"I know what you're supposed to be. I don't know who you are."
Another pause. When he spoke again, there was something different in his tone. Interest. Approval.
"Dozens of females have come through the portal over the cycles. You are the first who climbed for high ground."
First. Out of dozens. I'd done something different, something that mattered to him, and I didn't even know what test I'd passed.
"What did the others do?"
"Ran. Hid. Screamed. Begged." A pause. "Broke."
Broke. Dozens of females, and they'd all broken. The tonic had done its work, and they'd surrendered to biology, to the creature hunting them, to the desperate need that was even now making my thighs press together and my inner walls clench.
"I won't break."
The sound he made might have been a laugh.
"You'll choose. There's a difference."
"Show yourself," I said.
"Tomorrow. When you reach the spring at the center of the territory. I'll be there."
"Why? Why not now?"
"Because you're not ready to see me yet. You'll look and you'll fear. Tomorrow you'll look and you'll want."
The arrogance should have enraged me. Instead it sent a pulse of heat between my legs so sharp I gasped.
He heard it. Had to have heard it.
"To help you remember what you're walking toward," he said, and something pressed through the gap in my shelter entrance. Fabric. A piece of cloth that carried his scent so strongly my body convulsed the moment I touched it.
The smell hit my brain and my pussy responded before I could even process what was happening. Clenching. Flooding. Preparing.
And then he was gone.
I sat in my shelter, naked, dripping and shaking, holding a piece of fabric that smelled like him. Every breath I took sent another wave of arousal through me. My pussy clenched and released, clenched and released, trying to grip something that wasn't there.
I should have thrown it away, dropped it outside, and gotten as far from his scent as the maze would allow. I should have done anything except what I actually did.
I pressed it to my face and breathed deeply.
The response was immediate and devastating. My whole body seized. My back arched. My hips rocked against nothing. I buried my face in the fabric and inhaled his scent while my free hand found its way between my legs, fingers sliding through wetness that had reached new levels of desperation.
I stroked myself with his scent in my nose, building toward something that might really crest this time, might actually tip me over?—
Build. Peak. Stall.
Nothing.
But I didn't stop. Couldn't stop. I spent the rest of the night grinding against the bone floor with the fabric pressed to my face, edging myself over and over, getting so close and never quite falling, until the sky began to lighten and I was ruined, desperate, and one day closer to breaking.
But I'd stopped counting.
KERRIS
Day three. The spring at the center of his territory.
