Page 33 of Feral Keep

A tooth.

My lungs seize.

For one white-hot second I’m back on the intake table, a stranger’s gloved hand at my jaw, pliers cold against my cheek before I understood what they were for. My hand wants to fly to my mouth and check for blood that isn’t there.

I lie still, tracking the ache with the part of my brain that learned to do that in the camps. Jaw-line ache. Inflammation. The burn of tissue being forced apart from the inside. Not infection. Something else. Something growing.

My molars went a blow at a time—a guard’s fist, the clearing line, four years of a place that eats bodies. Left the gaps jagged. The ones that broke below the gum-line never came back. I learned to eat around them, to not expect my mouth to work the way it used to. The camps take a lot of things. Your teeth are just the beginning.

But something is pushing through now.

Red stirs. His tail releases my leg and slides instead across my belly, testing my skin with the sensitive tip. The slow drag tells me he’s not fully awake, the idle curl of it lazy, but his breathing changes. Sharpens.

“Hurt,” he says against my shoulder, certain of it before I’ve said a word.

I should tell him no. I should keep my jaw clenched and ride out whatever this is. The camps taught me that too, don’t show weakness, don’t let anyone think you need help.

But his nose is already tracking the angle of my face. Searching. His mouth opens against my shoulder-blade, fangs extending slightly—not threatening. Just present. Just ready.

“My jaw,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve told him exactly where it hurts. “Pressure.”

He shifts. The movement is deliberate enough to confirm he was more awake than I thought. His knot flexes inside me as he angles sideways, bringing his mouth to the line of my jaw, and I have to process the geometry of it—his head is too large, his jaw too wide, but he works around me like he’s spent weeks learning the angles. Which maybe he has. The rut doesn’t stop time. Time just becomes something that happens to other people.

His fangs find the line of my gums through my cheek. They press, not breaking skin, just settling. Deliberate.

Then he does something I don’t have a word for. The fangs flex. Not like he’s biting down. Like they’re opening. Opening into the spaces where they’re seated, and something—venom, it has to be venom—floods directly into the inflammation, a green bitter smell rising up through my own sinuses from inside my skull.

The pain doesn’t fade. It stops existing.

One second I’m aware of a burning line running from my molars to my temples. The next second there’s only pressure and warmth and the soft sound Red makes, not quite a growl, not quite purring, something between that lives in his chest. It rumbles against my shoulder-blade.

The silence in my mouth is so complete it terrifies me.

For years and years, the ache has been there. Background noise. A constant message from my body: you are broken, you are not whole. I stopped expecting it to stop. Stopped imagining a world where I could touch my face and not find pain waiting.

Now there’s nothing.

Just numbness creeping outward from where his fangs are seated, like cold spreading through water. My jaw was on fire. Now it’s snow. The absence of pain is so profound it feels like a wound itself—something missing, something stolen, and I don’t know how to exist in this silence my own mouth is making.

He holds there. Mouth pressed to my jaw. Fangs still seated. His tail coils tighter around my leg, and the vibration under my skin deepens to a frequency that sinks into my bones. Still inside me, his cock. The knot pulses at the same rhythm as his purr. I’m aware of all of it at once—the heat of him, the impossibility of where I am and what’s being done to me.

His mouth pulls away. He keeps his head close enough that warmth radiates from him, the soft rasp of his breath against my jaw.

“Taste,” he says. A command. A request. Both.

I work my tongue across my gums and find the places where the venom has blunted everything, numbed it down to pressure. The swelling is still there, my tongue tracks it, but the pain is gone. Pulled out of my body like water down a drain.

I press harder. Exploring the roof of my mouth, the soft tissue where gaps have always been. And there—there. Not one hard point pushing through anymore. Several. The venom did something to the ridge, made it grow thinner, pushed the new growth closer to the surface. The crowns of them press against my tongue now, teeth sharpening under the surface. Not someday. Soon.

The realization hits in my chest: I’m going to have teeth again.

Not the ones I was born with, not the ones the Ordained broke and took, but teeth. Real. Growing from my own bones because something in his blood is rebuilding me.

My eyes sting before I understand why. Somewhere between the pressure and the numbness, some quiet unguarded part of me is already grieving the version of me who gave up on having a whole mouth again, the one who put that hope in the same place as my mother’s vine and the settlement that doesn’t exist anymore. Grieving her feels stupid. She’s not dead. She’s just wrong. But some of her doesn’t want to let go of being right.

He’s already moving. With his knot still locked inside me, he shifts his weight to one arm and reaches for something on the stone ledge beside our hollow. His fingers—long, clawed, careful—bring something back. Food. Dark shredded meat, glistening faintly in the midday light, his crimson knuckles almost black against it. I catch the smell: soft meat, already shredded, the smoke of last night’s fire still clinging to it. Probably cooled now, from where he’s kept it warm under his wing earlier.

He feeds me with his fingers, pieces small enough that I don’t have to chew. I just let them sit on my tongue and dissolve slightly before swallowing. The meat is tender—whatever he hunted, he’s cooked it until it falls apart. It tastes like rendered fat and something gamey. Wild. It tastes like here. Like this warren, like this male, like I’m inside something that owns the sky.