Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 64359 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64359 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
He stops and smiles at me with a broad grin that makes my heart skip a beat. “But you are cute.”
I look at him with curiosity. This doesn’t make sense. Not even a little bit. I am not the only human woman for sale. I am not his only option. That means he’s choosing me for some reason.
He likes that I’m a very bad girl. It’s what they all like about me. Either that, or the fact that they’ve all had to compete for me has made me seem more desirable than I am. That could be it. It would be stupid, but it could be it.
I have been just as addled by this experience. When I started, I knew what I was doing. I was escaping. I was making a better life. I was doing what I needed to do in order to survive and to protect… I was doing what I had to. Now I've been sacrificed. I’ve been infected. I’ve been defiled so many times I no longer remember what it felt like to be pure in any way.
But he still wants me.
“I don’t believe the universe makes mistakes. I believe you were put in my path for a reason. I believe I was put in your path for a reason too.”
I look at this handsome, earnest, apparently nice guy with all the strength in the world, and I know that my attraction to him is preordained. I was made to want to fuck this guy and have his babies. He was made to make me want him. The universe is playing with us like two whittled dolls it made just to amuse itself. That’s according to him.
I have to believe in something more than that. I have to believe that I have choice, and that my fate is mine to determine. There is more at stake than just my freedom. There is everything I have ever suffered, and everything I have ever wanted to be.
I feel shy with Kronos, which is wild as I have been with Emrys in the most public and defiling of ways. By now I should be beyond shame. But I am embarrassed, because I know what I am. I know what the others do to me. Kronos almost seems too sweet and good and proper to be with me.
“Why are they letting you do this?”
“I have claim, and they know it. None of us wants to go to war against one another. Emrys is an ass, but I have been given safe passage here. And Atlas, he is a scythkin. He is used to sharing with a brood.”
“He didn’t want to share before…”
“This is a smaller, proven group, I imagine. Sweet of you to consider your other mates’ feelings. You are worried about what they think, when it is your own tender body which is on the line.”
Kronos makes love sweetly and tenderly. He holds me close and he kisses me, and he treats me the way a woman should probably be treated in a universe where she is not a commodity being used for her body.
It is strange to be treated this way, especially when I know what darkness lurks in my blood, but I let him take me, because he owns me, and because Atlas and Emrys see fit to share me. Does he know that the spreading of my thighs comes at the behest of my dark masters? Does he know that his kindness is not nearly as much of an aphrodisiac as the fact that I have been sent off to be fucked?
There is something deeply twisted inside me, something shattered, like Emrys said. It was twisted a long time ago, though. I think I might even have been made wrong. Are all humans this way? I’ve never met another one. I wouldn’t know whether it is normal to cling to the handsome, attentive, beautiful body of a new lover and cast my mind to those who wait to ravage and defile me once he has done spending his hopeful seed inside my deceptive womb.
9 BRED
It is Atlas who eventually catches me out.
“There’s something odd about this human. She isn’t cycling. She should be coming into heat every thirty or so days, and she should be bleeding two weeks after that. Have any of you observed her heat cycle?”
My eyes fly open as I hear Atlas broach a topic of discussion I’d really rather he didn’t.
Their favorite topic of discussion is always me. Having me. Mating me. Using me. It hasn’t occurred to them that I’m not having periods, and I had deeply hoped that the topic would not come up.
“There is one good reason that might not be happening.” Emrys speaks, and I hope he says the first stupid thing in his life, but of course he doesn’t.