to save your sister!
So instead of having sex, we kept our relationship friendly and professional. I spent my time reading, trying new recipes in the kitchen, and following progress reports from Donnie's team on site. They were leaving no stone unturned; the scale of the operation was a lot bigger than I had realized.
*
We touched down early in the morning and met Donnie's lead investigator at a dusty local bar outside the space port, the only place that was open at that time of day. The investigator's name was Mave Renari - she looked like a nicer version of my grandmother, but according to Terras, she was a legend among bounty hunters.
"Welcome to the end of the world," she said and shook my hand with an iron grip. "So you're Cassidy."
"Yes. And soldier boy here is Terras."
"We've met," she said and hugged him. "Pleasure as always, Terras. Didn't think you'd make it out of Massanas alive."
"Pleasure, Mave. And I thought you only do high profile cases."
"This is coming right from the big man himself. We're working with an unlimited budget, I've got the fleet on call and an Omega class destroyer in orbit. Beats me though why George thinks I might need a darned destroyer."
Terras shrugged. "It's better to have one than to need one."
"Boy, in fifty years on the job I never ... Oh well, what do I care. If that's how he wants to spend his money, that's his business. I've run large-scale operations in my day, but I haven't seen this level of crazy in a while. Except when the wife went missing, of course."
We sat down at a table in a corner of the bar. There were no other customers to bother us and the waitress on duty had fallen asleep at another table, so Mave could give her report without anyone else listening in.
"We tracked down that farmer who bought your sister. There's just a slight complication: After last year's drought he went bankrupt and Amara was not on the list of liquidated assets. We checked all the slave sales."
