“Kaede, are you sure you want to do this? You really don’t have to. You have a choice.”

A choice between seeing my warren suffer and trying to save it? That’s no choice at all. “It’s alright, e-elder,” the mimiga said, acting more resolute than she felt. “I’ve sp-spent my whole life making guns.”

She hefted the weapon of her own craft, a beautiful thing. Its weight felt like second nature to her, more familiar in her paws than a child’s weight would be to their mother. “How hard could it be to switch to using them?”

—

Kaede grunted, moaning, as she was taken from behind, her voice ragged and raw behind the gag her captors had shoved in her mouth. She kept protesting despite it, despite the fact that they wouldn’t stop—her ceaseless protests left her throat nearly as raw as her cunt.

They’d captured her the previous day and used her nonstop since.

It was supposed to be an easy mission for a merc with a shiny new gun. A small gaggle of bandits harassing farmers and travelers. Kaede had felt positive she could do it alone.

She’d never aimed her gun at anything sentient before, had frozen imagining them wounded and dying.

They’d taken advantage of her momentary weakness, had pinned her to the ground, had taken her weapon.

They’d taken more than that.

As Kaede was forced down into the dust, sobbing and begging as they’d stolen her maidenhood, she’d watched wide-eyed as those brutes pawed at her gun.

“Don’t do that!” she’d screamed as they’d carelessly pried it apart, ruining weeks of expert work and care. “No no no no no!”

A bandit’s cock forced her open and her voice rose wordlessly. The brutes all laughed. “Little mimiga thinks she can play hero, huh?” one taunted. “How bout we play something else instead?”

They’d fucked her all day and through the night and into the morning, and she had no clue which was worse—seeing her work so callously destroyed, a weapon she cared after like a child, or the fact that eventually, the pain of being these thieves’ plaything stopped being pain at all.

Don’t cum, Kaede told herself, bound and blindfolded, tears staining the dark cloth they’d ripped up to serve that purpose, their cum seeping out of her cunt and caking into her fur even as another one had his third go at her. Don’t cum. You have that much control. You can keep your dignity. Don’t cum.

But she had only lasted so long before she shuddered and clenched, hating herself.

In the end, that hadn’t been a choice of hers at all.

—

She’d spent three weeks and change as the bandits’ plaything before being rescued by a real mercenary. The female had looked at her with sympathy and given her enough coin for a month’s lodging.

Kaede had sent it back to the warren instead. She would find work and get a roof over her head that way. What were a few roofless nights compared to the ordeal she’d just endured? She’d be fine once she found work.

But work never came. Big-city workshops wouldn’t hire a gunsmith from the boonies, and no merc company was willing to offer her a job now that she was weaponless and a known mission-botcher.

Weeks passed and the nights grew colder until even Kaede’s fur didn’t help. Desperate, she made her way to a nice-looking inn, hoping someone who didn’t run a hovel would show mercy.

The proprietor was not as kind as she had hoped.

“Do I look like a charity?” he snapped. “Get out.”

“Please, I’ll... I’ll f-freeze...”

“Get. Out.”

As he turned to go inside, Kaede’s shaky voice followed: “I can... p-pay...”

He stopped, turned. “You have coin?”

She swallowed. She didn’t want to do this, but the only other choice was death—no choice at all.

Trembling, hating herself, she’d peeled up the hem of her skirt to show off her perky slit.

The owner had appraised her for a moment.

She got very little sleep that night—but she was quite warm.

Kaede told herself she would never debase herself that way again.

—

She was back again in nine days. Her body for food and a night in a real bed... it was a sign of her desperation that it felt like a fair trade.

Somehow, word spread. Instead of being ‘that homeless boonie girl who calls herself a gunsmith,’ now she was ‘that loose mimiga.’ Her few other options dried up.

Which left her no choice.

The innkeeper told her, when she’d arrived back a third time, that he wasn’t interested that day.

Desperate, hungry, fearful, Kaede swallowed and, scarcely believing what she was doing, asked if he knew anyone who was.

The innkeeper smiled.

—

The inn offered a new deal—anyone who rented their best suite got full access to everything in the suite.

Everything.

Somehow it started seeming normal to Kaede. Taking the cock of strangers day after day, gazing up at them as she took barbs and knots and hemipenes and a variety of exotic equipment.

Sometimes, on her knees, slurping lewdly and gazing up at her latest ‘roommate,’ it was hard to remember she was a gunsmith, that she had a warren to return to.

