For a moment, he doesn’t respond. I squeeze my eyes tighter, tears welling behind my eyelids as I wait. That’s when he pushes his own raw, unfiltered intent across the connection.
A sense of duty slams into the front of my mind.
“A dra-dam does not choose.”
He lifts a claw and taps his bare chest, directly over the steadily vibrating purr.
“Weight. Here. Always.”
“Did you want it?” I whisper, the emotion bleeding through the mental link. “Did you want to be the dra-dam?”
He does not understand the concept of ‘want’. Instead, a barrage of vivid images hits my mind.
A glowing monolith deep in the sand. Ancient, thrumming with forgotten power.
The memory crashes into me, followed immediately by Kol’s own birth. A small boy gasping for his very first breath as he emerges from the glowing Giving Stone, his hands small and shaking. Then, the literal crushing weight of the old dra-dam’s mind slamming into his newly formed skull, wiping his consciousness before he could even learn who or where he was.
He shoves the raw, unvarnished feeling directly against the front of my brain. I flinch. It is the complete absence of a choice. He was not elected. He was not trained.
He was engineered from the rock, forged from millions of microscopic, vibrating golden particles suspended in the air, and reborn from the old dra-dam to replace the dead one.
“Made for the burden.”
The concept slams into the front of my skull, knocking the air out of my lungs.
A sharp ache splits open right behind my ribs. My eyes burn. He is trapped. Exactly as trapped as I am.
“Is this how all of you are made?” I whisper, the emotion bleeding across the link. “You just... emerge from the stone?”
“Yes. It is the only way a Drakav can survive the dust. We are carved from it.” His broad hands slide around to cup my jaw, his thumbs sweeping slowly over my cheekbones. “The mated females told me something in the Hall of Knowing. They claimed humans do not have a Stone. That they are not carved.”
“We aren’t,” I swallow, keeping my forehead pressed flush against his. “We aren’t engineered. We grow our young. We carry them.”
His chest rumbles, a soothing, resonant vibration. “You carry the newly-formed young after the males carve them so you do not tire your delicate limbs.”
“No.” I reach up to cover one of his hands resting against my jaw. Slowly, I pull it down along my body, pressing his broad, scorching palm flat against my lower belly. “We carry them here. Inside our bodies.”
The utter silence that drops over his mind is deafening.
I tilt my head back just enough to look at him, breaking the physical connection for a second. His golden eyes are wide, the pupils growing until they are pressing against the amber and pushing it back. The glow along his arms flares.
“Inside you.” He chases me, pressing his forehead actively back to mine to slam the telepathic connection open again. The thought is feral.
“Y-yes.”
“For how long?”
“Nine months,” I whisper, my throat tight. “I reckon we’ve been here for about four or five months already so basically double that time.”
A harsh, guttural scrape rumbles out of his chest. Not a purr this time. More like a tight, rough noise that makes the hairs on my arms stand up.
He goes perfectly still. The claw resting over my low belly flexes once, his fingers pressing firmly through my shirt. Then his mind cracks wide open across the link.
Every single rational thought in his head disappears. The war council, Lucek, the starving clan. Gone. Replaced by a single, blinding image slamming through the connection so hard my vision whites out.
Me. My belly, round and taut under his spread palm. His claws curved protectively over the swell.
A rawneedfloods through the link after it. It’s hardly a thought. It’s adrive. Singular and so focused on the soft skin beneath his hand that it drowns out everything else in his brain.
