Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
“Is there a reason you’re acting like a spoiled brat?”
That description hits me hard. Is that what he thinks of me? Probably. He probably thinks I have all kinds of personality deficiencies. He only ever kept me around because he could fuck me and make that precious fucking…
“You don’t care about me. All you care about is the damn egg.”
“Lettie, that is our baby.”
“No, it’s not! It doesn’t do anything. It sits there and stares at me. Or actually, not even that.”
He draws in a deep breath. “It will hatch soon, and then you will see. You just need to be patient, and obedient. Now. Come here.”
I almost do as he says, but then I don’t. I stand firm where I am. I shake my head.
“No.”
“No?” Shan quirks a brow at me. “I must have been neglecting you, Lettie. For you to act this foolishly tells me you have entirely forgotten who you are dealing with.”
“An egg polisher?”
For some reason, that phrase sounds like an insult. I know I’m being an asshole. I’m basically giving him shit for looking after his own baby. Deep down, I know I am the fuck-up here. I am bad, and he may as well know it.
Shan strides over to me, steps over the fence, and takes hold of me in a way he hasn’t in a long time. He grips me by the hair at the back of my head, and he looks down at me with a very stern and unimpressed expression.
“You know better than this,” he lectures me. “You know you are to obey me.”
“What do you care anymore. You have your damn egg.”
His brows rise at my petulant outburst. “It is not my damn egg, Lettie, and you know it.”
He smacks me hard enough to make me yelp, and then repeats the act again, ensuring that there is plenty of painful sting in my ass.
“Is this what you need? Are you feeling left out?”
I am feeling so many things, and none of them are repeatable or even expressible in the first place. I’d rather be in trouble than admit how much I am struggling with the strangeness of this entire situation, the loneliness of being separated from humanity, and finding out that my own baby is actually an egg. No matter what eventually hatches from that shell, it won’t be a person like me. It won’t look like me. It probably won’t even like me. And what if I don’t like it? What if I feel the same way about it as I do about the egg?
Shan spanks me again to get my attention. “I am talking to you.”
“Yeah? And?”
“I see,” he growls, hefting me up over his shoulder. He carries me back inside the compound, back inside the house. There, he sits down on the bed he made for the both of us, and he puts me over his knee. I swing over that familiar fulcrum, still brimming with rebellion and discontent.
“It has been too long,” he says. “I have neglected you. I’m sorry. That won’t happen again.”
With that, he sets about whipping me with his palm, the scaled surface of his hand smacking painfully against my ample cheeks. Bolts of pain accompany every impact, but I don’t care. All the feelings I’ve been trying to keep in check since I laid that damn egg are roiling inside me, making a sensible response absolutely impossible. Instead, I lose myself in the sensation. It’s not even pain, not properly. It’s something else. It’s a manifestation of Shan’s continued existence, which sounds weird, but I had really started to feel like I’d lost him, and myself.
I start to cry, hot tears of something like relief tracking down my face. And then I start to sob. Shan spanks me through the tears, but once my entire body starts to contort with the effects of my absolute misery, he stops what he is doing and settles me, hot bottomed, squirming, and sore on his lap.
“Tell me what is happening inside that head,” Shan says. “I need to know.”
“I’m such a bad mother!” I wail. “I don’t like my egg.”
He takes a patient breath and hugs me tightly.
“I have told you, haven’t I? Even saurian females don’t feel a particular attachment to their eggs. It will be different when it hatches.”
“Will it?”
“Yes,” he assures me. “That is when you will see the life you and I have created together. And it won’t be just a thing sitting there anymore. It will be full of movement and life and you will see yourself, and me, and it will be everything you ever dared dream of.”
Shan
Lettie looks at me dubiously. I know this entire situation has been traumatic for her. She was stolen, she was bred, and now she is mother to an egg. It is not easy for her, and I could feel guilty for putting her through this if I did not believe her eventual happiness was guaranteed.