"If not, you'll have your answer quickly." Oberon's reflection wavers slightly. "For what it's worth, I believe this one may be different. She has something the others lacked—a will to survive that comes from never having enough."
A will to survive. Such a simple way to describe Maya's desperate hunger to finally matter to someone, her willingness to risk everything for approval and acceptance. The very wounds that made her perfect for my conditioning might also give her strength to survive what's coming.
"Tomorrow I begin the final phase," I tell him. "Physical bonding, teaching her to crave my touch. Everything necessary to make the attachment unbreakable."
"And if she doesn't survive it?"
The question I've been avoiding settles heavy in my chest. If Maya dies, my court dies with her. No more candidates, no morehope, just slow extinction while I spend eternity knowing I killed the woman I've started thinking of as mine.
"Then I'll make sure her final moments are filled with pleasure instead of pain," I say finally. "That she dies knowing someone finally valued her above everything else."
Oberon nods slowly. "A mercy the others didn't receive."
No, they didn't. The previous candidates died in sterile rooms, surrounded by magical devices and desperate attempts to save them. If Maya's transformation fails, I'll hold her while it happens. I'll make sure the last thing she feels is my hands on her skin, my voice telling her how perfect she is.
After Oberon's reflection fades, I remain in the garden until moonrise, studying each statue and remembering each failure. Seven women who trusted me. Seven deaths on my conscience. Seven reminders that tomorrow night could add an eighth name to this collection of broken hopes.
But Maya has something the others didn't—complete emotional dependence that runs both ways. She needs my approval to breathe. And I've started needing her to survive more than I need my court to continue.
That mutual desperation might be enough to anchor her through magical transformation that killed every previous attempt.
It has to be enough.
Because tomorrow night, I'm going to make her mine in every way that matters. And either she'll survive to become the fertility goddess my people need, or I'll watch the first woman I've claimed in eight centuries die knowing I was the one who led her to that fate.
The thought drives me back to my chambers, where desire wars with dread. I retrieve the scarf again, burying my face in silk that still carries traces of her scent mixed with my own seed. My cock hardens immediately, the prehensile length respondingto the promise of finally claiming what I've been conditioning her to offer.
Tomorrow, those desperate little sounds she made during our kiss will become cries of pleasure as I show her exactly what submission can feel like. Tomorrow, her virgin body will learn to crave my inhuman anatomy, to beg for my knot, to accept the breeding that will transform her completely.
My hand works my length roughly, thinking about how tight she'll be, how she'll struggle to take even half my size before I'm fully inside her. How her virgin channel will have to stretch around my knot when I finally lock us together, pumping her full of the enhanced seed that will ensure conception.
When I come again, it's with thoughts of her belly swollen with my child, her body transformed by fertility magic that flows through my release. The plants in my chambers respond to the power, blooming and reproducing in celebration of successful mating that hasn't happened yet.
Tomorrow, we find out if love and perfect bonding and the desperate need to breed are enough to overcome eight centuries of failure.
The alternative—adding Maya's statue to my garden of regrets—is unthinkable.
So it won't happen.
It can't.
CHAPTER 13
MAYA
The fire startsbetween my legs and spreads outward like poison in my veins.
One moment I'm walking to the laboratory for our morning session, and the next I'm on my knees in the hallway, gasping for air that burns my lungs. My skin feels too tight, like it's trying to peel away from my bones. Every nerve ending screams with need so intense I want to claw at my own flesh.
This isn't the gradual building I've felt for days. This is agony.
"Maya!"
Thorian's voice cuts through the roar in my ears, and his scent—God, hisscent—hits me like salvation. Pine and earth and something wild and ancient that makes my mouth water and my pussy clench with desperate need. The moment it fills my nostrils, the fire becomes bearable.
He scoops me up in arms that feel impossibly strong, and I bury my face against his throat, breathing him in like a drug. Up close, his scent is even more intoxicating. There's something inhuman about it, something that makes my hindbrain recognize predator even as my body melts with relief.
"What's happening to me?" I gasp against his skin. "I feel like I'm dying."
