Page 13 of Feral Keep

The tip is warm. Warmer than the rest of his tail—the nerve-dense white tissue carrying its own heat. It presses against my clit. The contact is a direct line between the vibrating knot inside me and the swollen ache outside. The signal that’s been building and stalling suddenly completes.

My walls clench around the knot.

A contraction so hard my abs lock. My thighs tighten around his hips. My hands grip the furs with a strength I didn’t think I had left.

The clench pulls him deeper, his cock dragging against walls that have gone tight as a fist. The wet sound of it. My body gripping him, milking him, doing something primal that has nothing to do with me.

He grinds against the knot. Not thrusting; he can’t, the lock won’t allow it. But the grinding shifts the cock inside me. The tip presses forward. The knot vibrates harder, a deep, buzzing pulse that makes my teeth ache. The tail tip on my clit presses in a slow circle.

Every nerve I own lights up at once.

I don’t come.

My body tries. The wave builds. Higher this time than the stalls before. It builds until my vision goes white at the edges. Until my teeth are clenched so hard my jaw aches. Until every muscle in my body is locked—rigid, straining, reaching for the thing the vibrating knot and the circling tail tip are dragging me toward.

The tail tip circles. The knot vibrates. The wave climbs.

It doesn’t crest.

It gets to the top and hangs there. My whole body straining around the edge of it, caught between release and nothing, unable to tip either way. My nerves fire. The signal doesn’t complete. I’m too depleted. Too close to the edge of what a body can survive and still feel.

The wave breaks back down.

“I can’t—” The whisper cracks. I don’t know if I mean I can’t come or I can’t take this or I can’t be here anymore. There is only the wave that built and failed and the shaking that comes after.

Shaking, I lie in the furs, not from cold, not from fear, but from the almost. The almost is worse than if I’d felt nothing at all. My body reached for something it couldn’t grasp, and the reaching opened a space I didn’t know I had.

Something small and bitter curls up in my chest, close to shame. Whatever the camps built in me wants to make this my fault, the way it made everything my fault—too broken, too starved, too used up to finish what a body is supposed to finish. I don’t have the energy to argue with it.

His hands change. From the rut’s grip on my hips to something else. Slower. His palms travel up my sides, over the ribs he found before. Broader. His hands run the terrain of my body with the unhurried attention of something learning a different question. Not what’s broken this time. How much.

His head drops. He inhales at my throat, a long, deliberate breath, his nose against the pulse point where my blood runs close to the surface. Whatever thread he’s chasing—sweat, venom, the copper edge of blood still healing under my skin—it tightens his jaw. The frustration I saw earlier surfaces in the muscles of his neck, in the grip of his hands on my ribs.

“Too skinny.”

The frustration is almost anger. His palms press against the bones of my ribcage, feeling what isn’t there—the muscle, the fat, the tissue that should cushion bone from skin. His mate is bones. His cock is locked inside a body that can barely keep itself alive, let alone grow anything new.

The conflict is in his body. The rut says breed. The rest of him says she can’t. His cock grinds against the knot’s seal in one rhythm, his hands running down my ribs in another. Something in him wants to flood me with seed, the thing the camps warned me about, given a body at last. The other thing, the thing that fed me before it fucked me, wants to keep me alive long enough for the flooding to matter.

His cum comes.

The heat comes before the understanding. Deep. Sudden. Flooding. His cock pulses inside me, flexing in sequence, a wave of contractions that rolls from tip to base. The tip presses hard against the front wall as the first surge hits my body.

Hot. Thick. More than I can hold—except the knot is sealed and I have to hold it because there’s nowhere for it to go. The smell of him thickens around us both, salt and heat and that same dark musk that soaked into the ground where he found me, except now it’s under my own skin instead of just in the air.

The heat spreads. Through my abdomen. My pelvis. Radiating outward from the place where his cock is pumping into me. The warmth is different from the venom—not the numbness, not the pain-killing fog. Something more direct. The heat of it soaking into tissue that has been cold for months.

My body responds, not consciously, not with any decision I make, deeper than thought. Something in me reaches for what he’s giving, absorbing it, the way cracked earth drinks rain. I don’t understand it. My body is taking what it needs without me.

He comes for a long time.

“What are you doing to me?” I don’t mean to say it. The words come out thick, half-lost in the furs, aimed at no one because the thing locked inside me doesn’t speak in sentences. But the question is real. It’s been building since the first piece of food touched my lips.

Saying it out loud cracks something. My eyes go hot and blurred at the edges, no tears, just the burn and the thick feeling in my throat that comes before crying if crying were still a thing I knew how to do. I don’t know if I’m asking him or asking myself.

He doesn’t answer. His cock pulses. His hand stays on my belly.

I lie under him. Knotted. Filled. His cock pulsing in rhythmic surges. Each surge soaks a little deeper into tissue that needs it. My body clenches around him, contractions that pull his cum deeper, that I didn’t ask for and can’t stop. I don’t fight them. My body is doing this on its own.