Page 5 of The Monster's Daughter
“I have no harem!” he snaps, scandalized as promised, and I can’t help it—I laugh, full and real. It bursts out of me like air after drowning.
His silver-flecked eyes narrow, and he looks… embarrassed. Flustered, even. Which just makes me laugh harder. “Oh, fuck, you’re serious. That’s priceless. Alright, fine, no harem. You gonna tell me what the hell youaredoing, then?”
He stiffens again, quieter this time. “The suburbs. Near Lurax. My parents are there.”
The laughter dies in my throat. My stomach sinks, heavy. I saw those suburbs from the dropship, nothing but fire and rubble. He doesn’t know.
I wipe my mouth with my shoulder, sighing through my nose. “Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but… Lurax is toast. Suburbs are ash. If your folks were there when it hit, they’re gone.”
His head jerks toward me so fast the shadows leap. His eyes flash, silver bright in the dim. “Don’t—” His voice is low, trembling with fury. “Don’t say that.”
“Look, I’m sorry, but it’s the truth,” I say, maybe sharper than I should. “You’re chasing ghosts. That place is fucking gone.”
And then he explodes.
One clawed hand lashes out, seizing my throat, hauling me into the air like I weigh nothing. My toes scrape the dusty floor, ropes cutting deeper into my wrists as I kick. His grip is iron, hot and rough, and his breath snarls across my face.
“Take it back,” he growls. His voice shakes—not weak, but breaking.
I meet his gaze. Silver streaks lace through his black eyes, and what I see there isn’t just rage. It’s something rawer. Older. Broken. And against every instinct, against the panic clawing up my throat, I feel it—something pulses between us. Heat. Wrong and right all at once.
“What the fuck are you doing to me?” I gasp, legs thrashing. “Telepathic—attack? Is that it?”
His eyes widen, like my words startled him. For a beat, we just stare, locked in something I don’t have a name for. Then his grip falters, and he drops me.
I crumple to the floor, hacking and clutching my bruised throat. My eyes water, my lungs burn. By the time I blink through it, he’s gone—vanished into the dark edges of the basement, scales rasping against ruined concrete.
And then I hear it.
Sobs. Low, muffled, ragged. The sound of someone cracking open in a place where no one’s supposed to hear.
I press my forehead to the dusty floor, bound wrists useless, chest heaving.
I should feel triumph. Fear. Anything but this. But instead, to my horror, I hurt for him. I ache for him.
And I hate myself for it.
CHAPTER 4
KAGE
The mannequins judge me.
I stagger through broken aisles littered with dust-clotted boxes and clothing that smells like mildew and rot. Their glass eyes glint through the shadows, cracked faces half-melted by fire. Some lean crookedly, arms frozen in brittle gestures, others headless, torsos gouged open. They look like corpses straining to remember how to be alive. Each step I take crunches over old displays and shattered plaster, the hollow groan of the building above pressing down like a mountain.
My claws shake. My chest aches. My throat still burns from the roar I poured out in the alley above.
The jalshagar.
It slammed into me the instant my gaze locked with hers. That red-haired medic. That infuriating, sharp-tongued human. It was like being flayed open and stitched to something that wasn’t mine. My soul tearing in half, only to find the missing piece branded with her heartbeat.
I squeeze my temples, claws scraping rough against scales. “No,” I rasp, voice cracking like dry stone. “No, not her.”
But the truth is already gnawing at my bones. She is mine. By the Design, she is bound to me.
And she is human.
The Precursor’s joke cuts deep. To bind me to an enemy, to tether me to a woman wearing the insignia of the machine that stole my city, my friends, Jamie… my parents. I taste blood in my mouth where I’ve bitten down on my tongue too hard.