It really isn’t so bad, Kaede caught herself thinking once. Clients came and went, but the suite itself was basically hers, and the innkeeper bought her nice—if slutty—new clothes. She didn’t have to pay for her own food. The innkeeper even tossed a few coins her way at the end of every week, and sometimes more genteel customers left her a tip. These she always sent back to the warren.

It was how Kaede pretended she wasn’t a harlot, and what was she going to do—whore herself out and let her warren starve?

No choice at all.

And even the worst of her customers had nothing on those three weeks with the bandits.

—

Kaede had always assumed she’d head back when she’d sent enough. It seemed natural.

But then her belly started rounding—little by little.

She’d stared, horrified, at it. What was she supposed to do? Send the warren another mouth to feed? Her child alone would offset everything she’d sent them.

And only certain clients were willing to pay for a night with her now.

Kaede lived in fear of the innkeeper turning her out as her clients dried up, of being homeless and worthless and pregnant.

One day a client with an aristocratic air approached her. Rather than sex, his primary interest was her belly, her background, her health. Was she really a gunsmith? Was this her first?

He returned a few days later.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said. “I’d like to buy your contract.”

Kaede eyed him warily, but nodded.

“I represent a business that does what your current employer has you do,” he said, “but for a more... discerning clientele. Very selective. Our clients have... unique... tastes.”

“M-meaning?”

“Oh, your days on the job will be a bit more... adventurous there. But most important is...”

He nodded at her belly. “They don’t just come to us to boink. They come to us to breed. Selective heirs, that sort of thing. You’d spend most of the rest of your life as you are now. But.” He pulled out a sheet and pushed it at her. “We offer good compensation. Your current child would be sent back to your warren with a stipend to both care for it and to help the town. That stipend would repeat monthly, adjusted every half-decade for inflation, as long as you work for us.”

The number on the sheet made Kaede’s eyebrows climb. “The... the c-catch?” she asked.

“Well,” he said without hint of apology, “there wouldn’t be an end date to your employment. I say the term ‘employer,’ but really, we’d be your owners.”

The weight settling on Kaede had nothing to do with the child inside of her. “But slavery is illegal,” she said, as if that would magically stop people from practicing it.

He smiled. “If you check the law, you’ll find that voluntary life servitude is entirely within its confines. I am not forcing you to do anything.” He reached over, flipped to the signature page at the end, and pulled out a pen. “Make the right choice, Kaede. For your warren and your child.”

The mimiga wanted to both laugh and cry. All her problems, solved, and all she had to do was spend her life as some high-class brothel’s breeding slave.

Or she could live in the streets, penniless and round-bellied, as her people suffered.

She picked up the pen. There was no real choice here.

The representative smiled as she set it down with a trembling paw, the other resting comfortingly on her belly. She swallowed dryly.

He pulled out something—a splendid golden collar with her name etched lovingly on it.

“We knew you’d see reason,” he said, walking over to snap it on her. “Good girl.”

—

Kaede had long forgotten what the weight of a gun felt like.

She was used to a new weight. Heavy womb, teats swollen with milk, laborious steps. She spent more time pregnant than not. It felt a part of her now, like the collar that had never come off or the quiet numbness in her heart—like the identifying tattoo her new owners had worked into her inner thigh, a mark of subservience and ownership.

Her cunt was sore, well-used. It always was. It always would be. That’s what she did, after all. Breed, breed, breed day in and day out, breed till her belly got fat and she squeezed out a brat for some noble and waved goodbye to a child she would never see again and then did it all over again.

Forever.

She’d once made guns with her paws. Now she made heirs with her womb.

It was a living.

The warren didn’t know the details, only that she was working hard to send them money and was too busy to come back. They sent her letters. The most recent one had included shaky, blocky handwriting from her first child, the little girl asking when her mother was coming back, please, she wanted to meet her mother so badly.

Kaede had stared desolately at that paper for a long, long time until a kick from her current occupant drew her out of it. She hadn’t realized she’d been crying until that moment.

She was comfortable and cared-for and healthy and far, far more miserable than she ever had been with the bandits.

She was property.

She’d never get to go back to her warren. She’d never get to meet her daughter or any of her children. It didn’t matter whether she wanted to or not. Her owners wouldn’t allow it, and that was that.

A knock at the door. An attendant poked her head in. “He’s here, ma’am.”

Kaede nodded silently—she rarely found occasion to speak anymore—and rose ponderously after comporting herself.

Her client, a regular, was waiting in the next room. Quietly, Kaede sunk onto the bed and opened her legs.

As he pounded away, she tried to find solace in how pointless it was to think of these things. It was out of her paws now. She didn’t have a choice.

But then, she never really had.