Page 75 of Dark Mate

“Harder.”

His grip tightens. His hips snap. The force pushes me an inch up the wall, the head of him grinding my front wall on the downstroke, and the hum climbs through his chest into mine until I can’t tell the vibration from the rest of it.

I come with his name in my mouth, muffled into his chest, my whole body clamping down—arms, legs, everything I have gripping the body holding me off the ground.

He comes with mine, my name broken into two syllables against the wall, the first punched out on the thrust that buries him deepest, the second a groan that goes through the root behind me. “Ell… ie.” His cock throbs, his cum flooding me with heat, and the knot swells, smaller than the rut, enough to seal us, to lock me onto him while his body gives up everything it’s got.

His arm shakes under me. The first time I’ve ever felt his strength falter—not from my weight. From the force of his own release.

He holds me there, knotted, pinned, the only things touching the ground his own two feet. His mouth comes down to the top of my head and stays. Ten feet of him folded careful around me in the warm dark of a room he made with his own hands.

I don’t have the words for it either. So I hold onto him, and let the room hold us, and for once neither of us tries to say the thing out loud.

That night, I wake to the dark gone wrong.

I feel it before I hear it—a vibration deep in the wood floor under us. Not the hum. Something else. A tremor that runs through the wood like a voice pitched too low for my ears, the kind of thing you feel in your teeth, in your breastbone.

Riven goes rigid behind me. Every muscle locking at once. His arm clamps over my ribs, not a squeeze, a reflex, the grip of a body that’s named a threat before the mind catches up. His wings flare to half-spread, filling the hollow, the rush of cold air off the membranes raising the hair on my bare shoulders.

My heart kicks once, hard. “What is it?”

He doesn’t answer. His head tilts, chin lifted, his whole body turned into a thing that listens. The gold eyes are open and not seeing me, not seeing anything in the hollow. Whatever he’s reading is coming up through the wood.

“The east.” His voice is clipped down to fragments. “The Ordained, in force. Not Eunuchs.”

My skin prickles.

He sits up, and the absence of his heat down my back is like a door opening onto winter. His claws are out. I hear them scrape the wood floor, extended without a thought. “Something else moving with them. A trail. The gait’s wrong. Steps too farapart. The weight in the wrong places.” A pause. “Like nothing that walks the way a body’s meant to walk.”

He crosses to the entrance. His silhouette against the night canopy—wings half-spread, horns cutting the dark, the whole frame coiled tighter than I’ve ever seen him. Not the predator’s easy readiness. Something under it.

“Riven.” I sit up, the furs falling off me, the cool air on my skin, and I don’t reach for them. “What are they?”

He turns. The softness of the male who carved a rattle is gone. What looks back at me from the entrance is the thing the Cage built its whole theology to frighten us with—ten feet of dark that kills whatever comes near its nest. And under it, in the set of his jaw and the way his wings won’t fold flat, is the thing I never thought I’d see on him.

“Whatever they sent,” he says, “it isn’t human.”

The words land in me like something swallowed wrong. The baby’s gone still. Outside, the canopy sings on like nothing’s changed, insects, birds, the far percussion of the roots, and he stands in the mouth of the nest he built and won’t come back to the furs, reading the dark, his tail locked flat against his thigh instead of its usual idle sway.

He’s afraid. Ten feet of apex predator, standing guard in his own doorway, and he is afraid.

The fear of a thing that has never once been afraid is the most frightening thing I’ve ever felt. Not watched—felt. It’s in my body: the tight throat, the cold hands, the press of my own palm to my belly like I can hold the small life there still by hand.

I’m not afraid of him. I’ve never been afraid of him.

I’m afraid for him.

I don’t sleep. Neither does he. We wait out the dark together at the mouth of the nest, and somewhere east of us, under the same black canopy, the made things start to come.

40

ELLIE

Dawn, before the light’s reached the forest floor. I smell them before I hear them.

Something wrong. Sharp, antiseptic, the smell of a room with clean walls and no windows—cutting through the green-rot morning of the canopy like a blade through silk. My whole body seizes before my head names why. The smell isn’t alive. The smell wasmade.

My stomach knots. The baby kicks, hard, sudden, a fist against the inside of me, like even the thing growing in me recoils from it.