Episode Eighteen Better Insight

D ays Later…

Alliana

Will I ever tire of waking like this? In a warm pile of furred bodies. Feeling adored, prized. I wish everyone could have this. I imagine the pain my two sisters must be enduring Up Above. Sold to the highest bidder like cattle, without the ability to decide what to wear, unable to say no to anything in their lives.

My life Down Below is like a fairytale compared to that. A fairytale with mates who teach and encourage and cherish me.

I snuggle backward and realize I'm in Mirron's arms. It's been days, and I'm only just getting used to this. No matter what configurations we explore in our nighttime bliss, when we settle down to sleep, the brothers move to bookend the minotaur and me, forcing us to sleep next to each other. It's their not-so-subtle encouragement for him to mate with me.

Every morning I wake to his ass facing me, his ropey tail the only part of his beefy body touching me. It gives me the clear message of where his affections lie—with his beloved mate, his Dek.

Today, for the first time, I wake to feel his arm around me. I stay very still as I assess how this makes me feel.

He terrified me when I first arrived. It was partially because he was so stern, so powerful when the wolven and monks gathered outside our cave, clamoring for me. Then, when Luka and I shared our bodies for the first time in the pool, he never removed his angry gaze from me as he took Deklan from behind.

He was putting me on notice, threatening me, letting me know I wasn't welcome here.

Yesterday, Deklan took me to the fields to the east where we scavenged for vegetables. He called the carrots "volunteers," and said he imagined people farmed these hundreds of years ago, before the cataclysm. That was before some of us went Up Above and some stayed Down Below. Some carrots still grow. You just have to know where to look.

On our way there, me feeling like the best-dressed female in all of Down Below in my red fox coat with the black wolf fur hood, he told me about Mirron.

It wasn't as if he was tattling on his beloved mate, just letting little facts drop. On our way back to our cave, it struck me he was very strategic in telling me these things. It was just another part of his plot to soften my feelings toward the minotaur.

Dek told me that one day, when I loved Mirron—he said it confidently, like it was an absolute conclusion I would love the male one day in the future—I'd run my fingers over the front of his right shoulder and feel a large, round scar there.

"You can't see it, even if you know where to look. His shaggy fur covers it. But it's there all the same. It's where he was gored by his brother," Dek said.

I may not feel affection for Mirron, but I feel a jolt of sadness to think he was attacked by his own brother.

He went on to tell me how minotaurs are territorial creatures, how they fight for supremacy in their herds, and how most of them have potent, forceful personalities, just like Mirron.

He'd always been an outcast because of his beautiful eyes—one brown, one blue. Although he was the older brother, his father favored the younger one. The undamaged one.

After their father died, Mirron's brother attacked him when he had his back turned. When he turned to respond to his brother's punch, the male gored him on the shoulder, knocked him down, and claimed he won the challenge for leader of the herd. He took over, banishing Mirron forever. The rest of the herd were only too willing to believe the brother, since they didn't want a defective leader.

"When I met him, he was an angry male."

"How did you meet?" I thought this would be an interesting story.

His winced and his eyes got a faraway look. "I'd been hunting. It was a lean year and I'd traveled far from our cave in search of game. Some… thing attacked me. I didn't see it coming. It was a species I'd never seen before or since. A fanged reptilian that walked on two feet. Its claws were long and sharp."

I'd never asked about the reddish scars visible on his face and chest, though my fingers have traced them when we cuddle after sharing our bodies in the furs.

"It was a stroke of luck that Mirron happened along. I passed out shortly after the big minotaur's shadow fell over me and my attacker. I've wondered a thousand times why he intervened. That reptilian was big, muscular, and both its fangs and claws were deadlier than anything Mirron possessed."

I pictured the fight as Deklan described it and shivered at the brutality of the scene.

"For whatever reason, he waded into danger, killed the beast, tended my wounds, and when I woke, he carried me back to our cave. He said he stayed because he liked my ass. It took the better part of a year for him to show more than the smallest bit of affection."

He smiled then, even though he was describing Mirron's hard exterior.

"I loved him from the start." He shrugged. "I knew he'd come around."

He pegged me with a sharp stare and said, "Just as he'll come around with you, little flower."

I wasn't sure if I even wanted him to like me in that way.

"When that male loves, it's deep as the ocean and endless as the sky. Just you wait."

That was the end of the conversation, but it helped me see the minotaur in a new light. Deklan is the male's lover, his mate, his safe haven.

Dek hadn't said it out loud, but the huge minotaur, so self-assured, so strong, so powerful, had found me a threat.

"He doesn't need to fear me," I'd whispered after Dek was too far away to hear me. "I only want to add love, not subtract it."