Grant squeezes a handful of his wife’s ass as she sinuously gyrates it at him. So full and smooth and soft. So unmarred. “You ready for what you just earned yourself, Princess Sykora?”

She snickers. “You don’t have the horns to—”

His palm slaps into her asscheek, sending a shockwave across the plump blue pillows in his lap. She yelps.

“You thought this was gonna just pacify me?” he demands. “Like I’d just forget I’m mad at you?”

“Insufferable Maekyonite!” She thrashes. “Get your—your lowborn hands off me.”

Smack. Another spank and she lets out a throttled gasp. Her toes curl. Her tail is wagging like a mad windmill. He grunts as its tuft thwacks him in the face. He bites his laugh back. “Get—” He grabs for it. “Get your goddamn tail out the way.”

“I can’t just—it doesn’t always do what I OH—”

She’s cut off as his teeth close around her tail.

“You vandal,” she gasps. “You—”

Another jiggling smack across her ass sends her into a toe-curling groan.

“Barbarian,” she cries. “How dare you—”

Smack.

He sees the color in them now, the blushing rose he's raising. She’s panting and gasping like she’s barely getting her head above water. “Brute,” she whimpers. “You’re a brute.”

Smack. Smack. Smack.

She’s caressing his crotch; he snatches her hand away. He shifts her and sees the viscous stain her pussy has drooled onto his lap. “Are you wet?”

Her sodden reply sounds like a no that got left out in the sun.

“You are.” He shoves his fingers between her legs. She lets out a husky, desperate grunt. “You’re soaked.”

“In—insufferable Maekyonite.” Her act is flagging. “Insubordinate peasant.”

“Peasant? That’s a new one.” He digs deeper and finds a spot that makes her keen like a cat in heat. Another spank and her throat opens further into a yowl. Her face kneads against the fabric of his pants.

For all his anger—and he is still angry—he can’t help but feel it, the love surging back in, how she feels and how she smells. Healthy and gripping and so beautifully blue. It intermingles with his irritation at her, and becomes something else, something he can’t name, exactly, but knows exactly what to do with.

“Look at you,” he says. “How am I even supposed to properly punish a little masochist like you?”

Her hips buck. He feels her muscles squeeze and unclench and squeeze again in a desperate rhythm around his digits. “Please,” she whines. She fumbles with the button of his pants. “I’m sorry. I said sorry. Please, Grant.”

He removes his fingers and wipes a shiny trail on the raw, flushed skin of her ass. “Just Grant? Run outta names to call me?”

She’s run out of every word, it seems. All she can summon in reply is a wheedling moan as he tugs her panties the rest of the way off.

He unzips his pants. “Maybe you’ll think of one while I’m fucking you,” he says.

He lifts her off his lap. There’s something he wants to try with his bendy little bride. His arms scoop under her thighs, then tuck upward, folding her legs up around her ears and squeezing her shoulders into place. His hands knit together behind her head.

“Grant—” Her voice shakes as she wriggles in his grip and realizes how immobilized she’s become. “What—”

He plunges his trussed-up, half-dressed space imp wife onto his cock.

“Whaaat theee fuuuck,” she wails, every syllable drawn out and rattled by his brutal, rhythmic discipline. Bangles and earrings clatter like a hailstorm. His teeth grit. Her hands clutch his arms, and he flexes them, and she moans with lustful awe and he feels like some kind of caveman sex god.

She’s told him before how risque doggy style feels, how Taiikari sex without face-to-face contact has a thrill to it. The way he’s taking her now must be throwing that into overdrive. With his hands on the back of her head shoving her down and forward, she couldn’t compel him even if she wanted to, even if he was vulnerable to it.

She squirms in his grip, but she’s trapped like this, outmatched by the sheer physical force of a husband twice her size, mewling helplessly, a living, panting, writhing sex toy, limbs pinned, face flushed, voluptuous curves folded in on themselves, incapable of doing a thing except stare down at the dripping place where they meet, the bulge pumping below her skin as her hulking alien groom jerks himself off with her—and then her tail wraps around the back of his neck and dispels that illusion, and he is reminded that no, the Princess of the Pike could absolutely still kill him in a matter of seconds, even when he’s knotted her into a pretzel and using her like one of Lieutenant-Gefreiter Axyna’s ridiculous cum-catchers.

