Page 47 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

But here, in this nest, with this male wrapped around me and a whole society built to support what my body was doing – it didn't seem absurd at all.

It seemed simple.

That was the thing that kept catching me off guard. The simplicity of it. After years of complexity and struggle and always managing alone, the life I'd fallen into was remarkably straightforward.

I produced. He provided. I was tended.

It wasn't everything I was. I was still Mara – still dry and stubborn and prone to making jokes when things got too serious. I still had opinions, still argued with him when I disagreed, still pushed back against the parts of Khorreth culture that made no sense to me.

But underneath all of that, the foundation was simple. I was loved. I was cared for. I was home.

I woke once in the night, disoriented, my body warm and heavy with sleep.

For a moment I didn't know where I was. The darkness was complete, the air unfamiliar, and I reached out automatically, searching –

His hand caught mine.

"I'm here," he murmured. "I'm here. Go back to sleep."

His scent wrapped around me, that warm earth-and-musk I'd learned to read as safety. My body relaxed before my mind caught up, settling back into the furs, back into his arms.

My hand found my stomach again. Rested there.

Inside me, something new was growing. Something that would have hooves and horns and his eyes. Something that would be raised in this nest, in this dwelling, surrounded by a love so vast it had crossed stars to find me.

I hadn't chosen to be taken. But I'd chosen everything after.

And lying there in the dark, warm and full and tended, I couldn't imagine wanting anything else.

I closed my eyes.

The future I hadn't chosen was the one I would choose again, every day, for the rest of my life.

That was enough.

CHAPTER 15

I USED TO HAVE A WAIST

I used to have a waist.

That had been three weeks ago. Three weeks since Keth went still over my belly and his eyes filled, since the words barely begun, since the change was nothing but a new sweetness in my scent. Three weeks would be nothing in a human pregnancy – a missed cycle, a vague maybe. On a Khorreth timeline it was most of the way to the end, and my body had spent every day of it racing to catch up with the life inside me. I'd watched it happen in the reflective panel, morning after morning, too fast to ever quite get used to.

I stood in front of the reflective panel in the hygiene alcove – positioned too high, like everything else in this dwelling, requiring me to climb onto a stepping block Keth had carved just so I could see myself – and surveyed the damage.

My belly had rounded significantly in the last week alone. Not the gradual swell of a human pregnancy, the kind that crept up on you over months until one day you couldn't see your feet. This was faster, more insistent. I could track the changes day by day, sometimes hour by hour. The skin was stretched taut, faintly luminous, and when I pressed my palm against the curve I could feel the warmth of what was growing inside me.

My breasts were enormous.

There was no other word for it. They'd been larger since the serum, fuller since production established, but now they were genuinely, absurdly big – heavy and round, the veins visible beneath the skin, the nipples darkened and swollen. The support wrap Keth had commissioned for me when we first arrived on Khorreth no longer fit. The craftsperson had been back twice already to remake it, each time with more fabric, more structure, more accommodation for the weight I was carrying.

I needed the support. I was practical about needing the support.

"You're staring at yourself again."

Keth's voice came from the doorway. I glanced over my shoulder and found him leaning against the frame, watching me. His eyes dropped to my belly, then my breasts, and the satisfaction in his scent deepened into something warmer.

"I'm trying to remember what I looked like before you got your hands on me," I said. "I'm having trouble."