Page 37 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

He was still fighting. Still roaring. Three officials straining to hold him back, and he was still trying to reach me, still clawing towards the platform where I stood frozen and small and unable to do anything except watch.

Our eyes met.

For just a moment – just a breath – we looked at each other across the chaos. His eyes were wild, all pupil, the gentle dark I'd learned to read completely subsumed by something feral. But underneath the fury, underneath the terror of what was happening, I saw something else.

Desperation. Love. A devotion so complete it had stripped away everything civilised and left only the animal beneath.

He would have killed them all to reach me. I could see that. Every official between us, every protocol, every law – he would have torn through all of it, and he wouldn't have hesitated.

The door closed between us.

I could still hear him on the other side. The roaring. The sounds of struggle. The crash of bodies against walls as he fought the officials trying to contain him.

"I'll be okay," I said.

My voice was quiet. Steady, somehow. The words fell into the chamber and died, swallowed by the cold formality of the space.

He couldn't hear me. The door was too thick, the sound of his fury too loud.

But I said it anyway. To the closed door, to the echo of his presence, to whatever remained of the bond that apparently hadn't read strong enough to save me.

"I'll be okay."

The neutral facility was clean.

That was the first thing I noticed – the absence of scent. After days immersed in Keth's dwelling, surrounded by his warmth and his presence, the sterile blankness of the facility hit like a blow. The air smelled of nothing. The walls were smooth and unmarked. The small sleeping pallet was covered in fabric that had never been touched by anyone I knew.

I sat on the edge of the pallet and wrapped my arms around myself.

Three days. The appeal window was three days.

I didn't know what would happen during those three days. Keth would be trying to prove Vorreth's cheating, presumably – filing complaints, demanding re-assessment, doing whatever the Khorreth legal system allowed. But I was here, alone, in a room that smelled like nowhere and no one.

My body noticed before my mind did.

The first sign was a tremor – not cold, not fear, but something deeper. A vibration in my bones like a string plucked out of tune. I pressed my hand to my stomach and felt the wrongness there, the way my body was already starting to misfire without him nearby.

My breasts ached. Not the familiar fullness of needing relief, but something sharper and more uncomfortable. When I tried to express milk by hand – something I'd done before, when he wasn't there – barely anything came. A few thin drops, lukewarm and unsatisfying.

My production was slowing.

And underneath that, the heat – the steady rhythm I'd been adjusting to – was fragmenting. The warmth in my belly spiked and faded without warning, waves of need followed by sudden cold crashes. My body didn't know what to do without him.

I lay down on the sterile pallet and stared at the ceiling.

He had raged for me. He had torn through officials, thrown his entire status and future away, because they were trying to take me from him. I'd seen alphas in the assessment chamber – I knew what they looked like, how they carried themselves – and none of them had watched that scene with anything except shock.

They were afraid of what he'd become.

It should have terrified me, the violence of it, the absolute loss of control. And part of me was terrified, I could admit that – still shaking from the sound of his roar, from the sight of officials thrown aside like furniture.

But another part of me – a part I wasn't ready to examine too closely – was turning over what it meant.

That he loved me enough to become that.

That every careful, gentle, asking-before-touching moment had been a choice. He'd been containing something vast and ferocious, holding it back every day, because he didn't want to frighten me. Because he wanted me to feel safe.

And when they'd tried to take me, the containment had shattered.