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I chased her through the hallways before eventually skidding to a halt when I lost sight of her. A moment later, movement from above clued me in to where she’d disappeared to and I found her glowing blue like a beautiful beacon beckoning me closer as she levitated on the ceiling.

‘Come down, baby,’ I called, my voice needy and breathless even to my own ears.

‘Why don’t you come up here?’ she asked instead.

I frowned then decided she was right. If she wouldn’t come down I would just have to meet her up there. I closed my eyes and focused, but thethrobbing of my cock and the lubrication seeping from my tentacles that tingles along my shaft and dripped down my thighs made it impossible.

A sound of agonised defeat tore from my throat as I collapsed to my knees.

‘Please.’

‘Just a little further, Bromm. Just a little bit further and then you can put a baby in me, okay?’ she placated, her offer appeasing me slightly, but not enough. My abdomen clenched, my orgasm approaching and I feared it would happen with or without me inside of her.

‘No. Now. It has to benow.’

‘Okay, baby,’ she said, but she was moving away again. Panicked, I jumped back up to my feet, but I was too slow yet again. She shot down the hallway at a speed that blurred her form and I struggled to track her. I took chase again, my lower tentacles working overtime to keep my overly sensitive cock from bouncing around and slapping against my me.

The world around me was a blur, the only clarity when I was focused on Artemis. I didn’t see where she was taking me until it was too late, and I was suddenly restrained by multiple hands, my arms yanked behind me by someone with a strength that rivalled my own, and cold metal snapped around my wrists.

I snarled and writhed in their grip but the hands only tightened, sharp nails digging into my flesh and splitting open my skin. My lower tentacles joined in the fight, smacking away hands and squeezing arms as I struggled to make my way back to my love.

‘Arty! Please! I need to.It hurts. I have to. Don’t do this!’

I was strapped down onto a solid surface before a sharp prick stabbed my neck, and then my eyes unfocused even more as I fell unconscious, my cock still straining as it reached for the only woman who could relieve it.

???

My entire body ached. I groaned as I woke, my vision blurry, ears ringing and brain foggy as I tried to piece together what was going on. I moved to rub the grit out of my eyes only to find my arms pinned into place.

‘Bromm...?’ Henrik’s voice came from beside me, though he sounded more uncertain that I had ever heard him before.

‘Henrik? What’s going on? What happened?’

‘You don’t remember?’

I shook my head no.

‘You tried to…’ he began, but then trailed off as if he didn’t want to tell me.

‘What happened, Henrik?’ I asked again, hard and demanding.

‘You attempted to assault Artemis,’ another voice I recognised drifted to me from somewhere else in the room. I couldn’t see where since I couldn’t even twist my head around to see.

My stomach dropped as I felt the blood rush from my head with dizzying speed. ‘What?’

‘The nanites,’ Henrik began slowly. ‘We believe we have discovered the reason for the transference. It seems Artemis’s nanites latched onto her desire to have children alongside her desire for you. You were raving about trying to impregnate her.’

‘Took a whole damn army to stop you, too,’ the other voice piped in, and it finally hit me who it belonged to.

‘Did I hurt her?’ I asked the Tornu that had claimed the position of her personal bodyguard whether she liked it or not. In this moment I was glad for it, though I’d never imagined I would become a threat to the woman we both loved.

‘No. She held you off, but you wouldn’t stop,’ he told me.

‘You weren’t yourself, Bromm,’ Henrik attempted to assure me, but there was nothing that could reassure me after I’d attempted to essentially rape the love of my life. How would I ever look her in the eye again? How could I ever trust myself around her after this?

I felt a sudden kinship towards the Tornu that had once held a piece of Artemis’s heart, and I suspected still did. If he felt like this after whatever had happened between them in the past, I suddenly understood him a whole lot better.

I heard more than saw the door open, light footsteps entering the room. My vision still wasn’t much better than before and I was essentially blind, though I was glad that the ringing had finally died down and my head was clearing of fuzz.