Page 6 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

"You will understand when it happens," he said. "It is sacred, among my people. An omega who produces is the highest gift. The most precious thing there is."

I looked at the cylinder in his hand. At his enormous dark eyes. At the careful way he was crouched in front of me, keeping his bulk below my eye level, giving me space in a room where there was none to give.

He wasn't hungry. He wasn't aggressive. He looked at me as though I were something fragile and irreplaceable.

That was worse.

"I want to go home," I said.

"I know."

"Take me back."

He didn't answer at once. The hand holding the cylinder lowered slowly to his side.

"We are already past the point where that is possible," he said.

The words were flat and inflectionless, and they should have felt like a threat. They were a threat, weren't they? A declaration that I was trapped, that there was no going back, that my life as I knew it was over.

But he said it the way you'd report that the ship had left the dock. Not cruel, not triumphant. Just a fact, a piece of information he was handing me because I'd asked for it.

And underneath the fear, underneath the anger, underneath the part of me that was already calculating escape routes and wondering how hard it would be to take down something three feet taller than me, there was a warmth.

Low in my belly. Spreading slowly. I'd noticed it when he came in, I realised. That same strange, wrong calm I'd felt in the cargo bay. My body relaxing when it should have been coiling to fight.

A threat response, I told myself. Adrenaline doing something strange. Shock, maybe, or some chemical interaction I didn't understand.

Not him. It wasn't about him.

He watched me with those huge dark eyes, patient and still, and I told myself the warmth meant nothing.

I almost managed to believe it.

CHAPTER 3

MINE, SAFE, TENDED

Three days.

That was how long it took me to piece together that I was living inside the plot of a terrible romance novel.

The translator Keth had given me – he'd left it tucked into the small depression in the wall beside the water cup when he went – turned out to work on text as well as speech. So when he brought me a datapad the next morning (morning? I was guessing; there were no windows), I could read it. Slowly, haltingly, squinting at words the device rendered as approximate synonyms and hoping I was getting the gist.

The gist was not encouraging.

"So let me make sure I understand this," I said, on what I was calling day three because I had to call it something. Keth was crouched in the doorway again. He always crouched when he came in, folding himself down to my level as if he was trying not to loom. It didn't entirely work. "Your species has a, a biological caste system. Alphas, betas, omegas."

"Yes."

"And the omegas are the ones who–" I checked the datapad. "Who 'carry' and 'produce.' Which I'm assuming means pregnancy and something else. The translation's not clear."

His tail swept once. Slow. That meant calm, I'd worked out. Or at least not agitated.

"Produce," he said. "Your language does not have–" The translator crackled. "Lactation. For feeding. But also, not only for feeding. It is–" Another pause. He breathed in slowly, and I wondered if he was searching for scent-words, concepts his language had that mine didn't. "Sacred. An omega who produces is the highest gift."

"You said that before."

"It remains true."