Page 71 of Bred By Sor'en

Holy fuck, fucking, fuck, shit! A goddamn alienprinceregards the offending lip as I shake my head, pleading with my eyes.

“Prince Ravian, we will make entry if you do not—"

“Beat on my door again and I’ll leave you behind!” he snaps back through the door, and I hear only a long-suffering sigh before they leave.

I nearly sag against the male still pinning me to the hall.

“Explain. Now,” he commands, and for the first time, I see it… the prince, the renowned Kalzait coldness I had nearly forgotten to be terrified of in the heat of the moment. A species that is so advanced that they keep the whole of the universe in their pocket.

“I’m here to get my mate. He’s… he didn’t—"

He huffs out a snide, bitter laugh. “You’re here to free the murderer?”

“I’m here to make sure everyone gets a fair—"

Something flips in his jewel-toned eyes, something very close to hate. “Do you assume it was fair when he snuck onto a protected Space Station and filled my little brother so thoroughly with toxin that his small boneslocked. Locked so hard they had to be broken to lay him flat in his grave?”

I can smell the alcohol on his breath, his iridescent wings trembling with rage. Flashes of cold, prone bodies of people I loved fill my mind with an ugly hopelessness. Tears well in my eyes, taking his attention seconds before he huffs, shoving off me and letting me collapse backward, sliding halfway down the wall.

Because it’shorrible. It'ssohorrible. What can I say? What do you even say to someone like that? If it were Mom, or Sor’en, our baby, or Jin, would I listen?

Of course not.

“By the old gods, do not cry,” he mumbles, digging his fingers roughly into his long, silken hair as he turns his back on me. Apparently, very sure I’m not a genuine threat. Which is fair, I’m like a few blinks away from entirely dissolving into hysterics.

He doesn’t turn when he speaks again. “You called the murderer your mate. I assume he collected you on one of his many murderous trips star side for Adder.”

“They forced him! Sor’en would never hurt someone without—"

He turns toward me with a withering look. “I couldn't care less about anything else he did. His manifesto was easily fact-checked. I am simply here to collect him to stand before the King and Queen for what he did to their prodigal son.”

“Have you spoken to him? Asked him to explain? There’s got to be something else, somereason.”

“A reason to kill a defenseless child,” he offers, pointily looking at my swollen stomach.

That does it.

A big, nasty sob leaves me as I let myself crumble the rest of the way to the floor. “He’s my mate. I-I can’t lose him. I can’t just, not try!”

The uncomfortable look on the regal male's face only makes me sob harder.

I’m entirely caught off guard as he plops himself on the floor in front of me, his back against the end of his large canopied bed. His pretty greenish wings lie limply on either side of him on the plush floor. His next question is even more baffling. “What is it like tofeela life growing inside of you?”

My head snaps away from his wings, my voice numb as I answer honestly. “Scary. Really, really scary.”

His eyes linger on my stomach.

“Would you like to feel?” I ask, my sobs breaking off into hiccups.

He keeps staring. “What a disgusting offer.”

But he moves toward me anyway, we’re both quiet and still in the room, our misery from opposing sides of the same horrible story mingling as he lies his palms on my belly.

My baby rolls, making the prince jerk his hands back before pressing them to me again. This time with more care than before. “Fascinating. Our women do not do this.”

“Have babies?”

He stares at my stomach when he answers, his brow furrowing when the baby doesn’t move again. “Carry them. We have used artificial surrogate wombs long before I was born.”