“Everyone’s having a lovely time, aren’t they, Dolly?”

The pirate squeezes her tighter, closer. Dolly’s heart is racing; she awkwardly pushes against the oddly familiar assailant. It’ll come to her in a moment. With a condescending click of her tongue, the pirate (the same one from the bay, the one who pounced on her, how [i]dare[/i] she) hip checks her against a clothes bin, leverages her position, pins her in place. One hand squeezes stuffed cheeks, fingers dimpling the scarf, just like she’d done back in the hangar. If she could just wiggle out, she’d be out of the aisle. She could run for it. Go for help.

“But that’s because this is the easy way,” the leopard says, tilting Dolly’s face up. Dolly glares furiously through sunglasses knocked askew, puts her hands on the Bander’s stomach and pushes uselessly, feels the hip grind into her stomach. She can’t even make a sound. Her breath is gone, and she’s panting into the scarf, feeling it flutter against her nose. “You and me are going to have a walk, [i]girlfriend.[/i]” She cups Dolly’s chest, squeezes, grins at the way Dolly’s eyes widen and at the sharp inhalation through the scarf. “Nobody needs to get hurt. All these shoppers, having a nice day out… you wouldn’t want us to have to bring them along, would you?”

Her gold tooth is so arresting. A flash of metal in a hungry smile. “Because then we’d have to make such a mess. Then we’d have to sort through them, figure out who’s worth keeping, set price tags… but you don’t want that, do you?” Her head is turned from side to side, jostling her sunglasses more. The Terenian is keeping an eye out at the end of the aisle. Nobody’s coming to help her. “Not when we could have such a nice night in. So behave and everybody wins, and [i]they[/i] all get to go home tonight.”

There’s no way of knowing how many Banders are here. There’s no way of knowing if they [i]would[/i] take half a shopping mall prisoner to be ransomed off or added to their collections. But more than that, the thought of panic, chaos, innocent bystanders getting caught in the trap they’d laid for [i]her…[/i]

“So are you going to be a good girl, Dolly dearest?” The Bander’s voice drips with venomed honey, drizzling all over Dolly. A thumb presses firmly against her swaddled lips. One leg threatens to buckle underneath her. Her ears flatten, and her treacherous tail curls between the pirate’s taut thighs.

“yhff,” she says, small and cute, most of the sound swallowed up by her gag. Her hands droop, and she tucks them in close to her chest, fingers tugging at the taut fabric. She wants to be a good girl. And if the only way to protect everyone here is to not make a scene, then she’ll be meek, and obedient, and quiet.

(How long was the leopardess planning this? Since before they met? Or was it having Dolly underneath her that made her [i]have[/i] to do this? Was it even her plan? Was this punishment from Erys for humiliating her?)

The leopardess slides the sunglasses back up Dolly’s nose, hooking them properly behind her ears. “See? You [i]are[/i] a good girl, Dolly. We’re gonna have [i]so[/i] much fun~” She pushes a purse into Dolly’s hands, closes her fingers around the handles. “Now don’t let go of that. If you let go, even for a moment, I’ll [i]brand[/i] you.”

Outside, there is sunlight shining through glass and the babble of fountains. There are kids running around, shrieking, giggling. Two students on leave sit on a bench and eat ice cream together. A fellow jaguar works on something behind the panel of a storefront’s display. The Bander nods to a fur-painted tiger flicking through purses across the walkway and squeezes Dolly’s hip, followed at a careful distance by the Terenian.

There are multiple Banders here, Dolly notes, and they’re casually falling in line as the leopard passes by (making her some sort of lieutenant, maybe even the pirate queen herself??). She catches glimpses out of her peripheral, on the left side, because the right side is just the leopardess, midriff bared, jacket unzipped, the subtle muscles firm when she pulls Dolly closer. Nobody else knows what’s happening. Nobody knows she’s being kidnapped by pirates. Nobody even knows she’s completely, totally gagged. The Bander, her kidnapper, is slowly kneading her hip, and an insistent throbbing is making itself known in a way that makes her shamefacedly lower her ears even deeper into her hair.

It feels like everybody is looking at her. Like she might as well not even be wearing the scarf, or her top, for that matter. That everybody thinks she’s [i]easy.[/i] Strutting around, pretending to be a pirate’s girlfriend, melting into her side, hands in front of her clinging to the purse, and every time she feels it slip against her sweaty fingers, she clenches tighter and tries not to imagine a pattern worked into her fur by the sting of a brander slowly burning hairs down (like Jade has done for her before, Jade, [i]Jade[/i])— on one breast, or right above her tail, or just above her increasingly, [i]distressingly[/i] wet—

“Here’s our ride, Bride,” her kidnapper says, and then lowers her head, and she doesn’t figure out what’s going on until it’s too late. Lips, pressed against the scarf; lifted up by the hip, until her feet are barely on the floor. The pirate’s tongue squirms out between her lips, and the squeal is only for the two of them, because someone’s going “aawwwww” in the background, and she’s such, she’s so, she’s fighting not to wrap her legs around this pirate [i]because[/i] of how embarrassed, how humiliated, how dominated she is, and she brings one hand up just to touch—

The purse handles slip from her clumsy fingers.

Her heart stops cold.

“What did I tell you~?” The hot breath washes over her face. Someone claps for the chivalrous leopardess, already bending down, hooking her girlfriend’s purse with one claw, helping her take it back. The temptation to bolt and run is screaming in the back of her head.

But she’s protecting everyone here. Jade would understand. Wouldn’t she? So she pretends to be a bashful little sillyhead (which isn’t hard), hiding her face in her shoulder, wagging her tail, praying that she looks like a butterfly-brained girl in love, aware that now the leopardess, her kidnapper, can rub her face in this, too, can point out how [i]eager[/i] she must be, how excited, how ready to be kidnapped.

When she gets in the waiting shuttle and out of sight of innocents, this pirate had better have backup, because Dolly’s going to brain her with the purse if someone doesn’t grab her immediately. Yes, even though her kidnapper is strong, and rude in a way that is secretly really [i]doing[/i] it for her, and is promising to treat Dolly to her darkest fantasies made real. And isn’t that pathetic? That she’s not dreaming of escape so much as she is showing her kidnapper that she’s not a simpering, helpless, defenseless prize? Terror and arousal embrace each other and kiss (with squirming tongues) as she is pulled into the waiting, yawning mouth of the Red Band, already gagging on its hot and heavy breath.

[hr]

[i]Here, then, the parliament settled in the branches of the apple-tree, and picked the bones of the goddess clean; and beneath was shining stone, the flesh of the gods. The red lacquer they poured down her grinning throat; greedy she guzzled. The drink of Grandmother Hunger they offered her there, where her firefly-flickering bones hung in the tree.

Then the owl on the branches, whose name was Rojja, said: let her be crowned again. For she has come by the road that is white, and by it she must return. The mirror they hung before her, that she might count her countless teeth. This, then, was a sign given to her, for the owls protect those who come and go. The crown of plumes they placed upon her head; her bones they wrapped in the soft flesh of the papaya, as the first children of mud and reeds were by their Mother.

Then Rojja spread white-spotted wings before the apple-tree, and performed the dance of the worm and the grasshopper. The goddess leapt from the embrace of the branches, and chased Rojja this way and that, drooling the red lacquer. This she left as a trail for any who have the eyes to see, lost in the dark.[/i]