“Here is what you need to know, terrakin. You belong to me. I will use you as I please. You will not leave my sight. I will aid you in meeting your obligations to your captors—”
“Captors?!” she interrupts, eyes flashing as she shoves futilely against my abdomen. “They’re not my captors. They’re my friends.”
They’re her friends as much as the warrior-priests of the Eye are mine. “Can you leave?”
“Of course. After the Hatching, I can go wherever I want.”
“After the Hatching,” I repeat. “But not before. Make no mistake, they are using you. This is not friendship. It might feel that way because you’re doing what they want, but if you stopped, you’d see. This ‘friendship’ is just a bad thing you let happen.”
Chapter 11
Lena
He’s scaring me. His niceness is terrifying in a way his death threats and constant jabs are not. I’m so afraid that I’m going to let down my guard and give him the rope that he’ll use to strangle me.
So when he pins me up against the wall and offers to be cruel instead, it’s almost a relief. And when he tries to poison me against my friends, I can finally fully relax. There he is, my murderous, manipulative mate.
His abs tense under my hands, and I realize my fingers have started roaming, tracing the contours of his muscles. I pull them back. He grabs my wrists and plants my palms on his belly, holding them there until I stop resisting.
When I continue my exploration, he curls forward, catlike, to brace his forearms and forehead against the wall. The sides of his cloak fall around me, tenting me in privacy. Our breaths mingle in the column of darkness as I explore the landscape of his body, mentally naming the muscles from my undergrad anatomy class.
Rectus abdominus. Quadratus lumborum. Transversus abdominus.
He jolts when I trace his inguinal crease, hissing at me and pressing closer so I can’t move my hands lower. “If you want to work in the hatchery today, terrakin, you should stop.”
I stop.
“Don’t smash them or anything,” I say, putting words to my deepest fear.
“What are you talking about?” His voice has a frown in it.
“The eggs. Don’t smash them.”
He pulls back to look at me, his cloak going with him, and I squint in the bright lights of the passageway. “You think I’d do such a thing?”
“Yes,” I answer honestly. “I think you would do anything to get what you want, and sabotaging the Turning would mean that you’d have much more time to fix your ship. I’d be one-hundred-percent available to you.”
My vision adjusts in time to see his swirling, gray eyes narrow at me. “You make a good argument for doing it. If you’re trying to convince me not to, I suggest you give me reasons why I shouldn’t.”
“It’s cruel,” I point out.
He shrugs. “I’m cruel.”
“It’s the last chance for the Frathiks to save their species.”
His breath huffs out in a bitter laugh. “Don’t care.”
If that doesn’t compel him, nothing will. “I can’t stop you, then. But it will be very hard for me to love you if you do.”
This, he seems to take a little more seriously. “You’ll leave me,” he says like a foregone conclusion.
I swallow hard, wishing I were a better person. “No.”
His brows shoot up. “No? Kill all your little fetal Frathiks and you would stay with me?”
“Would you let me go?” I challenge back.
“No, but you knew that.” A jagged smile spreads across his face. “We’ve already established that I’m a bad thing. Why resist?”
