"The difference," I said, "is that when you offer, it will be because youwantto be here. Not because the tonic made you. Not because you had no other choice. Because you looked at what I've built and decided it was worth staying for."
I was close enough to touch her. Close enough to smell the arousal flooding from her body. My cock strained against my armor, leaking, desperate.
"I won't take what isn't offered," I said. "Not tonight. Not ever."
She stared up at me. Her pupils were wide. Her nipples were hard points. Between her legs, I could see how swollen she was, how wet, how desperately her body wanted me to stop talking and start fucking.
"What if I never offer?"
"Then you'll leave when the portal opens. And I'll have another empty nursery and another twenty cycles of waiting."
"That doesn't scare you?"
"It terrifies me." I let her see it. The need. The desperation. The twenty cycles of hope that had crystallized around her. "But I'd rather wait forever for a choice than take something that was never given."
She made a sound. Half sob, half laugh.
"You're nothing like them," she said. "My family. Jonah. Everyone who's ever taken from me. You're nothing like any of them."
"No," I agreed. "I'm not."
I stepped back, putting distance between us. It was the hardest thing I'd done since walking away from her at the spring.
"Sleep," I said. "Or try to. The storm should break by morning."
I returned to my position against the wall. Watched her. Waited.
She didn't sleep. But she stopped pacing and sat on the sleeping platform. She looked at me across the chamber with something in her eyes that hadn't been there before.
Tomorrow. Or the day after. Or the day after that.
She would choose.
I felt it building.
KERRIS
Day eight. I broke.
I'd spent the night watching him across the chamber, my body screaming for something my pride wouldn't let me ask for. Every time I closed my eyes, I felt his mouth on me. His fingers inside me. The ghost of his cock pressing against my entrance before he pulled away.
Two edging sessions. All those orgasms. And I was more desperate than I'd been before he touched me the first time.
The storm had quieted sometime before dawn, not entirely, but reduced from a scream to a moan, the bone shards no longer flying with lethal force. He'd gone to check the perimeter, leaving me alone in the Keep with nothing but my desperation and the memory of the nursery.
Twelve platforms. Twenty cycles of waiting. A monster who built things with the same obsessive precision I did.
He wasn't like them. He wasn't like Jonah or my parents or anyone who'd ever taken from me. He was patient and deliberate and he kept walking away when I begged him to stay.
I hated him for it. I also understood it in a way that terrified me.
He wanted me to choose. Not because I was desperate. Not because the tonic had broken me. He wanted me to look at what he'd built and decide it was worth staying for.
The problem was, I was starting to think it might be.
He returned midmorning,bone dust coating his armor, his scent stronger than ever. The moment he entered the Keep, my body responded. Clenching. Flooding. Preparing.
Eight days. Eight days of this, and I'd lost the ability to be in the same room with him without my pussy clenching like it was trying to pull him inside through sheer force of will.
