"We can reinforce it. Add support here and here." I sketched invisible lines in the air. "It would take maybe two days."
"Two days." His hand found my hip, pulled me against him. "And what will you do while I work?"
"Direct. Criticize. Tell you when your angles are wrong."
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. "You're already doing that."
"Someone has to maintain standards."
His mouth found my neck. Bit gently. "Tonight I'm going to breed you until you can't criticize anything."
"Promises, promises."
He kept the promise. Twice. I fell asleep still locked to him, his seed warm in my belly, his offspring growing somewhere deep inside me.
Day sixteen.Fourteen days until the portal.
I woke before dawn, which was unusual. My body had settled into a rhythm of sleeping late and napping often, conserving energy for the pregnancy.
But something felt different. Wrong.
I lay still, listening. The Keep was quiet. Bruk was warm against my back, his arm draped over my belly. Outside, the wind had picked up, carrying sounds I couldn't quite identify.
Then I heard it. A scratching at the perimeter. Multiple sources. Moving.
"Bruk."
He was awake instantly. Alert. His arm tightened around me protectively.
"I hear them." His voice was low, dangerous. "Seven. Maybe eight. They're testing the walls."
The ferals. The ones he'd been tracking, the ones drawn by my scent.
"They're getting bolder," I said.
"You're pregnant. The scent has changed. They know now that you're fertile, that breeding you would produce viable offspring." His hand pressed against my belly. "They want what's growing inside you."
I'd known, abstractly, that my presence attracted ferals. That being hunted was part of the deal I'd made when I stepped through the portal. But hearing it stated so plainly, that creatures wanted to take me, wanted to breed me, wanted to claim the offspring already growing inside me, made my stomach clench.
"What do we do?"
"The Keep will hold. I designed it to withstand assault." He was already moving, rising from the sleeping platform, his body tensing for a fight. "But they're getting bolder. Testing more frequently. Eventually they'll attack in force."
"How many?"
"Now? Seven or eight. In a week? Could be fifteen. Twenty." He turned to look at me, his amber eyes serious. "They'll keep coming until you're too pregnant to attract them, or until I've killed them all."
I sat up. My hand went to my belly automatically, protective.
"Then we prepare," I said. "The Keep's defenses. The weak points I've identified. We reinforce everything, and we design traps."
"Traps?"
"I'm an engineer." I met his eyes. "I don't just build things. I understand how things break. And I understand how to make things that break other things."
He crossed to the corner where he kept his tools and came back with a sharpened bone shard. Handed it to me. For sketching. For planning.
We got to work.
