He walks past me and up the stairs. After a while, I hear the door to his room open and close.
I stand there, trying to sift through my feelings. I think I’m angry. He walked away from me. He decided what I could and couldn’t take, and didn’t even give me a chance.
However, there’s something under the anger that I can’t reason away. When that sound came out of him, part of me wanted to run, and part of me wanted him to come closer. I don’t understand how one strange sound could make me feel so many confusing things at once.
I shake my head and try to snap out of it. I fan myself. The heat is unbearable. That must be it.
Chapter Ten
Osric
I turn the lock and rest my hand on the bolt.
The clicking won’t stop. It used to come in single bursts a cough could cover. Now it rolls up from my chest, over and over. I clamp my jaw and press my tongue against my teeth, but it pushes through anyway.
The hot flash hits me before I reach the bed. It starts at the base of my spine, where my tail joins the shell, and spreads through my chest, arms, and my thighs. I breathe in and out, in and out, hold it at the top. My hands shake so badly that I have to curl them into fists and press them into my sides.
I keep the tincture vial on the shelf by the bed. Varys said five drops, seven at most if I really need a high dose. I pour water, count ten drops into the glass, and drink it down before I can think too hard about what Varys would have to say about this. The bitterness coats my tongue, and I wait.
The heat eases a little. The clicking drops to a low pull at the back of my throat. That’s all ten drops does for me, and I can already feel it fading.
I understand why. Varys measured the dosage for a male living alone in an empty house. Esme sleeps under my roof, her scent fills the air, and her voice carries down the corridors. The rut is out of my control. Her proximity speeds it up, and however much time I believed I had, now I have less.
I don’t blame the shaman. He’s never had to deal with such a situation before.
I make myself describe what’s happening to me. If I rationalize it, maybe it helps.
The rut isn’t desire. I can say no to desire.
The rut prepares my body to take her whether I agree or not. Whethersheagrees or not.
The heat under my shell is only one side of it. Then the senses sharpen until they hurt. Her scent will become a signal at some point, something I’ll be laser-focused on. I’ll be able to find her anywhere without opening my eyes.
Even now, if I sit still and listen, I know when she moves from one room to another. At night, I know when she sleeps badly. I hear her everywhere: her steps, her breathing behind a closed door, the small sounds she makes when she huffs and pouts at something that frustrates her.
My body is learning her, but not out of love. It’s learning her for a hunt.
My instincts decided when I first saw her: she’s mine. My biology takes that as fact, and it doesn’t understand why I’m locked in my room when my mate is just within reach. My biology doesn’t care that she’s terrified, that she doesn’t know about the clicking and the mating ritual.
When the rut takes a male fully, his mate is supposed to run. He gives her a head start, and that isn’t mercy, it’s part of the process. He hunts her by scent, by sound, by the heat of her body in the night air. He claims her where he catches her, on the ground, against stone, in the dust. At the peak of the claiming, he stings her.
For our females, none of that is violence. Scorpii women are built for the hunt. They’re fast, strong, and venom doesn’t harm them. The sting brings a female pleasure and seals the bond, and before the hunt is over, she usually puts her own stinger in her male.
In the ritual grounds, elders and family witness the start of the hunt and bless it. It’s a joyful thing among my kind. I used to imagine mine.
For Esme, the same ritual ends with her dead. A Scorpius sting kills a human – that is the known truth. The only exception is a true fated mate. The shamans believe the bond may changethe venom inside her blood, so it doesn’t stop her heart, but no shaman alive has watched it happen with a human woman, and there’s no safe way to test it. The only test is the sting itself.
There wouldn’t even be ritual grounds for my hunt. Haara doesn’t want me on its sacred paths. If the rut takes me, it takes me here, at the edge of the city, among the black rock, thornbrush, and dry washes behind my house. There would be no elders, no witnesses, and no one to pull me off her.
She’s a frail human who will get a head start that won’t help her at all, in a desert her kind can’t survive, running from a male built to catch anything that moves out here.
I sit on the edge of my bed and squeeze the glass so hard that it shatters. I don’t pick up the shards, because the enormity of what I’ve done finally sinks in.
I put her in this danger. Her parents would’ve saved her, had I let them. But I told myself I was saving her from an old man’s bed, and maybe I was, but I also brought her within reach of the most dangerous thing in Otheera – me.
Every kind thing I’ve done since, offering her the promise of freedom, buying her silk… I told myself it was to give her a reason not to fear me. But I kept her close while knowing the rut is inevitable. I’ve been fooling myself since the very beginning.
I should never have gone to the bride market. I should never have bought a human bride. I should have stayed home and accepted my fate. I’d already accepted my death and made my peace with it. Then I went ahead and risked her life for… nothing.
