Page 25 of Feral Keep

I close my eyes.

Danger, one more time.

My body says no again.

I let my body win.

12

MAEVE

The days have started to blur.

My body is different.

Not healed, not the word for it, but changed. The starvation-grey of my skin has shifted, darker, warmer, something closer to what I looked like before the camp stripped the color out of me along with everything else. The hunger is still there but it’s changed pitch. From the screaming static of a body eating itself to something lower, steadier. An ache I can live in.

I can chew on the damaged side. Not well—the gap still catches food wrong, but the jaw moves more evenly. The hinge that was locked tight for months has loosened. The venom works at the joint every time his tongue passes over my face on the way to something else. He doesn’t linger on the jaw. He doesn’t need to. His body finds the damage the way the camp guards found the workers, automatically, relentlessly, but in the opposite direction.

My ribs barely hurt. The cracked ones have gone from a screaming ache to a dull warmth, the fracture lines knitting under the venom’s constant work. My shoulder still grinds, but the range of motion has widened. I can lift my arm to take food from his fingers without the white flash of pain behind my eyes.

Five days of his cum flooding me. Five days of venom, of the knot’s vibration working through my bones, of my body pulling in whatever he gives it with a greed that has nothing to do with my choices.

I’m stronger.

Not strong. Stronger. Stronger than the woman who collapsed at his tree roots. Strong enough that when his cock stiffens inside me on the afternoon of whatever day this is, my body does something it hasn’t done before.

It pushes back.

That scares me more than it should. Four years I trained my body to do exactly what it was told and nothing else, flinch when hit, go slack when there was nothing left to do but wait. Maybe that’s healing. Maybe I’m just losing the last thing that was ever mine to lose.

We’re on our sides in the furs, the position we’ve been in for hours, my back against his chest, his arm across my ribs, his knees drawn up behind mine so I’m curled inside the cage of him. His cock has been soft inside me during the lull, the prehensile flex lazy, absent, the way a hand drums fingers on a table. Now it stiffens. Swells outward against my walls. The girth stretching me open from the inside, the flex becoming deliberate, the tip pressing forward to find the spot on the front wall.

The knot pulses at my opening. One slow swell. Another. Each pulse wider than the last, the vibration climbing.

He grunts behind me. The arm across my ribs tightens. His hips shift, a small adjustment, pressing his cock deeper, and the movement drags his cock against tissue that is no longer starved-numb but alive, swollen, responding. Every inch of the drag catches fire. Something rises off my own skin, warm and slick with salt—a smell I don’t have a name for. Then I do. Want. Sharp and unmistakable.

“Ah—” The sound escapes before I can trap it.

He goes still.

Not still like stopping. Still like a predator that heard something in the brush. His breath is hot against my temple. His cock twitches inside me—a hard, involuntary flex, the thick heat of him pressing outward against walls that just clenched around him.

Then he moves.

His arm slides under my thighs. He lifts me, one motion, no effort, like picking up a rag from the floor. My back stays against his chest but now he’s sitting up, leaning against the stone wall of the warren, and I’m in his lap. My legs draped over his thighs, spread by the sheer width of him. My weight settling me deeper onto his cock. The new angle drives the tip against the front wall and I make another sound, a choked, surprised thing I don’t recognize.

“Good.” His mouth is at the top of my head, the word vibrating through my skull. “More.”

The knot swells. Locks. The vibration climbing from the low hum to the full-body buzz that turns the edges of me to static. His tail unwraps from my waist, slides down my hip. I know where it’s going. The bone-white tip has found the same place every session, down my thigh, up to the place where the knot is sealed against me.

The tip presses against my clit.

This has happened every session. The tail tip finds the spot and presses. The vibration from the knot connects to the pressure from the tail. My body clenches. It builds. It doesn’t crest. I endure it.

Except.

My body is stronger.