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“Ezo—”
“Do you understand me?”
She nods, eyes wide. And then I unlock the door and step outside, closing it firmly behind me, ready to face whatever may come. Perhaps it is nothing. Perhaps not.
Either way, I will be my Ana’s shield.
Chapter Eighteen
Ana
What the hell is going on out there?
I press my ear to the door.
At first all I can hear is a lot of loud voices. Lots of hissing with the occasional guttural consonant.
“Shak,” comes Juliet’s voice. “We need to get Ana and talk to her first.”
Juliet’s house might be fancy but these doors are shit because I can hear everything. There’s a large gap underneath the door, too, and the tile makes the voices echo.
And then, louder, she orders, “And all of you, speak in English. You’ve all had it scanned. It’s rude not to practice it while you visit your Queen.”
The command in Juliet’s voice is impressive. I’ve always known she was a badass but she’s really been coming into her own the past four months.
I know she can speak Draci—she told me about how they gave her a brain scan or something and implanted it. But it’s still hard for her to follow with all the idioms the Draci constantly use. She’s started asking them to speak in English, only because she feels like the Draci use their own language to make her feel excluded back when she still occasionally visits the ship. Apparently Draci politics are messy and not everyone immediately warmed to the idea of having a human Queen.
“Yes, my Queen,” comes a voice I don’t recognize, hissing his s’s. “My King, surely you must agree with our esteemed Royal physician. He recommends we reject the specimen immediately and seek a better suited female.”
I blanch. Specimen. He means me. Oh fuck, he means me.
“Okay, I know I’m late to this show, but what the hell are you talking about?” Juliet asks.
My thoughts exactly.
“The specimen—”
“Ana,” Shak interrupts.
“Ana’s womb is deformed. We must have another speci— Another female replace her.”
My stomach drops to my feet and I shake my head. No. No, it can’t be.
I kept telling Ezo I was afraid there was something wrong with me but underneath, I believed all his assurances. Everything was supposed to be fine. This scan was just supposed to confirm that there was nothing to worry about, that—
“What do you mean, deformed?” I look back up at the door sharply. That was Gisele’s voice. When the hell did she get here? Of course she has to be present for my humiliation, too. Perfect Gisele. My father always loved that I was friends with her. How many times did I hear him whisper that he wished I were more like her?
“She is missing one of her two reproductive organs.”
“What, like…an ovary?” Giselle asks. “She only has one ovary?”
“Yes,” says an impatient voice. “Who is this female and why is she here?”
“She is the spe— The female candidate with the ideal genetic makeup that our King was first intended to mate.”
“What?” ring out both Juliet and Gisele’s voices, perfectly echoing my own. What the fuck are they talking about?
“Take a deep breath, my love,” I hear Shak’s voice. “Yes it is true my mission was initially to impregnate your friend.”
Jesus fucking Chr—
“But then I met you and I have never looked at another since. Nor will I.” After a brief pause, his voice comes again, almost a bark. “And this missing organ means that Ana cannot have children?”
“No,” Juliet says at the same time the doctor says, “yes.”
“What your chief medical officer apparently doesn’t know is that a woman with one ovary can get pregnant,” Juliet continues heatedly. “Is her other ovary working?”
A pause. “The other organ appears to be unharmed.”
Oh thank God. My forehead drops to the door in relief. I’m not all the way broken. Just mostly.
“There,” Juliet says. “Problem solved. Ana can still bear children. Why don’t all you neanderth—” She pauses as if taking a breath. “So why doesn’t everyone calm down, I’ll order some food brought in and we can—”
“Your Majesty, surely you cannot condone the continuation of—”
“Enough,” Shak says.
But the voice won’t shut up. I think it’s the doctor. “I do not understand. When right here we have the female with the ideal DNA makeup whose genome we have already sequenced and determined to be perfect. The soldier can simply mate her instead since she is obviously superior to the other—”
“Do not finish that sentence,” Ezo warns in a growl from right outside the door and then I hear footsteps walking away. He must have been standing guard right outside my door but now he’s heading down the hall to the rest of the group.
“I do not want any other female than Ana and I will not have any other female but Ana.”
“Quiet, soldier,” someone snaps. “Do not speak in front of your betters.”
