Page 19 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

This was biology. Just biology. My body needed relief, and he was offering to provide it. Nothing more.

He knelt beside the pallet, his bulk somehow managing to look contained rather than looming. His hand came up to cup my left breast, testing the weight, and even that light touch sent a jolt through me, pleasure and pressure at once.

"Tell me if it hurts," he said.

"It already hurts."

"Tell me if it hurts worse."

His fingers moved, pressing gently against the swollen tissue, working from the outside in. I felt the milk shift inside me, responding to the pressure, and my breath caught.

"Relax," he murmured. "Let your body do what it wants to do."

I wanted to snap at him that my body and I hadn't been on speaking terms for days, but his fingers had found my nipple, and he was squeezing with a slow, steady pressure, and–

Warmth.

Thin and pale, beading at the tip, then flowing in a steady stream as he kept up the pressure. The relief was immediate and overwhelming, the ache releasing, the tightness easing, the pressure that had built all night finally finding somewhere to go.

I made a sound. I'm not sure what it was, a gasp, a moan, something in between. My head fell back against the furs, my eyes closing, my whole body going loose and liquid as the milk flowed.

"Good," Keth said, his voice rough. "That's good. Let it come."

His other hand moved to my right breast, working it in counterpoint to the first, and now both of them were releasing, thin streams running down my skin and pooling on my stomach. I waited for the mortification, for the part of me that should have been calculating how to clean this up, how to keep some dignity, how to not look like a cow being milked in a barn.

It didn't come. I was floating.

The sensation was like nothing I'd ever felt. Not quite sexual, not quite not, a deep physical satisfaction that hummed through my whole body, loosening muscles I hadn't known were tense. Every time his fingers squeezed, another wave of it rolled through me, and I found myself arching into his hands, wanting more.

"Mara." His voice, low and awed. "You're beautiful like this."

I opened my eyes.

He was watching me with that expression I was learning to recognise, the one that sat somewhere between hunger and worship. His pupils were blown wide in the low light of the dwelling.

"Among my people," he said, "an omega who produces is the highest gift. The most sacred thing. You are–" He hunted for the words. "Irreplaceable. Holy. Mine."

Part of me wanted to argue, to tell him I wasn't holy, wasn't sacred, wasn't anybody's. But his hands were still working my breasts, still drawing out the milk in steady streams, and every squeeze sent another wave of that bone-deep relief through me.

"I don't feel sacred," I managed. "I feel like a dairy cow."

His tail flicked, that motion I was starting to read as amusement.

"A dairy cow," he repeated. "I don't know this word."

"It's – an animal. On Earth. We bred them to produce milk for us. That's their whole purpose. Just... producing."

"Ah." His fingers shifted, working a new section of tissue, and I gasped. "Among the Khorreth, an omega who produces is not reduced to a purpose. She is elevated. Without her, there is no future. Without her production, there is no bond, no family, no continuation. The producers are–" He searched for words. "The reason everything else exists."

I stared at the ceiling. The pressure in my breasts had faded to something manageable, the ache replaced by that warm, loose satisfaction. His hands had slowed, gentling, no longer squeezing but simply holding.

"That's a lot of pressure," I said finally.

"It is a lot of honour." His thumb traced a slow circle around my nipple, and I shivered. "I know you don't feel it yet. I know this was not chosen. But you will learn, in time, that what your body does is–" He paused over the word. "Precious. To me. To my people. To yourself, eventually."

There was nothing in me to argue with. My brain was still too fuzzy, too flooded with whatever chemicals the milking had let loose. I lay there in the warm quiet, his hands on my breasts, my skin sticky with drying milk, and tried to find the outrage I knew I should be feeling.

It wasn't there.