13. Doors Are Optional
DOORS ARE OPTIONAL
I heard him before I saw him.
A distant rumble, felt more than heard – the vibration of something massive moving through reinforced corridors. Then hooves. Fast. Not the careful, quiet footsteps he used at home when he didn't want to startle me. These were thundering, urgent, the sound of someone who wasn't trying to be subtle.
I sat up on the pallet, my heart suddenly pounding.
Voices outside. The guard, raised and alarmed. Another voice answering – low enough to feel in my chest even through the walls. A crash. Something heavy hitting the floor.
The door didn't open.
It came off its hinges.
Keth stood in the frame, breathing hard, his horns lowered and his eyes wild. His fur was matted with what might have been sweat or might have been something else. There was a gash across his shoulder, dark with blood, and he held one arm at an angle that suggested pain.
He didn't seem to notice any of it.
His eyes found me, and everything else fell away.
"Mara."
I was off the pallet before I knew I was moving.
The space between us closed in heartbeats – my bare feet slapping against the floor, my body covering the distance at a dead run. He dropped to his knees just as I reached him, and I threw myself against his chest, wrapping my arms around as much of him as I could reach.
Which wasn't much. He was enormous, and I was small, and my arms barely spanned the width of his ribs. But I held on with everything I had.
His arms closed around me.
Not gently. Not carefully. He pulled me against him and folded around me entirely – his chest curving over my head, his arms wrapped tight around my back, one hand cradling my skull. I could feel his heartbeat hammering against my cheek, could feel the shudder running through his whole body.
He was shaking.
"I couldn’t…” His voice broke. "They wouldn't let me – I tried to find evidence, tried to prove – but they wouldn't let me see you...”
"I know." My face was pressed into his fur, my voice muffled. "I know. It's okay."
"It's not okay." His arms tightened, almost painfully. "Three days. I could smell your distress through the walls. I could feel you – fragmenting, falling apart – and I couldn't reach you."
I pulled back just enough to look at his face. His eyes were wet. His jaw was clenched so hard I could see the muscles jumping.
"You're here now," I said.
"I broke through the facility perimeter." He said it flatly, as if reporting the weather. "There will be consequences. I don't care. I couldn't – I couldn't–"
"Keth." I reached up, cupping his face in my hands. My palms barely covered his cheekbones, but he went still at the touch, those dark eyes fixed on mine. "You're here. I'm here. That's what matters."
His forehead dropped to rest against mine. His breath was warm on my face, his scent flooding over me – earth and musk and that sharp protective note that meant he was still on edge, still ready to fight.
We stayed like that for a long time. Just breathing together. Just holding on.
"There's something I need to tell you."
We'd moved to the pallet, sitting side by side. His arm was wrapped around me, his injured shoulder apparently forgotten, his tail curled around my hip like an anchor. The door was still on the floor where he'd left it. No one had come to investigate.
They were probably all too afraid to try.
"The guard sent word," I continued. "About my scent changing. But I don't know if anyone told you what happened."
"They told me something shifted." His eyes searched my face. "That's why I came. I felt it – through the bond, I felt something change. And then the message arrived, and I couldn't wait anymore."
"Vorreth visited me."
His whole body went rigid. The protective note in his scent spiked, sharp and metallic.
"He described what my life would be like in his household." I kept my voice steady. "Shared resource. Commercial production. Multiple alphas tending to me on a schedule."
A growl built in his chest, low and dangerous.
"And I made a decision." I turned to face him fully, my hand finding his chest, feeling his heartbeat under my palm.
"I chose you. Not because the serum made me.
Not because I didn't have other options.
Because I looked at what he was offering and I knew – knew, Keth – that I wanted something else. "
His tail tightened around my hip. His eyes were very dark.
"I wanted your hands on me. Your scent around me. I wanted to go home – to the dwelling, to my nest, to the life we've been building." I swallowed. "I want to be yours. Really yours. Not because you took me. Because I'm choosing it."
He was silent. His hand came up to cover mine where it rested on his chest.
"The mating bond," he said quietly. "That's what you're asking for."
"Yes."
"It's permanent. Irreversible. Once the bite is given, it cannot be undone." His voice was careful, measured, but I could feel the tension running through him. "You would be bound to me for the rest of your life. There would be no going back. No changing your mind."
"I know."
"Mara–"
"I know." I held his gaze. "I've thought about it. In this room, alone, with my body falling apart because you weren't there – I had a lot of time to think. And I know what I want."
"What do you want?"
The question was simple. The answer was enormous.
