Page 32 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

And now I was.

I wasn't sure how I felt about it. The romantic part of me – the part I'd buried under years of practical solitude – wanted to find it beautiful. Fated mates, written in the stars, scent-bonded across impossible distance. The stuff of every terrible novel I'd ever read.

But the practical part of me, the part that had survived nine years alone, knew it was more complicated than that. He'd chosen this. I hadn't. He'd had three years to make peace with what was coming. I'd had days.

And yet.

When I thought about Vorreth – about being taken from this dwelling, this male, this nest built specifically for my warmth – my chest tightened with something that felt a lot like fear.

My body had decided who was safe. My body had decided who I belonged to.

I wasn't sure my mind had caught up yet. But lying there, staring at the ceiling of a home I hadn't chosen, I thought maybe it was starting to.

Three rotations.

He'd been waiting for three rotations.

And I was beginning to understand what it meant to be waited for.

CHAPTER 10

THE DISTRESS CALL I HOPED WOULD FAIL

I'd been responding to his moods through scent for six minutes before I noticed I was doing it.

He was in the workshop, working on something that needed concentration – I could tell from the careful, focused note underneath his usual warmth. I was in the main room, sorting through a pile of fabrics he'd brought home for me to use as extra bedding, and I'd been adjusting my movements to match his focus without realising. Moving quietly. Keeping my presence small and unobtrusive. Giving him space to work.

I stopped mid-motion, a length of soft grey cloth in my hands.

When had I started doing that? Reading him through scent instead of looking at him, instead of asking? When had his emotional state become something I tracked automatically, like temperature or air pressure?

I set the fabric down and pressed my palms flat against my thighs.

This was the problem with settling into a rhythm. You stopped noticing where the rhythm came from.

I'd been here for – I counted – eleven days. Eleven days of heat cycles and milking schedules and meals he prepared for me, sized for my hands. Eleven days of sleeping in my nest, of waking with his scent already wrapped around me, of falling asleep to the sound of his hooves moving through the dwelling.

Last night, I'd dreamed in Khorreth. Broken fragments of his language, words I'd absorbed without meaning to, threaded through a dream I couldn't quite remember. I'd woken with one of them still in my mouth – tevarra, which meant something like home-place or dwelling-heart, the untranslatable centre of a Khorreth living space.

I was learning his language in my sleep. I was reading his moods through his scent. I was settling into his life like water into a hollow in the ground.

And I kept catching myself not minding.

The communications terminal was in the room I'd first mistaken for a storage space.

I found it by accident, looking for something else – more of the soft fabric, I thought, or maybe just something to do that wasn't sitting in my nest and thinking about how comfortable I'd become. The terminal was built into the wall at Khorreth height, but there was a small maintenance panel at the base that I could reach if I crouched.

I stared at it for a long time.

It was clearly a communications system. The interface was different from human technology, but the basic components were recognisable – input mechanisms, display screens, what looked like frequency selectors. I'd spent nine years working with relay systems. I knew how to read infrastructure, even unfamiliar infrastructure.

This could send a signal.

The thought arrived fully formed, as if it had been waiting. A distress signal. A beacon. Something that would tell Earth – tell anyone – where I was.

My hands moved before I'd consciously decided. Old reflex, muscle memory from years of running maintenance checks and emergency protocols. I crouched by the panel, found the manual override, started working through the interface.

The system powered up with a low hum. The display flickered, showing coordinates I couldn't read, frequency ranges I didn't recognise. But there – a familiar notation system. Earth-standard wavelengths. Someone had programmed in the frequencies used by human vessels.