Meg was ready. She knew what General Karima suspected. She knew what details she could let herself be “forced” to give up, to steer the Farsi Alliance away from the truth. She’d spent weeks brushing up on her SEER training, to prepare for the rack. It was going to be painful. It was going to push her to her limits. But she was ready.

The first surprise was Karima starting soft. No questions, just gentle fingers. Probing. Exploring. The smile, when Meg allowed herself to orgasm the first time.

The second surprise was the jundin who’d walked in sometime during one of Meg’s blackouts. The things Karima had been doing to Meg’s nipples probably couldn’t be classified as torture, but Meg’s throat was raw from screaming all the same.

The third surprise was when Meg realized, in the middle of bucking her hips in an attempt to get away from Karima’s tongue, that there still hadn’t been any questions. God knew how many hours she’d been in here, manacles holding her against the rack, Karima twisting her body with orgasm after orgasm, and nobody had asked a single question.

The barrel of the gun against her cheek, a few minutes later, wasn’t a surprise. But Meg still heard her throat give a shriek of terror just before everything she was splattered out the top of her forehead.

She twitched for minutes afterward, even after General Karima got tired of tonguing her corpse and left. The cleanup crew would be by in the morning.