"You," I said. "All of it. The dwelling and the nest and the milking and the heats.
The way you ask before you touch me. The way you changed your whole world to fit me before I ever asked you to.
" My voice cracked slightly. "The way you just broke through a government facility because you couldn't stand to be separated from me for one more minute. "
His breath caught.
"I want to be your mate. Your omega. The person you waited three rotations to find." I pressed my palm harder against his chest. "I want to choose this. Fully. With all of it."
He was quiet, his heartbeat thundering under my hand.
Then he said: "You're certain."
It wasn't really a question. He could smell my certainty. Could probably feel it through whatever bond already connected us.
"Yes," I said. "I'm certain."
His eyes closed. When they opened again, they were wet.
"Then it must be your choice," he said. "The words must be yours. Tell me what you want, and I will give it to you."
I looked at him – at this enormous, terrifying, impossibly gentle creature who had crossed the dark between stars to find me. Who had raged against officials and broken through walls and would destroy anyone who tried to take me from him.
Who was still waiting for me to choose.
"Mate me," I said. "Make it permanent. Make me yours."
His tail lashed once, and his eyes went dark, and he moved.
He laid me down on the pallet with devastating gentleness.
His hands stripped away the thin facility shift, baring my skin to the warm air. My breasts were full again, aching pleasantly, and when his mouth found them I arched into him with a gasp.
"Mine," he murmured against my skin. "Finally. Truly."
"Yours."
He took his time. Even now, even with the bond about to lock into place, he was careful with me – his fingers working me open, his mouth drawing out my milk in slow, reverent pulls, his whole body attuned to my responses.
I came once just from his hands, then again when he finally pressed inside me.
"The bite," he said, his voice rough. He was seated deep inside me, not moving yet, his body trembling with the effort of holding still. "It must come at the peak. When the bond is most open."
I nodded. My hands found his shoulders, fingers digging into the dense fur.
"Move," I said. "Please."
He moved.
The rhythm built between us – slower than the heat-driven urgency of before, more intentional. Each thrust was deep and thorough, pulling sounds from my throat that I couldn't have silenced if I tried. His mouth moved from my breasts to my throat, nuzzling the curve where my neck met my shoulder.
"Here," he murmured against my skin. "The mark will go here. Everyone will see it. Everyone will know."
"Yes." The word came out broken. "Keth – yes–"
The pleasure crested. I felt myself climbing towards something vast and inevitable, my body coiling tighter with each thrust. His knot was swelling, pressing against my entrance, and I knew – I knew – that when it locked into place, everything would change.
"Now," I gasped. "Keth – now–"
His teeth sank into my shoulder.
The pain was sharp and bright, there and gone in an instant. In its place: a flood of sensation that crashed through me like a wave, pulling me under, remaking me from the inside out. The knot breached me, locking us together, and I came so hard the edges of everything dissolved.
And through it all – threaded through the pleasure and the pain and the overwhelming rightness of it – I felt him.
Not just his body against mine. Not just his scent around me. His emotions, pouring through the bond like water through a broken dam. Three rotations of longing. Three rotations of certainty. A devotion so complete it had no edges, no limits, no end.
He was mine.
I was his.
The bond locked into place, permanent and irreversible, written into our bodies at the deepest level.
The silence afterwards was different.
We lay tangled together on the ruined pallet, his knot still holding us locked, my face pressed against his chest. I could feel his heartbeat under my cheek – slower now, finally settling. His hand moved in slow strokes down my back.
Outside the room, I could hear movement. Voices, hushed and urgent. The facility staff, probably, finally working up the courage to investigate.
They would smell it the moment they got close enough.
The mating scent was everywhere. Flooding the room, rolling out into the corridor, announcing to everyone in range that something fundamental had just changed. I was marked. Bonded. Permanently, legally, biologically his.
Vorreth's challenge had just collapsed.
"They'll be coming," I said quietly.
"Let them come." His arm tightened around me. "There's nothing they can do. The bond is complete. You're mine."
"I'm yours."
He pressed his mouth to the top of my head. I felt him smile against my hair.
The door – what was left of it – scraped against the floor as someone pushed it aside. I heard a sharp inhale, then a muffled curse. Footsteps retreating rapidly.
They knew.
Everyone knew, now.
I stayed where I was, wrapped in his arms, the warm weight of his scent over me, the fresh bite on my shoulder throbbing gently with each heartbeat.
I'd chosen this. Fully, freely, with all of myself.
And for the first time since I'd woken up in that padded containment space on his ship, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.