Fortunately, she seems disinterested in murder at the moment; she’s too busy cumming her brains out. The hungry, silky pull intensifies into a frenzy; the alien musculature below his wife’s pastel skin hardens and binds.

The pressure valve in his stomach is tipping into the red. Arms out from behind her head and he lowers her to the floor, stretches her across the carpet, up and on top of her, and he pushes her prone and breaks the act for just a second, long enough to tug a pillow from the bed and shove it under her hips, to tilt her winking pussy up and snug against him, and to whisper “Good?” and to lighten his grip on the back of her head just enough to let her nod, and when she does, rapturously, he shoves her face-down against the floor and fucks her into it, sprinting for the finish, listening to her muffled cries in symphony with the obscene sounds he draws from her pulsing, pliant cunt.

She’s saying something. The hand in her hair balls into a fist and tugs her face up to hear.

“On me,” she says. “On me. Not in me. Let me feel it.”

“Say please.”

“Please. Please!”

He pulls out and shoves rhythmically between the thick, round cheeks that bear his handprints, the head of his cock prodding the velvety root of her tail, and yanks her further, into a balletic arch, and her butt flexes, the taut little ring of muscle between them twitching against his cock, and that finishes him off, wrings him out, and she sings his name in her high and gorgeously fractured voice, as he defaces the work of art in front of him, as he paints her, glazing the rosy globes of her ass, pooling in the small of her back, matting her sleek black hair, and she whimpers and kneads her toes against his skin and caresses his chest with her quivering tail.

And that’s how that fight ends.

***

“Grant Hyde of Maekyon,” Sykora says, when he’s drawn them a bath and she’s remembered how to talk. “What the fuck

was that knot you tied me into?”

“That was the, uh.” He opens his legs to give her room to sit, and wanders through his reconfigured language pathways. “That’s called a Full Nelson, I think.”

“What’s a Nelson?”

“A Maekyonite name.”

“Well. When we conquer your planet, we need to find Mr. or Miss Nelson and present them with some sort of award in recognition of their contribution to sexology.” She pants a laugh. “You’re such a fucking stud. You’ve gotten so strong. Every time I look at you.” She traces the line of his bicep. A contented purr rumbles her against him. “Gods of the fucking Firmament. Your arms.”

He examines himself, under the cooing touch of his well-fucked wife. “Huh,” he says. He flexes experimentally. It’s been happening so slow that he hasn’t had cause to really look at it. But at some point in his life aboard the Black Pike, between his lessons with Ajax and his time in the weight room and the sheer gravity, Grant Hyde has gotten kinda yoked.

Sykora sticks her butt up above the surface of the water and peers over her shoulder, across the cabin at her vanity mirror. “You could have gone harder. I’m barely even pink.”

“I didn’t want you to have trouble sitting or anything.”

“That’s not how a nobleman ought to spank.”

“Nice try.” He lathers shampoo in his palms and brushes them through her hair. “Not falling for this bit again.”

“Hellfire.”

“When did you switch from actually fighting me to gassing me up?”

“Uh. I don’t remember.” Her tail curls abashedly. “Probably after I was a total forgetful bastard about compulsion. I’m…” She forces the word out again. “Sorry, dove. I really am.”

“It’s okay,” he says. He reaches to the edge of the tub, where the plate of dumplings is balanced, and takes a bite of one. “I was yelling, too. Maybe we were just hangry or something.”

She shakes her sudsy head. “Taiikari pregnancy can, uh… it can sort of send you out of whack, emotionally.”

“Oh, shit. I didn’t even think of that.” He wraps an arm over her, palm to bellybutton, and slides her closer. “Think that happens to Maekyonites, too.”

