Page 8 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

"I understand fine." I stood. The cell was too small for pacing, but I paced anyway, three steps to the wall and three steps back. "You want to turn me into a – a breeding machine. A producer. A sacred gift." I spat the last words. "I'm not interested."

He was quiet. His tail lay still against his leg, and his eyes tracked me as I moved, back and forth, back and forth.

"Mara," he said. The translator rendered my name strangely, the vowels too long. "I will not force you."

"You already forced me. You kidnapped me."

"I brought you here. Yes." He didn't flinch from it, didn't make excuses. "But the serum, I will not give you unless you choose it."

I stopped pacing. "What?"

"The serum must be chosen. It does not–" He searched for the word. "It does not work properly without choice. The body must accept it. Resistance creates complications."

"So you need my consent."

"I need your choice."

"That's the same thing."

He tilted his head again. He went quiet a moment, and I had the uncomfortable sense that he was reading something in my scent, some signal I was broadcasting without knowing it.

"Is it?" he said.

I found the nav display on day four.

Keth had started leaving the hatch unsealed during the day. Not open; I couldn't have reached the control to open it anyway, it sat at his eye level. But unlocked, so that when I pressed my palm to the panel, it slid aside. He'd shown me how to work it, patient and slow, his huge hand guiding mine to the right spot on the smooth metal.

"You may move through the ship," he'd said. "This level. The lower holds are sealed, but you would not want to go there anyway. It is cold."

"You're letting me wander around."

"You are not a prisoner."

"I'm definitely a prisoner."

"You are my mate," he said. "Mates do not imprison each other."

"Mates also don't kidnap each other," I'd pointed out.

He hadn't had a response to that.

The ship was bigger than I'd expected. The corridor outside my cell, containment space, whatever, stretched in both directions, curving gently. Everything was built to Khorreth scale, which meant the ceiling was high enough that I couldn't have touched it with a running jump, and the doorways were wide enough that I could have lain down across one. I felt like a child in a giant's house. Every handle was too high, every step too deep. I had to haul myself up onto the raised threshold of each doorway as if I were climbing onto a bed.

The nav display was in what I assumed was the cockpit, though it was hard to tell. The room was dominated by a wide curved viewport showing the black of space and the faint smear of distant stars, and a bank of controls along one wall that I couldn't begin to interpret. But the nav display was clear enough: a three-dimensional map projection floating above a raised platform, with a blinking dot that had to be us and a larger shape that had to be our destination.

I stared at it for a long time.

"Not long now," Keth said, behind me.

I didn't jump. I'd heard him coming, his hooves on the deck plating, near-silent but not quite. He'd let me hear him.

"Until what?"

"Until we arrive." He came to stand beside me, and his presence was a wall of warmth at my shoulder, that scent rolling off him in waves. Warm hide and green growing flora and the thing underneath them I still couldn't name. "Khorreth. My world."

"And then what?"

He didn't answer straight away. His tail swept, slow, and I watched it at the edge of my vision, reading it the way I'd started to read all of him. Calm. Thoughtful.