Page 42 of Doom

I’d gone to the mess hall for breakfast the morning after Doom had gone back to the front. Within seconds of me starting to eat my fruit salad, the discreet fluttering sensation in my womb of my child moving quickly escalated, feeling like a school of fish was swimming around at high speed in an attempt to flee a predator.

Worried, I held my stomach, wondering if something was wrong with my baby. I touched his psychic mind and a whirlwind of joy and excitement, laced with some major confusion, knocked the wind out of me. My head jerked up and I glanced around the room. While none of the Warriors were looking in my direction, an abnormally high number of them seemed lost in thought, their faces slack and their eyes out of focus like someone engaged in a psychic conversation.

“Cut it out!” I shouted, standing on my feet.

Every head in the mess hall turned towards me, most stunned and far too many looking guilty.

“Which ones among you got my son acting as if my bladder was a soccer ball for him to kick around?” I asked, glaring at them. The Warriors squirmed uncomfortably on their chairs, averting their eyes, a few getting highly fascinated by the ceiling or the mound of food before them. “I said which ones? Raise your hands!”

The guilty Warriors scrunched their faces, some hands reluctantly going up, while the others smirked at them mockingly. I glared at Wrath whose hand was still down, not believing for one minute he hadn’t been part of it, too.

“No need to glare at me, Victoria,” he said unapologetically. “I wasn’t touching minds with your son.”

“But you were going to,” I snarled back.

“Of course,” he said with a shameless smile.

“Well, you all need to fucking stop it,” I snapped in an icy tone that left everyone stunned.

Generally, I was a laid-back, happy-go-lucky kind of woman. I could count on one hand the number of times the Warriors had seen me angry in my almost two-and-a-half years with them. But certain things I didn’t play with.

“At least twelve of you have raised your hand,” I said in an angry voice. “Twelve of you simultaneously pushing your consciousness at my baby whose minds, both psychic and biologic, haven’t fully formed. You could be hurting him. I could feel his confusion. How could he not, being bombarded by so many of you?”

Shock, horror, and shame descended upon the features of the Xians. But that didn’t stop me from continuing to give them a piece of my mind.

“You can’t keep ninjaing a little nudge here and a poke there not knowing how many others are doing the same,” I said in the same harsh tone. “If he wishes to reach out to you, he will. I know you’re all excited and eager, and I love that my son has so many doting big brothers. But what he needs is for you to protect him from harm, including from yourselves.”

“Apologies, Victoria,” Wrath said, echoed by the others. I hated seeing the shame and sorrow on their faces. “It will not happen again. We didn’t think.”

My anger faded like so much snow in spring. How could anyone remain angry at so many beautiful faces stricken with guilt and genuine remorse?

“You’re forgiven, this time…” I said with a falsely threatening voice. “I will set up schedules for when you can pat my bump and touch minds with my son. The rest of the time, you leave me and the baby alone.”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the silly grins that blossomed on the Warriors’ faces, a few of them already arguing as to who would get to go first. In the end, I drew names.

* * *

Halfway through my sixth month, my belly had swelled overnight, as had my feet and my ankles. I didn’t feel particularly sexy, and yet I couldn’t help drooling at the sight of my mate’s perfection. Despite plenty of cuddling and snuggling, intimacy had taken a serious nose dive between us. Doom was afraid to hurt the baby—seeing how wild and unbridled he got in the heat of passion—and I felt clumsy and uncomfortable in my body. Plenty of couples had no problem getting it on, even into the last few weeks of their pregnancy. We were definitely not it.

While I’d been doing a good job—I think—at hiding my frustration, tonight I wasn’t even trying. Even though my husband still looked at my naked body like I was a goddess, loving to see my round belly sheltering our child—as did I—right now, I just felt bloated like a beached whale.

Doom’s golden scales gleamed as they caught the soft light of our bedroom. It should have been romantic but felt gloomy. The Xian Warriors had a thing about black and gold—the colors of the Gomenzi Dragons. While they managed to make it work, it was just too dark for me who loved light and bright colors. In my current state of mind, it made me feel even more depressed.

“What is it, my Red?” Doom asked sitting on the bed next to me to start brushing my hair.

He’d taken to doing that every night we got to spend together. He would then give me a back rub followed by a foot massage before spooning me for the night. I certainly loved all of the above. However, as Isabelle—my former colleague from Camp 485—had so crudely said once, right now, I wanted to ‘get dicked the fuck down’ by my sexy golden alien.

“Do you want the crude and shameless truth or a prim and proper answer?” I asked grumpily.

“Always the truth, my love,” he answered in tone that implied that was self-evident.

I turned around to look at him over my shoulder, forcing him to stop grooming my hair. “I’m so horny, I want to rip off your loin plate and ride your cock until it falls off. But if I tried to tackle you down to have my way with you, I’d probably end up flailing like a turtle on its back.”

Doom’s jaw dropped, and he stared at me with bulging eyes before regaining his composure. A sensuous smile stretched his lips and, as his double fangs began to descend, the intoxicating cinnamon scent of his pheromones wafted towards me, making me instantly wet and achy.

“Not helping,” I said in a pained moan.

Discarding the brush, Doom picked me up from the edge where I sat to lay me down in the center of the bed. Crawling up onto it, he spooned me, one hand settling on my belly, the other moving my hair out of the way to expose my neck.

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