Page 12 of Feral Keep

He is filling me.

I’m not going to come. The certainty is the same as the cracked ribs—physical, factual, beyond argument. My body doesn’t have the resources. The nerves fire. The stretch lights up pathways. But the signal builds to a place and then dissipates—a fire trying to catch in wet wood.

The wave starts. Stalls. Starts again.

He feels it. His rhythm changes: not slower, not softer, but different. He shifts his angle. His hands lift my hips, tilting my pelvis, and the change in position seats him differently inside me.

The tip of his cock finds a new spot. Deeper. To the left of where it was pressing. The tip curls against it—a slow, deliberate grind that pushes against tissue so deep it makes my stomach clench. The thickest part of him grinds against the nerves at my opening.

A shock up my spine.

I make a sound. Sharp. Bitten off at the edges because the camp taught me that sounds are dangerous, an invitation for something worse to happen. But the sound escapes before I can catch it.

Something sharpens behind his gold-black eyes.

He grinds in again. The same angle. The same thickness hitting the same cluster of nerves. I jerk under him—my hips rising, my back lifting off the furs. The sound comes again. Louder. I clamp my jaw and the sound becomes a hum trapped behind my teeth, vibrating through my skull.

“Good.”

One word. Said while he’s inside me. While his cock is grinding against the spot that’s turning my camp-filter to static.

The word lands in my body like a stone in still water. The ripple of it, the devastating strangeness of being told good while a monster fucks me in his nest. No one has said good to me since... since...

My mother. Stirring something over the settlement fire, watching me carry a water jug back from the stream without spilling. Good girl. The memory surfaces and sinks in the same breath. After that—Gretchen, maybe. When I finally managed the braids on my own. Good. You’ve got it.

Two women. Two words. Both from a different life.

Hearing it now, from something with claws and a knot swelling inside me, splits me down some seam I didn’t know I had. It shouldn’t count. It means something anyway. I hate that it does. I want to hear it again anyway.

The knot begins to swell.

The pressure at my opening changes. The base of his cock expanding, thickening against the place where my body is stretched widest. The swell is gradual, not sudden. It grows in pulses, each one pushing my walls further apart. I hear myself breathing, short, sharp, the sound of a body trying to accommodate what it was never built to hold.

“It’s too—” The words choke off. Too what? Too big. Too much. Too everything. The sentence doesn’t finish because my jaw locks around the stretch.

The venom absorbs the worst of the stretch. But the sheer, obscene fullness of the knot pressing outward while his cock presses inward exceeds anything the venom can translate into neutral.

It’s not pain. It’s not pleasure. It’s a third thing. A thing that takes up all the space in my body where thoughts used to be.

The knot locks.

His face has gone somewhere I haven’t seen yet—jaw slack around a sound that isn’t a word, silver hair stuck dark and damp to his temples, the gold in his eyes rolled back to black.

A seal. His cock hilted inside me, the knot expanded to its full size at my opening, plugging me shut. He is inside me the way the ground is under me: total, immovable, a fact.

The vibration starts.

Low. Through the knot. A hum that begins at the base of his cock and transmits through the locked seal into my walls. The vibration is a physical thing—not sound but pressure, a buzzing deep in my pelvis that spreads outward in slow waves, through my spine, my abdomen, blurring the edges between where he ends and I begin. My ribs pick it up, the cracked ones resonating, a deep ache the venom immediately softens. My walls flutter around the knot. Not my doing. The vibration pulling the response out of my tissue the way you pull a note from a string.

His tail unwraps from my waist, slides to my hip, then down over my thigh. The bone-white tip travels with purpose. Up. To the place where his knot is sealed against me, where the skin is stretched tight, the nerves firing at a frequency I can’t process.

The tip presses against my clit.

A sound rips out of me, full and raw, torn from somewhere deep in my chest. My hand flies to my mouth, camp-reflex, covering the noise, because noise is dangerous, noise gets you noticed⁠—

His hand catches my wrist. Moves it away from my mouth. Pins it to the furs beside my head. His eyes, gold-black, find mine.

“Good.”