Page 10 of Feral Keep

His jaw tightens. His grip on the joint doesn’t change. But something crosses his face—a tightening behind the eyes, the look of a thing that has already decided who did this.

Nobody has ever looked like that on my account. Not Gretchen, who could only ever offer her hands after the fact. Not Lisa, who spat her anger at the ground because spitting it anywhere else got you written up. This is different, a whole male built like a wall going rigid with something on my behalf, and it lands strange in my chest, too big for the space I have to put it in.

I stare at the root-beam ceiling of his warren. A nine-foot feral predator is testing my shoulder joint while his cock strains hard against my thigh.

The rut is in his body. The tension of his muscles. The heat pouring off his skin. The way his cock jerks against me every time his nose catches my scent, thick, the hot underside dragging across my thigh. But his hands are on my shoulder, on my ribs, on the damage.

He moves down my body. My hips meet his palms next, the bones sharp under them. My thighs, thin, the muscle wasted, skin stretched over what’s left.

He’s learning me. Finding every place my body has failed, the way the camp overseers checked the women every morning—except Shayla wrote the damage down and adjusted workloads. He’s keeping track of it somewhere inside his feral brain. Whatever he’s planning, it’s not about how much labor I can still produce.

His touch moves lower next, not rough, not sudden, his fingers trailing down from my hip, across the hollow below my navel, to the place I’ve been bracing for since he first touched me. His fingers part me with the focused patience of a thing checking the last item on a list.

I’m wet. The venom, the rut, whatever his scent does to a mate’s body—I’m wet despite the starvation, despite the fact that my body has no business producing anything when it can barely keep my heart beating.

He makes a sound. Low. Deep. Not a word. Satisfaction—the check returned a result his feral brain needed: she’s ready enough.

His cock moves. Not his hips—his cock. It shifts against my thigh, pressing forward, the thick underside dragging across my skin with a heat that borders on burning. It moves like a living thing, independent of the body it’s attached to, curving toward the wet, seeking the way a tongue seeks water. The blunt, swollen tip finds the place his fingers just found.

Presses.

I go still. Every muscle. The freeze. The camp-trained shutdown that served me through every moment a body came too close—go rigid, go silent, go somewhere else.

His tail tightens on my waist. Not hard. A squeeze. His eyes find mine, gold gone to black.

“Stay.”

The word cracks at the edges, rough, nothing like the flat authority of eat and more—like it scraped the inside of his throat on the way out.

Stay.

His palm rises from between my legs and settles on my sternum. The full weight of his crimson palm between my breasts. Over my heartbeat.

Stay.

What is he asking? Stay here? Stay conscious? Stay alive? Maybe all of it.

His cock presses. My body opens.

Every warning I was ever given crowds in at once, Shayla’s voice, the whispers between bunks, this is where it kills you. My hands fist in the furs. I brace. Not for pleasure, not for pain even, just for the ending the camps promised me.

The stretch is immense.

The size of him is a fact I knew from looking. Knew it the way you know a wall is tall by standing at the base. But knowing is one country. Feeling is another.

He enters me.

The stretch goes past anything I have a reference for. Past my own fingers in the dark barracks, past Lisa’s hand in the storage shed. My hips widen. My breath locks. The girth catches at the rim of me—a drag of impossible heat, pulling open tissue that has never been opened this wide.

This is not what it feels like. This is something else. My mind keeps reaching for the ending I braced for and finding this instead, huge and strange and not the death anyone promised me.

The venom catches the pain before it arrives. I brace for it—jaw clenched, hands fisting the furs, the old script running: it will hurt, it always hurts, wait for the hurt.

The hurt doesn’t come.

The sheer size of him drags against my walls with a friction that lights up nerves I didn’t know I had—hot, stretching, the girth so wide that every inch of me is pressed open around him. But the venom has translated the stretch into something my body has no name for. Not pleasure. I’m too emptied out for that, and pain doesn’t fit either.

Something between. Something that has no name in a camp-built vocabulary.