Afinasmiledagain. “Take my hand, Rychor. Come back to the caves. Someone is waiting for you there.”
His heart plunged again, and he jumped to his feet without taking Afina’s hand, eyes wild, his pulse picking up, his vision narrowing.
Afina looked him up and down and chuckled, of all things. “My, my,” she said. “You have got it bad, haven’t you? Back down, Rychor. Your little human is just fine, and she’s waiting for you.”
Rychor stared at Afina, utterly confused.
Afina shrugged and turned, dusting her hands off and stepping gingerly over a coupling in the huge pipe.
“Shecame tous,” Afina called over her shoulder. Having stepped over the coupling, she looked back at Rychor, still smiling. “I quite like her. It will be… pleasant. To have another female around.”
And then Afina, grinning wildly, strode away very gracefully along the pipes.
Rychor stared after her, undecided. It had all the markings of a trap, and yet he sensed only honesty in Afina’s words.
He followed, still wary and still guarding his secrets about Sonya. Just in case.
EPILOGUE
Rychor was already awake when the light adjustment began, which was typical of him. The Ryvokia didn’t sleep as much as humans. Sonya opened her eyes and watched the slow-changing light change hues around her: deep inky blue, then a subdued violet that blushed into a bright pink, which faded to a rosy hue, and then turned into a shade that had been specifically designed for her. It imitated natural sunlight at a middle-latitude location on Earth in late summer.
She liked watching the colors change. The bed that she shared with Rychor now had already morphed into its neutral state on his side, but sensing she was awake, it began to gently massage her, lift her to sitting, and warm her toes.
She smiled happily once she was sitting. The Ryvokia tech, when it was not being used for nefarious purposes, was really a delight.
Rychor appeared almost immediately, a tray of food, piled high with his attempts at human delicacies, floating in front of him. He scowled at it, like he always did. Rychor would have much preferred that she obtain her nutrition from a carefully-calibrated drip. But as Sonya had discovered in the past few months, he would do whatever she asked of him.
And a large component of the deal she had hammered out with Afina, and therefore Rychor had given her guarantees to be bred on her own terms.
And her own terms did not involve sleeping pods or nutritional drips, but a bed with her mate lying in it, next to her, and an attempted human diet. For this, the Ryvokia tech had been repurposed to generate copies of plants native to Earth, and she had even been allowed to help design an apparatus that worked like an oven and stove.
She smiled at him as he pushed the tray toward her. A great warrior and, as she was learning, a male of immense social status, Rychor was surprisingly concerned about his cooking skills. “I think this cake turned out very similar to what you showed me,” he told her. Well, more like told-thought to her.
She was still getting used to her connection to Rychor, which had only deepened since her decision, months ago by a human calendar, to abandon her escape, swim back to the cave, and demand things from Afina.
It had been a bold move, one that she had surprised even herself by making. But in the moments that Rychor had transmitted the huge dump of Ryvokia consciousness and history to her mind, she had sensed something about Afina. A curiosity, a desire for improvement and change, that was being smothered by the hierarchy of males that Afina had to manage.
Well, she knew what that was like. And perhaps that’s why she had been bold enough to speak to Afina. But really, it wasn’tthereason, it was only the reason she had believed her wild demands might be heeded.
Sonya looked at the “cake,” and smiled.
“Pancake,” she told him. She picked it up using an implement they had designed for her, which looked like a fork. It was dripping with a syrup of some kind. “Did you synthesize a maple syrup?” she asked, astounded. But she didn’t wait for his answer because she already felt it. She tasted the pancake.
“Not bad,” she said, nodding agreeably. It wasn’t perfect; there was no real wheat here, and no real maple trees, but the Ryvokia possessed technology that was very advanced in many ways—while their tribal practices remained so very barbaric.
Now that Rychor was so close to her, though, she didn’t so much care about her pancakes. She could smell him and feel him—the gathering of sheets of icy pleasure beneath her skin had not ceased, and her stomach still fluttered as if she was meeting him for the first time. A chill ran along her spine, and in her belly—just now showing—the wild lust she had developed for Rychor was brewing anew.
She pushed the tray away and Rychor watched it go. She reached her hands for him to pull him back into bed with her. Her fingers ached to touch his skin, to feel him against her thighs, between her legs, his weight pressing her to the mattress.
“Sonya,” he objected, because he always did. Rychor had it in his head that he was going to damage the baby growing inside her, and even though she had compiled a whole presentation of human medical information that had convinced him his idea was incorrect, he still hesitated.
But Sonya couldn’t be stopped, and he knew that. Her desire for Rychor had turned into a wild hunger, something she had never experienced before. She wanted him inside her, claiming her body fully, filling her with his seed again and again.
She knew hewantedto; she knew so many things now that she had his baby inside her belly, growing, feeding her connection to the Ryvokia consciousness.
She pulled him toward her, and he reached first for the swell of her belly, rubbing his hand over it, the pleasure visible in his eyes. Seeing the pleasure he took in her swollen belly, his breeding of her, was more sexually stimulating than anything else he had ever done. If Afina had maintained any doubts about her plan, they had been erased by their fruitful coupling, and by whatever Afina learned through their shared consciousness.
Rychor moved his hand from her belly as his eyes traveled to hers, and he climbed onto the bed, gently positioning himself to put no weight on her. His hands traveled over her body, setting fire to the skin he touched, stirring up a thick, molten lust between her legs.
