(Author's Note: A prompt request: "unbind me," one character freeing the other, featuring Cipher Nine and Kaliyo.)

Unbind Me

Nar Shaddaa. 11 ATC.

Her hands are going numb.

She ought to have turned Belan in a month ago- he was slaver scum and treated his girls like trash to be discarded- but on Nar Shaddaa the Hutts were the law and they didn't give a damn about a dozen half-starved Twi'lek slaves. More to the point, the intel he'd fed them on the Cartel ring was too good, her handler'd said. They had to let him be.

She did catch him cooking the books, though, skimming a few thousand credits a month off the profit margin. If that would buy his loyalty to the Empire, she would have let him keep the credits; it would have been a cheaper buyoff than most, and useful informants were getting hard to find.

Except when she went back to the cantina to renegotiate terms, data in hand, he was back in the slave quarters, half-drunk and raging and beating fragile little Sia'hla, his favorite, within an inch of her life. Enough was enough. She went to pull him off-

-but she'd missed the stun baton in his hand, and wakes up an hour later on the floor with a slave collar locked around her neck and her hands bound tight behind her back.

Uh-oh.

She wiggles her hands experimentally- rope, not chain, which is something, but the knots feel sturdy. Her neck's throbbing, too; he must've shocked her just for spite. Looking around, the room's empty save for her, a low bed in the corner and a pool of blood in the center of the floor. Not hers, she doesn't think. Not yet, at least.

Two sets of footsteps on the far side of the door- one set of bare feet and a pair of boots. She tries the ropes again- no. She can't get her hands free without dislocating her thumb, a less than ideal option not knowing who's outside. Maybe she can reach her boot knife? She twists again, backward, her muscles cramping in protest.

The door starts open, slowly, and she's about to say fuck it and pop her thumb out of joint when Sia'hla, with two black eyes and her nose still oozing, peers through the gap and gestures frantically behind her.

"Hey, boss." Kaliyo slips through the still-widening door. "You look like shit."

She snorts, which makes her head ache. Some of that blood might be hers, after all. "Get my hands free, 'liyo. He could be back any minute."

As she saws at the rope with her own blade, Kaliyo shakes her head. "I kinda doubt it. You told me to come find you after an hour, and by the looks of it he's been dead at least half that time."

"He- what?"

"Blaster shot to the kidney, close range. That wasn't you?"

"No." The last of the knots severed, she wrings her arms out as the blood flows back toward her fingertips. Oh, that stings. "If he's dead, we may not be alone. We need to figure out who killed him, and I need-"

Sia'hla, still in the doorway, lets out a half-choked little gasp. "I'm sorry, mistress. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have…" She trails off, mumbling in Huttese, and reaches out, a digital key clutched tight in one bruised hand.

She blinks. "What have you got there?" It sounds harsher than she means it to- Huttese is such an ugly language.

The Twi'lek gestures upward at her own throat, at the collar fastened too tight around it. "For the collars. Master kept it in the lockbox. He told me to put your things in it while he called his friends."

Kaliyo grabs the key and holds it up against her neck until the slave collar beeps and the lock clicks open. "I found her shaking in his office and him dead across his desk. Did you see who killed him, little sister?" (Kaliyo'd worn a collar once, herself, she'd said, a long time ago. She was pretty sure, unlike most of her stories, that one was actually true.)

"He told me to put-" the girl's repeating herself, stuttering over the words. "He gave me the gun, and the bigger gun, and I- I didn't think it'd be so loud." She finally looks up. "But you tried to make him stop. No one ever made him stop."

She rips the key out of Kaliyo's hand and forces herself to her feet, gets across the room in two steps and holds it to the girl's throat. The collar clicks, like hers, and she slowly pulls, an ugly ring of scar tissue showing beneath as the hinge comes open. She must have worn the same one for years.

"What are you- no, no, you can't-" Hands up against her bare skin, eyes wide, Sia'hla shakes her head furiously. "They'll think I ran. They'll punish the others."

"Like hell they will." Tossing the key back across, she tilts her head toward the corridor. "Get the rest of them out here and get their collars off. I'll buy their contracts out myself if I have to, but we need to get them out of here."

Kaliyo nods and slips out.

"Mistress?" She's still rubbing at her throat.

"Don't call me that. What's your-" what's the word for it in Huttese? It's on the tip of her tongue- "if I were to buy you, how much would Belan have asked?"

She shrugs, one lek twitching anxiously. "He paid five thousand, but I was only eleven then. He would have asked twenty, I think. He-" she twitches again. "I was his favorite."

Twenty thousand credits. She's been on vacations that cost more- and eleven? Force take this fucking job. She pulls a credit chip out of her pocket. "Well, then. Twenty thousand?"

"Mistress, I-"

"Rule number one, Sia'hla." She can hear more voices outside, now, high-pitched and anxious, and the soft beeps of unlocking collars. "Never use that word again."