Page 27 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

"I'm not… I don’t…” I stepped back, breaking the contact between his hand and my face. "I'm just scared of the unknown. Of being taken by someone who looks at me like livestock. That's not the same as–"

"Your scent tells a different story."

I glared at him. He looked back, patient and certain, and I hated him a little for being able to read what I didn't want to say.

"I need to be alone," I said.

He nodded. No argument, no protest. Just that steady acceptance.

"I'll be in the workshop. There are – modifications to make." He glanced at the nest in the corner. "Call if you need me."

He left.

I stood in the middle of the main room, listening to his hoofsteps fade down the corridor, and tried to pretend my chest wasn't tight with something that felt dangerously like longing.

I went to the nest.

Not because I was tired. Not because my breasts were aching, though they were – the familiar pressure building again, right on schedule. Not because I had nowhere else to go.

I went because it was mine.

I climbed into the hollow of furs and blankets, the materials shifting around me, moulding to my shape. The warmth closed over me at once, held in by the walls Keth had built up around the edges. And underneath the smell of the fabrics and the lingering scent of the dwelling itself, there was him. Woven into every thread. The smell of safety.

I pulled the furs up around my shoulders and curled on my side, making myself small.

This was different.

Every other time I'd come to the nest, I'd been drifting. Pulled here by instinct, by exhaustion, by a body that knew what it wanted even when my mind didn't. But now I was choosing. Consciously, eyes open, choosing to be here.

Because when Vorreth looked at me, all I'd wanted was to be back in this corner, wrapped in Keth's scent, hidden from the gaze that saw me as property.

Because when Keth said you are mine, some treacherous part of me had thought: Yes. Good. Stay that way.

I pressed my face into the furs and breathed deep. Sun-warmed earth and the musk beneath it. Him.

My body was bonding to him. I could feel it happening – the way his scent had become the standard I measured safety against, the way my skin settled when he was near, the way my breasts ached for his hands specifically, not just for relief. The serum had rewritten me to need him, and my body was doing exactly what it had been built to do.

But that wasn't all of it.

When he'd snapped the legs off the chair without being asked, when he'd carved steps into the table and built me a nest in the warmest corner, the shift in me had nothing to do with biology. It was just me, Mara, noticing that someone was paying attention to what I needed.

Nobody had ever done that before.

I stayed in the nest a long time. Let the warmth soak into my bones. Let his scent wrap around me like armour.

Vorreth would come back. I knew that. He'd file his challenge, or make another offer, or find some other way to take what he wanted. The danger wasn't over.

But I was here. In my space. My safety.

And when Keth came back – when he checked on me, as I knew he would, his hooves clicking softly on the floor – I didn't pretend to be asleep.

I just looked at him, curled in the nest he'd made me, and let him see that I was exactly where I'd chosen to be.

His eyes warmed.

He didn't say anything. Neither did I.

He went back to his work, and I stayed where I was, and the silence between us felt, for the first time, like something we were building together.