“She whiled away most of her days in the backyard, and she did not attempt to escape. However, it did worry me that she spent so much time walking back and forth, like a tiger caged. I worried for her mental health, knowing how easy is was for the minds of her much weaker species to break.
“However, it was not her mental health I should have been worried about. I discovered why she made this action eighty-four days into her pregnancy when I came downstairs to find her making breakfast instead of the current Colby. She told me she had more energy than usual and offered to make me food as well.
“Prior to that moment, I had never known the sunshine of her good graces, and I found myself helplessly drawn to the honor of having her make me a meal. We shared the food she cooked, and afterwards, she made a pretty speech about how she’d thought about our situation. Her fathers would never accept me, and the way we had met had been unfortunate, but we were having a baby together. She said that we should try to, as she put it, ‘make this work.’
“I agreed with her and she gazed at me in such a way that I suddenly understood the meaning of the cliché of looking deep into another’s eyes. It felt as if I were being seen, truly seen for the first time. Oh, how my flame burned. With fear, with reverence, and with a strange shame I had never known before for having treated her so irreverently.
“Then she did the most extraordinary thing. She placed herself upon my lap and pressed her mouth into mine. As you hopefully know by now, this was another mating habit of the anthros I didn’t quite understand before our first kiss. But the feel of her lips against mine, the scent of her—even the slight weight of her arms around my shoulders. There was no question of whether I would return her primitive act of affection. My male works instantly descended, and I consumed her kiss as hungrily as I would receive food after a long journey.
“For those moments, all thoughts of revenge fell away. I was no longer a drakkon mated to an inferior wolf mutation. And I understood then what I hadn’t before. She was the mother of my child. Deserving of all my reverence. Someone I wished to be with for the entirety of my life. But then she slashed my throat.”
I gasp out loud at the turn in the story. Covering my mouth with both hands. However, Damianos presses on, before I can fully process that I stabbed Other Damianos in the neck, not once but twice.
“As it turned out she had found a bit of flint in the front yard. That was why she walked back and forth so frantically. She had guessed correctly that the only way to escape me was by killing me, and had bided her time, sharpening the thin rock to a knife’s sharpness. Her betrayal was…incredibly painful.
“I fell to the floor and the last sight I had before my shell shut my mind down for repairs was of her running out the door. I woke up two hours later with a healed throat. Fortunately, she did not realize that our most vital arteries are in our belly, not our throat. Unfortunately, by the time I found her it was too late.
“Soon after I departed from the cabin, I came upon a most gruesome sight, even for one as unflinching as me. I discovered her lying in a strange position on her back with her legs splayed and the lower torso of a male wolf sticking out of her core. Later I figured out with the Betrayer King’s help that this is something newborn wolf mutations are designed to do when they’re in too much distress, shift to their much more durable wolf, so as to survive the birth. That instinct often killed she-wolf mothers before the current age of technology-assisted births.
“Perhaps if our mate had known to squat instead of positioning herself on her back, she might have survived the birth of our son. But she did not, and thus died alone in a wooded glen, attempting to escape me. The rage I felt upon finding her body cannot be described.
“Ola’s death left me free to go through with our original plan to unleash my ultimate revenge before using the fating gates to find a drakki with whom I could procreate. Indeed, I spent the next few months massacring wolves. Her fathers, her mother, the entire Nightwolf clan. Slaughtered. Then I swam to the distant island upon which the Betrayer King thought he would be safe. I lay in wait until he came downstairs with his mate and ambushed him. Then I put him back in chains and proceeded to slaughter his family. First the mate who had arrived downstairs with him, then the son who had come charging at the sound of all the commotion.