“I didn’t think of it either,” she says. “I’ll remember to take a breath next time.”

He holds a dumpling up to her. “Now I feel forgetful.”

She opens her lips and lets him pop it into her mouth. She sits cross-legged in his lap as she chews. “The dispute was genuine enough, even if the hormones kicked it higher.”

Grant sighs. “Yeah. It was.”

“Can you just—can we go back and imagine I made all my points with far less venom?”

“I think we just have really different ideas about crime,” Grant says. “You talk about it like it’s a disease that needs medicine. The Maekyonite view is, uh… well, it depends on who you talk to. But it’s—I guess it’s society and circumstance as much as it is individual, is how I learned it.”

Sykora’s brow furrows. “How so?”

“We might need to steal some books from Maekyon,” Grant says. “A college dropout isn’t gonna explain it like Foucault can.”

“I’ll take your word on that.”

“Maybe we table it for now.”

Her face grows eager. “Yes, please. If that’s an option.”

He smiles despite himself. “Okay.”

“It’s not something I can change anyway, the re-ed facilities,” she says. “Not without a cruiserload of effort and time that I just don’t have at the moment. And I hate arguing with you, sexual consequences aside.”

“Just one thing,” Grant says. “Can I ask a question? And offer a compromise?”

Her mouth twists, but she nods her assent.

“This Compound 71 we’re charged to make,” he says. “The injectable anticompulsion. When it’s ready, what’s the plan with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“And Compound 70. Are they going to be revealed simultaneously?”

“Dove, I really don’t know. I wish I did.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he says. “I will shut up about this. For a while, anyway. I hate it, but I hated how prison worked in my country on Maekyon, too, so it’s not like I’ve got a good alternative. I think there’s a version of a place like Shakami that I would be satisfied with. But I can’t be the guy who sends people there. Not yet. I won’t bug you about it all the time, and I get I can’t just tear the place down, but my conscience won’t just let me sit by.”

She lifts his hand to her lips and kisses the tip of his thumb. “All right. What do we do?”

“Here’s my compromise,” he says, as she works her way along the line. “When Compound 70 becomes public knowledge—”

Sykora pauses on the finger with his wedding ring. “If.”

“It’s coming out,” Grant says. “Maekyonites are about to break everyone’s brains and introduce a totally uncompellable population of hunks, right?”

She hums pensively. “I suppose that’s true.”

“If I’m the Empress, that’s when I rip the bandage off. Pretend it was just discovered and use it to grease the wheels on the Maekyon annexation.”

“That’s rather coldly calculated of you, Grantyde.”

He shrugs. “I’m just being realistic.”

“If that does happen,” she says, “we will be militant about its regulation. You and me.”

“And we won’t fight about those calls?”

“We might.” Her voice is firm. “But then we’ll work it out and find a place we’re happy. That’s what we do. And I won’t be on this hormonal rollercoaster any longer.” She sloshes her foot out of the water and pushes herself snugger against him off the wall of the tub. “You were saying about your compromise?”

“When the Empire finds out about Compound 70, the people who decide about these reeducation places, and the people responsible for flashing the inmates, they all need to take it and see what it is they’re inflicting,” he says. “Every single one of them. And once they understand what it is they’re doing, and how it feels, we’ll have a conversation about compulsion’s place in re-ed.”

She sighs and rests his hand on her stomach. “You have a deal, Prince Grantyde.”

“Even if that includes you?”

“Even then,” she says. “To be honest, I am quite curious about how it feels, the compulsion.”

He gives her a companionable squeeze. “I bet you are.”

She splashes him. “What does that mean, Mr. Trying-to-be-nice?”

“I dunno, Mrs. Maybe-you-should.”

She folds her fingers over his. “Where will we take them first?”

“Who?”

“Our babies,” she says. “When their father’s planet is ready to receive them, what’s the first thing we’ll show them?”

He cups a handful of steamy water and lets it cascade down her inky locks.

“Penguins,” he decides. “I’m gonna show you guys the penguins.”