Page 9 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

"Then we go to my dwelling," he said. "My home. You will be safe there."

"Safe from what?"

Again the hesitation. I caught him glancing down at me, the first time he'd done that, actually looked down rather than crouching to meet my eyes.

"What happens," I said slowly, "to an unclaimed human female on Khorreth?"

He went very still.

"Keth."

"There are no unclaimed Peritan females on Khorreth." His voice was flat and careful. "All who have come have been claimed."

"But if there were. If I arrived without your claim, without the serum. What would happen?"

He was quiet for so long I thought he wasn't going to answer. The nav display turned slowly in front of us, that blinking dot inching towards the larger shape of his world.

"You would be taken," he said at last. "By whoever was strongest. Your scent–" He breathed it in. "Even now, unchanged, you smell notable. Compatible. On Khorreth, surrounded by alphas who have not found mates, you would be–"

He stopped.

"Fought over," I finished.

"Yes."

"And whoever won would what? Force the serum on me? Force the rest?"

His tail lashed once, sharp and fast, and went still. When he spoke, his voice was lower than usual, more felt than heard.

"Some would ask. Some would not. There is no legal protection for an unbonded omega. No recourse. No law that says you cannot be taken."

I looked at the nav display. Three days until we arrived on a planet full of beings like him, all of them bigger than me, all of them wanting what I apparently represented.

"But with the serum," I said. "With your claim."

"With my claim, you are protected. No one may touch you. No one may challenge me for you unless they are of higher rank, and I would–" His jaw set. "I would not permit it. Regardless of law."

"You'd fight for me."

"I would kill for you." He said it plainly. A fact. "Anyone who touched you. Anyone who tried. I would kill them and feel no remorse."

I should have been frightened by that. Maybe I was, a little. But mostly I was thinking about the other alphas he'd described. The ones who wouldn't ask. The ones who would just take.

"What would I be," I said. "With the serum. With your claim. What would that make me?"

He turned to face me, and I had to tip my head back to meet his eyes. He was so tall. So big. One of his hands could splay across the small of my back; he could cradle my head like an egg. And he looked at me with those huge dark eyes, and there was no hunger in them at all.

"Mine," he said. "Safe. Tended."

Three words.

They landed in my chest and sat there, heavy and warm, and I hated it. I hated that they meant something. I hated that tended was the one that stuck, the one that lodged under my ribs and wouldn't shake loose. I'd spent nine years on relay stations tending to myself. Feeding myself. Keeping myself warm and working and alive through sheer bloody stubbornness, because no one else was going to do it.

And here was this alien, this creature who'd taken me from my home and carried me across the stars, offering to tend me as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I hated that a worn-out part of me wanted it.

"Fine," I said.