Page 28 of Naga's Mate

They half-carry, half-drag me through darkened corridors, following meticulously planned routes. My awareness fractures into disconnected fragments—emergency lighting casting sinister shadows across familiar spaces. Distant sounds of naga security mobilizing. The spreading wetness between my thighs as my body violently rejects what it had reconfigured itself to protect.

Reed murmurs coordinates into communication equipment, security barriers temporarily neutralized by technologies I helped develop before capture. The resistance has orchestrated this extraction with military precision.

They simply omitted the complete cost.

"Almost clear," Reed encourages as we approach the exterior vegetation zone. "Transport waiting. Medical intervention within the hour."

Medical intervention. As if my condition represents standard procedure. As if months of biological adaptation, venom-enhanced neural pathways, and pregnancy-induced genetic expression can be simply reversed.

As if they can restore who I was before.

Fresh cramping drives me to my knees, pain so intense consciousness momentarily vanishes. When awareness returns seconds later, I'm being physically carried toward a camouflaged vehicle barely visible among dense foliage. Night air assaults my sensitized skin like caustic acid, each breath a struggle against lungs suddenly forgetting their function.

"Systemic collapse imminent," someone reports, voice distant through the roaring in my ears. "Neural reconfiguration destabilizing autonomic functions."

"Secure her in transport," Reed commands, his concern genuine yet underlined with something darker—determination bordering fanaticism. "Post-boundary crossing, we'll administer stabilizing agents."

Agents designed to complete the disruptor's work—purging everything naga from my system. Including the child whose loss I hadn't anticipated mourning until this moment of violent separation.

The wetness between my thighs becomes torrential, consciousness flickering like the facility's compromised systems. Through fragmented perception, I glimpse the extraction team's operational efficiency—previously unnoticed weapons, communications equipment exceeding standard resistance capabilities, medical supplies specifically engineered for omega extraction.

Not improvisation but calculated operation, planned with meticulous detail.

As they transfer me into the transport, my senses continue deteriorating. Colors fade to monochrome, sounds diminish to underwater murmurs, even pain recedes to distant throbbing as my nervous system struggles without the biochemistry it had restructured itself around.

"Cardiac rhythm deteriorating," someone announces with clinical detachment. "Initiating emergency protocol."

A needle's prick barely registers amid the sensory catastrophe. Whatever compound they administer spreads numbing cold through my circulation, temporarily counteracting physical symptoms while doing nothing for psychological devastation.

My child is dying inside me. The thought forms with perfect clarity despite my fracturing consciousness.

Correction: my child is being killed. By my decision. By swallowing that capsule when I suspected—when Iknew—the consequences.

"Approaching boundary," Reed reports from the driver's position. "Two minutes to territorial crossing."

Two minutes to theoretical liberation. Two minutes until official extraction from captivity, from venom dependency, from the intricate emotional web connecting me to my captor.

"Freedom" tastes like ash in my thoughts.

Through encroaching darkness, as consciousness slips further away, another sensation penetrates—a sound beyond the vehicle's engine, beyond tactical communications. Something primal and thunderous. A roar that reverberates through bone and blood.

Nezzar.

Too late for reconsideration, for changed minds, for different choices. The physical and psychological trauma of sudden pregnancy termination overwhelms my system completely, darkness rushing inward from all directions.

The final perception before consciousness vanishes entirely is Reed's voice, tense with controlled alarm: "He's found us. Drive!"

Then nothing but emptiness, as hollow as the space now forming inside me.

CHAPTER14

THE AFTERMATH

POV: NEZZAR

Blood.

My offspring's blood.

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