"Don't push me too far little girl," he breathed into her ear, pressing himself roughly against her ass. "We'll be consummating our marriage next week and I can make it easy on you, or I can make it hard," he pinched her ass hard enough to bruise.
"You go whichever way you see fit, my Lord. I'm indifferent to the myriad ways you've come up with to satisfy your lust. I suspect they're all very hollow, in the end," she hissed back at him, her cheek pressed against the wall.
"Is that so," he smirked, pressing his lips to her ear. "I look forward to seeing how indifferent you look in my bed sheets."
"I promise I'll look as indifferent there as I do here," she whispered to him. "Because my feelings for you will be the same next week as they are this week, and as they were the week before that and the year before that, right back to when you stole me away from my family to join your all-you-can-eat girly buffet."
"Indifference can be replaced with all sorts of looks, Delphi. It's only in fairytale romances that the expression needs to be love. You'd be surprised at what expressions can arouse me."
"I most certainly wouldn't, I can assure you of that, my Lord. Bored and disgusted maybe but never surprised."
He laughed in appreciation, setting her free. She was everything the Chastain women were rumoured to be, and more.
Delphi signed secretly to Feifei and Lili as she walked free.
"Disgusting old bastard."
"Don't push him too far," warned Feifei in quick sign language.
"I'll push him so far he falls off a fucking cliff if I get the chance," she signed back, and Lili couldn't help but let out a giggle.
The Emperor looked at the long-haired Asian beauty, Lili, with interest. She still wore the tight-fitting black leather crop top the girls wore when they were not long post-breast surgery and needed the extra support.
His eyes fell appreciatively to her enhanced chest, and she smiled sweetly at him, a promise of good things to come...
Lili could afford to flash him that smile. The 4th-gen girls had a secret they would all die to protect.
They planned to be free, at whatever price it cost them; and not one of them planned to be around to join the Emperor's harem when they turned eighteen…
---------
The Emperor's Honour Guards were as off-duty as their commander ever allowed them to be. They sat at a waterfront bar in the busy downtown of the capital.
"Skoll, skoll, skoll," chanted the men, as Lieutenant Espey downed a pint of dark ale.
It didn't take much at all to encourage Loveday's brother, Niko Espey, to drink, and being six foot four and built like a brick shithouse, it took a lot for him to get drunk.
"Oh, the gentle giant's so sozzled now he won't be able to get it up, even with Bunny!" crowed Baer.
Bunny was one of the only half-decent looking State-sanctioned prostitutes in town.
"This giant's not gentle!" roared Niko. "And he can always get it up!"
He leapt onto Baer, tipping the man's chair backwards and trying to throttle him while he had him trapped.
Baer might have been an inch shorter than Niko, but he was even thicker set, with arms like slabs of meat, so they were a well-matched pair of combatants.
Their commander, Alton Meyer, watched on coolly as the two men rolled across the floor of the bar, the rest of the unit surrounding them and urging them on. He wouldn't pull them up unless it got really messy. In their rare downtime, his men needed to blow-off steam.
When the pair of young men rolled right to his feet, still trading blows, he leant down and grabbed them by their collars, hauling them up off the floor. Being an inch taller than both of them and broader again, helped when the shenanigans went over the top.
On seeing it was the Commander, the men let go of each other and ducked their heads.
"Sir," nodded his second-in-command Niko, sheepishly.
"Sorry Sir," Baer said cheerfully, clearly not at all sorry.
"Sit back down and stop destroying the place," said the Commander mildly.
"On it, Sir," Niko saluted.
"Stay sharp men," he called to his team, "I don't want a repeat of last time we got called back to the palace after the pub when Cormac was sick in the Chief Consort's garden…"
The men all laughed at Cormac; his best friend Magnus punched him in the ribs good-naturedly.
Like most of the population, they were a mixed-looking bunch; lots of blended ancestry. Young men their age were 4th-gen post-WW3, and by now ethnic groups had broken down and disappeared, along with the countries they came from.
So far as they knew, this little Island and the Mainland, were all that was left above water.
Boatloads and boatloads of survivors had arrived from the old countries after constant cloud cover from the Fallout inundated the Earth with rain. The planet tilted, rearranging the newly swelled oceans, and sinking continents under its surface.
The invader-survivors ran an almost bloodless campaign of suppression against the lightly armed inhabitants, ruling by dynastic Emperor.
"Thank God they never found out who did it, or I might have to do another year in this shitty unit before the Emperor gives me a wife," Cormac joked.
First wives were allocated by the Emperor after two years of military service for soldiers. A couple more years of good service and you would be given a second wife if you were lucky.
"Next year should see us all married if we don't stuff this year up," Commander Meyer reminded them. "If you lot keep training hard and working hard, we'll all be well-rewarded."
Young women were veiled, covered and chaperoned, so it was impossible to get to know them unless they were relatives.
Like most of the young men in the city, they still knew where the attractive ones resided. So did the Emperor, so you had to get in line after him.
He liked to take his women into the palace as small children and raise them there until they were of age. That was how Niko had been separated from his sister Loveday more than ten years ago.
Faint shouts floated across the water from one of the long piers that crisscrossed the harbour.
"Shhhh!" Commander Meyer hushed his men.
The shouts turned into frightened screams.
"Let's go men!" he shouted.
The eight young men jumped up from their seats and pounded out of the bar and down the waterfront, turning right at the first pier and thundering heavily along the old timber walkway.