"No!" I was sobbing again, thrashing in his grip. "No, you can't, I can't take anymore?—"
"You can." He laid me down on the sleeping platform, gentle despite my struggling. "And when you're ready—truly ready—I'll give you everything."
He stepped back. His cock was still hard, still glistening with my arousal, still ready for me. But he didn't use it. Just stood there, watching me cry.
"Why?" The word was broken. "Why do you keep doing this?"
"Because the words matter. Because choosing matters. Because I've waited twenty cycles for a female who would stay because she wanted to, not because she had no choice."
He knelt beside the platform and touched my face with surprising tenderness.
"You're almost there," he said. "I can feel it. Tomorrow, or the day after, you'll be able to say the words. And when you do—when you really mean them—I'll fill you so completely you'll forget you were ever empty."
He stood. Walked to the other side of the chamber. Settled against the wall to watch me.
I lay there, empty and aching and so close to breaking I could taste it.
Tomorrow.
I didn't know if I could last until tomorrow. But I was starting to understand what he was asking for.
Not just surrender. Not just my body.
My choice. My whole choice. The choice to build a life with him, to fill that nursery, to be the mate he'd been building for.
Could I make that choice? Really make it?
The fever burned. The need consumed. The emptiness ached.
And somewhere deep inside, the walls were finally starting to fall.
BRUK
Iwas dying.
Not metaphorically. Not dramatically. Actually dying. Twenty cycles of waiting, of building, of hope. And now she was here, and I kept stopping, and my body was turning against me.
I sat against the wall of the main chamber and tried to breathe through the agony. My sheaths had given up trying to contain my arousal. My cock was fully emerged, hard and aching and leaking fluid onto the bone floor. The armor plates that normally protected my mating organs had shifted aside, leaving me exposed, vulnerable, desperate.
I'd had her on me. Just the head, just for a moment, but I'd felt her walls gripping me, hot and tight and ready. The texture of her flesh against mine. The way she'd gasped when I'd entered her, even that small amount.
And I'd pulled out.
I'd pulled out because she couldn't say the words. Because she was still running from her past instead of choosing her future. Because I needed her to understand what she was asking for before I gave it to her.
My reasoning had been sound. My restraint had been correct.
My body didn't care about reasoning or correctness. My body only knew that the female I'd been waiting for was twenty feet away, naked and desperate and ready to be bred, and I kept refusing to take her.
The preparation fluid dripped from my cock in a steady stream now. My mating organs ached with a pressure that had become physical pain. Every breath brought her scent into my lungs, sweet and musky and ripe with ovulation, and my cock twitched in response, demanding I do something about it.
I could smell that she was fertile. Not just aroused, not just ready, but actively ovulating. Her body had timed itself to this moment, preparing to receive my seed, preparing to carry my offspring. If I bred her now, tonight, there was a strong chance she would conceive immediately.
The thought made my cock pulse so hard I groaned.
Twenty cycles. Forty-three females. None of them had stayed. None of them had looked at my Keep and seen what I saw: structure, permanence, a future worth building. They'd endured the tonic's torture and left the moment the portal opened, grateful to escape the monster who'd hunted them.
She was different. I'd known it the moment I watched her climb for high ground, testing load capacity before committing her weight. She thought like a builder. Saw the world the way I saw it. Understood that structure mattered, that patience mattered, that some things were worth waiting for.
