Page 31 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

"You'd never seen me."

"I didn't need to see you. Scent is–" He paused. "Among my people, scent is truth. It cannot be faked or hidden. What I smelled in that data was you. Your essence. The shape of who you are."

I stared at him. Three rotations. Three years. He'd spent three years arranging a mission to come and get me, based on a trace of scent caught from the cold dark beside my station.

"Why didn't you just – come?" I asked. "If you knew. Why wait three rotations?"

"Earth is far. The journey is expensive, the permissions difficult to obtain. And I had to be certain. Had to verify the data, trace the source, identify which relay station the sample came from." His tail swept. "By the time I had everything arranged, I had been thinking about you for two rotations. Building a picture of who you might be. The female who worked alone in the deep black, whose scent sang of strength and solitude and–" He stopped.

"And what?"

"Loneliness." His voice was quiet. "You smelled lonely, Mara. Even from so faint a trace, even through instruments and data processing, I could smell how alone you were. And I thought – I thought I could give you something else. Something better."

My throat tightened.

I wanted to argue. To tell him he'd projected an entire fantasy onto a scent signature, that he couldn't possibly have known who I was from chemical traces in the atmosphere. To remind him that he'd abducted me, that whatever his intentions, he'd taken away every choice I might have made.

But I thought about the nest in the corner. The chair with its shortened legs. The way he asked before he touched me, every single time.

And I thought about the flash of devotion I'd felt through the bond – three rotations of yearning, compressed into a single moment of emotional truth.

He hadn't been obsessing over a fantasy. He'd been waiting. Patiently, certainly, across the years and the distance. Waiting for me.

"You built your whole life around finding me," I said. "Before you even knew what I looked like."

"Yes."

"That's–" I shook my head. "I don't know what that is."

"It is what it is." His hand came up, cupping my cheek. "You were mine before I knew your face. Before I knew your voice. Before I knew that you have blue hair and a sharp tongue and a way of looking at things that makes me want to be better than I am."

My eyes burned. I blinked hard.

"I didn't ask for this," I said. "Any of it."

"I know."

"I had a life. It wasn't much, but it was mine. And you took it."

"I know." His thumb traced my cheekbone. "I cannot give it back. I can only give you what I have. Everything I am. Everything I will ever be."

I stared at him. At those dark eyes, patient and certain. At the curve of his horns, still sensitive from my touch. At the expanse of his chest, the thick fur I'd buried my hands in while he moved inside me.

Three rotations. Three years of waiting for someone he'd never met, because he'd caught my loneliness on the wind and decided to answer it.

Three years. There was no sane reply to three years. So I just lay there, pressed against his warmth, trying to fit it into a shape that made sense.

It didn't.

He held me anyway.

Later, when he'd gone to bring food and water, I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.

The dwelling was quiet around me. Warm. Safe.

Three rotations.

I tried to imagine it. Three years of waiting. Three years of knowing I existed, somewhere across the vast dark, and being unable to reach me. Three years of building a life around the assumption that one day, I would be here.