Page 38 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

I pressed my face into the sterile pillow and thought about the sound of him fighting on the other side of the door.

Still trying to reach me. Still fighting. Even when it was hopeless.

Somewhere outside this facility, he was probably still fighting.

And somewhere inside me, underneath the fear and the biological distress and the cold emptiness of this room, something was settling into certainty.

I wasn't going with Vorreth.

Whatever it took. Whatever choice I had to make.

I was Keth's.

And I was going to make sure everyone knew it.

CHAPTER 12

A COMMODITY WITH LEGS

My body was staging a mutiny.

I'd been in the facility for eighteen hours, and I'd spent most of them counting the ways everything was going wrong. My heat cycle had fractured into something unrecognisable – waves of burning need that crested without warning and then crashed into cold shivers, leaving me gasping and confused. My breasts were painfully full, pressure building behind them with nowhere to go, but when I tried to relieve myself the milk came in reluctant, thin dribbles that did nothing for the ache.

And underneath all of it, a wrongness I couldn't name. A hollowness where something should have been.

"This is fine," I told the ceiling. "This is completely fine. I'm just falling apart because I've been separated from an alien who kidnapped me. Very normal. Very healthy attachment patterns happening here."

The ceiling didn't respond. It was white and featureless, like everything else in this place.

I rolled onto my side and tried to find a position that didn't make my chest hurt worse. The pallet was comfortable enough – softer than the relay station bunks, properly sized for my body – but it smelled wrong. Smelled like nothing. After days surrounded by Keth's scent, the absence was its own kind of pressure, pushing against my sinuses.

My body didn't know how to function without him.

That was the truth I'd been avoiding, and lying here alone in the sterile dark, I couldn't avoid it anymore. The serum had rewritten me. The bond had deepened it. And now, separated from the source of everything my biology had come to depend on, I was in withdrawal.

"Brilliant," I muttered. "I'm an addict. That's what this is. Alien pheromone dependency."

At least the guards were polite.

They'd explained the situation carefully when they brought me here – legal ward status, not criminal detention. I was being held for my own protection during the appeal window, to ensure neither claimant could influence my scent or bias the reassessment. I had food, water, a hygiene alcove, everything I needed.

Everything except him.

I pressed my fist against my sternum and tried to breathe through another wave of heat. It crested, peaked, crashed into cold. My skin was clammy. My nipples ached. When I squeezed my breast, trying to force some relief, barely anything emerged.

"Come on," I hissed. "Work. Just – work."

Nothing.

My body had decided that if Keth wasn't here to tend it, it wasn't going to cooperate.

Fantastic.

I slept in fits and starts, waking every hour to another wave of heat or another spike of pressure in my chest. By morning – or what I assumed was morning; there were no windows – I felt like I'd been beaten. Every muscle ached. My head throbbed. My breasts were so full they'd gone past painful into numb, which was somehow worse.

The knock at the door startled me upright.

"Visitor," the guard said through the panel. "You may refuse."