He was the leader, no matter how many times he sat back and said nothing or watched his brothers figure it on their own. There was no doubt in her mind that he ruled and when he said something, they jumped. He was the oldest and he held their family together.
Now he wanted her to become part of that family. A family he protected, a family he expected to respect both his word and his loyalty to them. It was a family that was willing to do as he commanded. Maybe marrying a smith or a jones was making sense to her.
He never moved. He simply looked at her, waiting. Her mind swirled with all kinds of scenarios, good and bad, while a few of them were just ridiculous. The one with Rena beating her up because he bit her to make her part of the family made her laugh. Probably because Rena had whispered in her ear before they entered the jeeps ‘I can’t wait until you’re here with me.’ Then she had tapped her head and followed Aran.
She was stalling now, costing them time, but no one was calling her out on it. They all waited silently. This mattered and they all knew it.
She took the time to look at Aran. He sat there with his fangs lowered. There was no drool. Yet there was no denying the animal side of him. She could see it in his eyes. Not the same animal that she saw in Niko, but one that was definitely related.
Family, her family. She would have given anything when she was growing up to feel like she was a part of a family, to feel like more than a weight placed around her mother’s neck. She had wanted to be wanted and needed and loved. Being loved is important to a child as important. As it was to an adult.
She met his eyes, this time having made up her mind. She bared her throat to him. She saw his smile, which was full of acceptance. He reached over and moved her shirt a little, exposing her shoulder.
He stopped to look in her eyes one more time to make sure he had her acceptance and then moved. One minute he was staring into her eyes, the next his teeth were locked on her shoulder.
Before she could cry out in pain, before she could reconsider her acceptance of this different culture, he was done and leaving the jeep. Her hands flew to her shoulder. It was knitting itself back together, even as she touched it.
The jeep came to life. She could feel the rumble of the powerful motor under her, but no sound was made. Males and their toys! If they ever decided to branch out with some of their technology, they could take the earth by storm.
She waited to hear something. Nothing. No familiar voices in her head. No brothers bickering the way brothers do. She closed her eyes for a moment to mourn the fact that it had not worked with her.
“Kitten?”
She opened her eyes to what she was sure was a lab, an alien lab, but a lab just the same.
“What is this place?”
“This is where I was born. This is where all the created I call brothers were born. There are many labs like this all over the planet, but this is where we were planned, conceived and born.”
The room they stood in was huge. It reminded her more of a football field in length as opposed to a room. She saw things that mirrored test tubes and beakers, things one expected to see in a lab. She saw things that may have been their equivalent of high powered lab equipment, but it was what was set up in the middle of the long room that gave her pause.
She walked over to them, taking the time to walk around them. Her mind screamed that this could only be one thing on any planet, but she rejected the thought. It was better to stay sane than to believe that someone had done this to her family.
“What is this?”
“We call them incubators. We took that word from your planet. There is no translation for what we call it in your language. You would also call it a womb, if it were inside your body. That is where the created grew until we were formed and could live on our own without the help of a mother’s body.”
“That’s not a mother.”
He looked at the tubes that ran into the mechanical womb, it was as close as they came to being cradled by a mother. He showed her how the sac that surrounded them expanded as they did. He explained the fluid inside that kept them alive.
“This may not be a mother, but it was the closest we ever got to a mother we could touch. If not for our mother’s memories and thoughts that were passed to us, we would have had nothing but this.”
She really tried not to cry for him, but it was such a devastating way to be born, to live knowing that none of the women on your planet had been willing to bear you. They could have. She was sure of that. They had refused. She could almost hear the disdain and understand the social pressure they would have faced. No self-respecting female would have allowed her womb to be used for the creation of something they were told would be no more than an animal used for the purpose of fighting.