This one.
The women on the ship were brides for any bull who would claim them, but she was the one I wanted.
Then she lifted her head and found me across the bay.
Her eyes went wide. Big and brown-gold and so open it stopped the breath in my chest. There was wariness in them, the kind a beast wears after a bad winter, watching for the next blow. But there was something underneath the wariness that hadn’t been beaten flat yet.
The ache that went through me then was low and insistent, my cock thickening behind the rough canvas of my work pants in a way that made me grateful for the loose cut of them. I shifted my weight and pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth and tried, uselessly, to think about figs.
I took a step toward her.
Two strides was all it would take. I’d already mapped the path, already felt the pull of it in my legs, when a small shape darted into my way and threw up both hands like that would do anything at all to stop seven feet of minotaur in motion.
“Ah, Mr. Uh... Kazan, sir, my name is Theeodus and I’m supposed to help you choose your–”
“Her.” I lifted one hand and pointed past his head at the woman on the ramp, who had gone very still under the weight of my attention.
The official looked at my bride and then down at the tablet in his hands. He scrolled furiously, brows furrowed. “That is, hmm, yes, she is... oh dear.”
“What?” I demanded.
The growl came out before I could soften it, and Theeodus flinched so hard he nearly dropped the tablet. He was a pale, thin-fingered thing in an agency jumpsuit two sizes too big, and he kept glancing between my horns and his screen like one of them might bite him.
“It seems there’s been some kind of mistake, Mr. Kazan. That human’s account has been flagged. I suggest you choose another bride. This may take some time to sort out.”
Flagged. The word landed wrong in my ears.
On the ramp, she’d caught the shape of the conversation even if she couldn’t hear it, and I watched the wariness in her face harden into something braced. Whatever flagged meant, she knew it. She’d been waiting for it. A woman didn’t wear that look unless she’d learned to expect the floor to give out.
“What’s her name?” I needed to know.
Theeodus looked like he might dissolve on the spot. “Maisie. But, really, you should choose another.”
Maisie. It settled into me and stayed, a seed taking root.
Behind him, a dock attendant was already moving toward her with a second tablet, and her hand tightened on the rail. Whatever they were about to do, they meant to do it to her alone, in some back room with a closed door and no one to stand at her shoulder.
The growl that built in my chest this time wasn’t a flinch-maker. It was lower, and I let Theeodus feel the floor of it through the deck plates.
“I’m going to have her.”
1
KAZAN
The annoying fleafrom the matchmaking office thought he could keep me from Maisie. When I’d insisted on a meeting, he’d made some excuse about ‘inoculations’ and ‘an assimilation briefing’ that made an immediate meeting impossible.
Lies.
It had taken me three days to finally get the meeting. Theeodus had bought himself a delay. He had not bought himself my patience, and that well had never run deep to begin with.
New Knossos wasn’t built for waiting. It was built for work.
The main street ran wide and rutted, packed dirt churned to mud where the loggers dragged their wood sleds in from the tree line, and the buildings hunched along either side in heavy dark timber, low-roofed and broad-doored to let a bull pass without ducking.
Smoke from Lorkin’s forge hung over the eastern end. The market crowded the west, stalls of figs and cured goat and woodwork still smelling of the saw. My people filled the street, broad-shouldered males in flannel and canvas, horns catching the sunlight, voices pitched in the low rumble that passed for our quiet talk.
Here and there a human female moved among them, swallowed in a mate’s borrowed coat, looking small and warm and watched over. There weren’t many. A handful, no more. Enough to make a male notice how empty the rest of his life still felt.
