Page 50 of Breed

He smacks me hard enough to make me yelp, and then repeats the act again, ensuring that there is plenty of painful sting in my ass.

“Is this what you need? Are you feeling left out?”

I am feeling so many things, and none of them are repeatable or even expressible in the first place. I’d rather be in trouble than admit how much I am struggling with the strangeness of this entire situation, the loneliness of being separated from humanity, and finding out that my own baby is actually an egg. No matter what eventually hatches from that shell, it won’t be a person like me. It won’t look like me. It probably won’t even like me. And what if I don’t like it? What if I feel the same way about it as I do about the egg?

Shan spanks me again to get my attention. “I am talking to you.”

“Yeah? And?”

“I see,” he growls, hefting me up over his shoulder. He carries me back inside the compound, back inside the house. There, he sits down on the bed he made for the both of us, and he puts me over his knee. I swing over that familiar fulcrum, still brimming with rebellion and discontent.

“It has been too long,” he says. “I have neglected you. I’m sorry. That won’t happen again.”

With that, he sets about whipping me with his palm, the scaled surface of his hand smacking painfully against my ample cheeks. Bolts of pain accompany every impact, but I don’t care. All the feelings I’ve been trying to keep in check since I laid that damn egg are roiling inside me, making a sensible response absolutely impossible. Instead, I lose myself in the sensation. It’s not even pain, not properly. It’s something else. It’s a manifestation of Shan’s continued existence, which sounds weird, but I had really started to feel like I’d lost him, and myself.

I start to cry, hot tears of something like relief tracking down my face. And then I start to sob. Shan spanks me through the tears, but once my entire body starts to contort with the effects of my absolute misery, he stops what he is doing and settles me, hot bottomed, squirming, and sore on his lap.

“Tell me what is happening inside that head,” Shan says. “I need to know.”

“I’m such a bad mother!” I wail. “I don’t like my egg.”

He takes a patient breath and hugs me tightly.

“I have told you, haven’t I? Even saurian females don’t feel a particular attachment to their eggs. It will be different when it hatches.”

“Will it?”

“Yes,” he assures me. “That is when you will see the life you and I have created together. And it won’t be just a thing sitting there anymore. It will be full of movement and life and you will see yourself, and me, and it will be everything you ever dared dream of.”

Shan

Lettie looks at me dubiously. I know this entire situation has been traumatic for her. She was stolen, she was bred, and now she is mother to an egg. It is not easy for her, and I could feel guilty for putting her through this if I did not believe her eventual happiness was guaranteed.

“Most saurians in Grave City are hatched in the hatchery, and then raised in the nursery,” I explain.

“Parents don’t raise their children?”

“Servants do, sometimes. But most females lay their eggs and leave. The nursery is responsible for raising most of the saurians your crew knows. Myself, Alpha Thorn, and Enforcer Avel are all products of the nursery. This is what Wrath wants to avoid with his breeding program.”

“This is what you want to stop too, isn’t it?”

She’s perceptive.

“I was not well treated in the nursery. My eyes and temperament made me stand out in ways the nursemaids did not appreciate. I ran away when I was very young.” Re-telling my story in such an understatement is the only way to maintain composure and keep the pain from being evident. Somehow, she sees it anyway.

She puts her small human hand on me and looks at me with large round eyes, still watery from the expression of her own pain.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she says. “My parents couldn’t protect me from the world either. They tried, but they died when I was young, and then a series of very bad things happened to me. My whole life, all I’ve ever wanted was to be safe and to belong. And now I’m not safe, and the only thing I ever belonged to, the crew, is gone.”

“That is not entirely true,” I tell her, patting her sore cheeks in what I hope will be a good reminder. “You belong to me.”

She blushes, and a little smile appears on her face. I have made an impression, and for that I am glad. She needs me. I need her. And we both need to understand one another because we are both full of feeling.

And then I hear it. The unmistakeable sound of tapping and cracking. I have been hearing little hints of it on and off for days, but I did not mention it to Lettie because I did not want to get her hopes up. I know she has found the whole process hard, and the last thing she needed was more disappointment. The sounds are stronger now. In fact, they’re so strong, I just know hatching has to be imminent.

“I have some good news,” I tell Lettie.

She looks at me dubiously, wiping wet tears away with the back of her hand. “What is it?”

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