Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 41511 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 166(@250wpm)___ 138(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 41511 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 166(@250wpm)___ 138(@300wpm)
My eyes go wide and I continue to cry out, pain like I’ve never known stealing my breath. The pleasure from moments ago is torn away and it’s a shock, to go from bliss to hellish pain.
“My mate!” First cries, unseating himself from me and setting my feet on the floor. But I immediately collapse to my knees, my legs are no match against the blinding pain. I reach back to try to understand what’s happening and that’s when I feel it—
Wings are breaking through my skin.
Seventeen
FIRST
It has happened. I have a mate and I have bred her. She will bear my kit. And yet as I look at her, exhausted and passed out on the bed, her fledgling iridescent purple wings spread out behind her… I do not feel as I imagined I would.
This is all I wanted, is it not?
And yet now that I have what I desired… what am I to do? Find a way to get to my shuttle so I may tell them I have fulfilled my part of the bargain? I have bred a female. I will have their allegiance more than ever were I to make a move against the King. My half-brother, the very same who did not honor his life-debt to me.
Who is mate to those whom my mate calls family.
Were my mother still alive, I know clearly what she would say. She would say I am being foolish. Sentimental like my father. Either I should have claimed a mate who did not have such difficult ties to the king, or, now that I have, I should take my kit when it is born, and claim the throne that is rightfully mine.
I should lead a glorious revolution and take this planet for the Draci homeland, that we have waited these many hundred years to find.
It will not be easy, but with our superior technology and strength, these soft humans will stand little chance. We will make them our slaves and breed them so that our numbers flourish until the planet might rightfully be called New Draci.
But then my gaze is caught again by my beautiful, brave mate. She who gave herself to a brute like me completely and without shame. I saw into her and she was not… lesser in any way. If anything, the complexity of her mind and emotions and spirit are a challenge to me. They make me question that which I have taken for granted.
Together, we became more than I have ever been on my own.
I would not lose her, for anything.
Even at the cost of my own life.
But this is not the Draci way. We are not passionate. Or compassionate. We are cold, except when our fires burn hot and we destroy any who dare to stand in our way.
How are two such different species ever to share a planet?
And yet… my mate and I found a way to share our bodies and create new life. It is astounding. Maybe my half-wit half-brother is not as foolish as I first assumed. Maybe there is a way forward I have not considered.
What if… what if we could co-exist with these creatures instead of simply dominating them?
Movement on the bed distracts me from my thoughts.
Giselle blinks her eyes and stirs, her wings twitching and moving with her as she wakes. Already they are an inseparable part of her. I can only watch on in astonished wonder.
“What time is it?” she asks groggily.
“Just before sunrise, my mate.”
She blinks and sits up. Her wings flare out behind her, all but sweeping the walls—she stretches them unconsciously as she yawns. She looks over her shoulder and gives a little yelp.
“Holy shit, it wasn’t a dream.”
She stands up and turns, her still-extended wings moving with her and knocking an unlit scented candle and some books off the dresser beside the bed.
She tries to draw them back in, but not before catching them on the bedspread and yanking it onto the floor.
She covers her face with her hands. “Oh my God, what have I done?”
I immediately stand and go to her, pulling her into my arms. “You have made your body an accommodating vessel to raise our kit.”
She drops her hands and looks up at me at that, eyes wide.
“Holy shit,” she says again. “I’m pregnant. I mean, I knew it was a possibility, but everything was so— It took Ana and Ezo a long time to get pregnant, I guess I didn’t really think it would—” Her voice drops off and her hands go to her stomach. Her eyes are still wide. With shock or awe I cannot tell.
I frown. “Are you not happy to be pregnant with my kit?”
She waves a hand at me. “Just give a girl a minute here, would you? I mean, I’ve always wanted to be a mother. I just… I never imagined it quite like this, ya know?” She gestures with her head back toward her shoulder where she lifts her wings experimentally again.