“Okay, fine.” Sue-Eye glared at him from the floor, knuckling blood from the side of her mouth. “I’ll spit it out. You shouldn’t have fucked her at Charlie’s. She’s got her period, for Christ’s sake. She shouldn’t have been sucking you off, let alone half the dogs you made her blow. Couldn’t you see how scared she was? Didn’t she tell you how dangerous it is?”

Kane’s hand had been slowly drawing into a fist, but he restrained himself at the mention of danger. “Explain that,” he said quietly.

“A period happens every time a woman goes a whole month without getting pregnant. It’s supposed to make her want to get pregnant for the next month. It makes her really horny.”

“Horny,” Kane echoed.

“It makes her want to fuck,” Sue-Eye amended. She pushed herself into a sitting position, watching his hand guardedly. “But her body isn’t ready yet. When you put your spunk in her, her body tried to make a baby from it, but she’s still having her period! It’s dangerous. She could die if her body tries hard enough.”

“I never took her pussy,” Kane argued.

“That doesn’t matter! A body knows when jizz is in it. That’s part of the goddamn problem! And now look at her. She can hardly stand up straight.”

Kane turned back to his computer, his guts churning. Deep down, he’d always known it was something like this. He hadn’t known exactly what, but this made sense. This explained everything.

It did not occur to him to wonder how in the hell humans as a race survived such a warped biological imperative. Every species he knew of had evolved some genetic quality it had long outgrown. Jotan still had two rows of teeth, even though their wholly carnivorous days were many millennia behind them. Kevrian still had tails and vestigial flaps under their arms where once there had been gliding wings. The So-Quaal had outgrown the need for their voices, not to mention their own genitals. Raven’s period was, to Kane’s ears, perfectly sensible. At some point, many tens of thousands of years ago, perhaps humans had been solitary creatures. It might have taken five days of Heat-like frustration and building need for a female to find a mate.

“The pain she has now,” he said slowly. “Is it because she took…what’s the word I want, ichuta’a?”

“Cum,” she said. “Jizz, spunk, whatever you want to call it, there’s lots of names. And not all of it, no. There’s always some pain. Not as bad as you have it, but it’s pretty much the same thing. Actually, what’s hurting her most now is that she wants to fuck so badly and she can’t. I guess if she was going to die from what happened at Charlie’s, she’d have done it by now, but if you shot another load into her tonight, I can’t imagine her living through it.”

Kane bared his teeth but didn’t bother to turn around. This was what Raven had thought he wouldn’t understand? No. This was what she’d thought he’d kill her for if she told him all the truth. And he was pissed at her for it, that was a fact, but not enough to kill her. Heat gave him a unique perspective into how she must feel. Here she was, half in hell because of all the seed he’d put in her, and the other half still in hell because she wanted so furiously to mate. He could forgive her for not dealing with it very well.

Raven emerged from the bathroom with her hair wet and only a towel on, and let a low billow of steam fall into the main room. It had been a hot shower, although how she could have borne it in this heat was beyond his ability to reason, but she looked better for it. She returned to her bed and Kane drew a breath as she passed him, but the smell of blood masked whatever musk she made.

If he could be trusted to draw conclusions from Sue-Eye’s little lecture, it was possible that periods got worse as the female aged if she did not produce offspring. This was no doubt why Kane had never seen such obvious discomfort in the slaves he’d trafficked in before. Their periods hadn’t even been bad enough for him to notice, much less serious enough to kill them outright, but then, female slaves were often bred continuously or neutered for the convenience of their owners.

When Kane took Raven into space, he supposed he should have her neutered as well. There would be male slaves aplenty on the ship he commanded, and male slaves could be aggressive in all sorts of surprising ways. Pregnancy was a hard thing to manage in deep space.

Then again, if it made her periods easier, he might think about breeding her once in a while. The So-Quaal for sure would know all about this period thing and Kane had one or two of those in his pocket. He’d find out how often she’d need to be bred and see it done. Babies were a piss-poor commodity, but the handy thing was, they always grew up into more humans.

It was too bad, really, that Jotan and humans couldn’t produce young together. The thought of putting sons in his Raven’s belly was an agreeable one to him. He’d lock down the ship for a year for that. The So-Quaal were making advances in hybridizing all the time. Perhaps one day, there could be such a son (or, gods, imagine the daughter!), a perfect blend of both their ferocious natures, to be commander after him.

Kane moved his chair around so that he could see Raven’s bed, and she raised her head and looked at him. There was no sign that he could see of an urgent need to mate, but then, she had to endure it once a month, come hot weather or cool. Maybe she was just better at living with it than he was.

He could remember what it was like, staggering through the woods of Earth before finding her, suffering five days of blistering Heat.

“Sue-Eye,” Kane said suddenly, using the human’s true name for the first time. When she stood up, he thrust his chin at the bed. He saw Raven’s eyes widen with surprise and he turned back to his computer. She wanted to mate, he’d let her mate. He’d been watching females sex with each other on the tee-vee nearly every night. It would be safe enough for her with another female.

Kane loaded up two more bottles of unprocessed dopamine into his analyzer and listened to the bed creak as Sue-Eye crawled onto it. There was a rustle of clothing, and then the rasp of skin on skin. He tapped keys, watched the monitor as his equipment worked, and tried to ignore them. He could hear the soft sucking sounds of human kissing, and then Raven’s furtive, whispered resistance.

It gave him an excuse to turn around, at least. He fixed Raven with a cold eye and she quieted at once, covering her face with her hands and leaving her body open to the ichuta’a who lay curled with her. She looked miserable. He supposed that was only natural. He’d caught her out. He knew what her body wanted, and he was making her take it. In a way, it was no different from all the times he’d made her cum against her will, except that this was not purely for his own selfish pursuits.

Not purely.

Sue-Eye’s mouth was moving against Raven’s breasts, first one and then the other, sucking and biting and lashing with her tongue at the hardened nipples. Sue-Eye’s hand was between Raven’s thighs, not deep, not inside her, but stroking and rubbing at the little nub the painted female had called a ‘clit’. Raven was flushed, her face pinched as with pain, but her hips moved now and then, pushing against her will at the hand that worked her.

The computer chimed behind him, politely requesting his attention. Kane ignored it.

Sue-Eye moved her mouth up to cover Raven’s. Kane could see Sue-Eye’s tongue driving down, forcing Raven’s lips apart. He could hear Raven’s self-gagged distress. Sue-Eye cupped Raven’s breasts, rolling and kneading them and then rubbing her own hard against them. Raven keened from behind tightly-clenched jaws.

The computer chimed again. Kane shut it off.

Sue-Eye swung her leg over Raven’s hips, mounting like a male, and leaned back, grinding her pussy into Raven’s. Raven panted three times, her chest heaving hugely, and then locked her teeth against further sound. Her hands were fisted at her side. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Every muscle stood out in stark relief.