Page 41 of Feral Keep

I eat. Through the orgasm. Through the tears. My jaw works. My cunt works. My shoulder burns with a good fire. His tail keeps circling. I come and come and come until everything blurs into one continuous wave—pleasure, relief, the taste of salt, the heat of venom remaking the joint that healed wrong, all of it running together.

His arms are the only thing keeping me upright. The water laps at our bodies, his heat, the small waves of movement disturbing the pool’s surface. His mouth stays on my shoulder. Not biting now. Just resting. His lips against the punctures, the venom still seeping slow.

The tears stop on their own. The orgasm ebbs. The knot stays swollen, stays vibrating, but the pitch has lowered—the soothing hum, not the climbing one. Like he can feel the difference between more and enough.

I swallow the last of the meat. My tongue finds the salt residue on my lips. My shoulder throbs, good, warm, loosening.

His tail unwraps from between us. Slides around my waist instead. Rests there.

“Good,” he says. Into the punctures on my shoulder. The word vibrates against my skin.

Some old, stubborn corner of me still wants to flinch at the word good, the way that word used to mean I’d survived a Shayla inspection and nothing more. It doesn’t flinch this time. It just sits there, quiet, confused about which meaning to believe.

I lean into his chest because there’s nowhere else in the world I want to lean.

Later. The rut cycles back. The fast fuck.

He has me on my back in the furs, his body braced over mine, the wall of crimson blocking out the cave ceiling. His hips drive forward with the steady, relentless rhythm that my body has learned to answer. My legs wrap his waist, not reaching around, never reaching around, he’s too massive for that, but gripping the taper where his ribs end, my heels digging into the hot muscle of his back.

His tail cinches around the base of his cock. Tight. I’ve learned what this means. The pressure builds behind the restriction, the knot thickening harder, his balls drawing up heavy between us. His breath goes ragged. His driving picks up speed.

My hands grip his forearms where they brace against the furs. The muscle there is like holding stone. His wings spread—not wide, the cave walls are too close, but enough that the membranes block the light and I’m in shadow underneath him. Just his eyes. Gold, burning, the black ring of his pupils blown wide.

The pressure builds. It’s in his whole body—the way his cock strains against the tail’s hold, the way each thrust drives deeper because the restriction is forcing everything forward. The knot pulses against my walls, thick and vibrating, the frequency climbing.

He’s close. The rut makes him close fast when the tail cinches, the pressure too much to hold, and his body is trying to give me everything it has.

Two words break through.

“Need. Cum.”

They tear out of him like they cost something. Guttural, raw, ripped from whatever part of his brain still makes language. His eyes squeeze shut. His arms shake. The tail tightens, releases—and the flood hits.

I’ve felt his orgasms before. Every cycle. But this—the backed-up pressure releasing, the hours of restriction breaking in one violent flood—my belly swells with it. The heat pools, fills, the knot locking so tight that even the smallest shift sends shockwaves through both of us. His cock pulses and pulses and pulses. The load is massive. My body strains to hold it all and the cum sits inside me like something liquid and alive.

He roars. Not the territorial sound from outside the warren, not the warning call. Something deeper. The sound of a body breaking through its own restraint. The smell that comes off him with it is heavier than anything before, dense enough that it coats the inside of my mouth.

It goes through me before the pleasure does, a spike of something closer to fear than want, some animal part of my brain flinching at a sound that big even while the rest of me is already answering it.

The vibration of his roar travels through his cock, through the knot, into my walls. I come. Hard, sudden, my spine curving off the furs, my hands clawing his forearms. The orgasm rides the aftershocks of his. The cum keeps coming, hot and endless. For a moment I can’t separate his body from mine. The knot locks us together. My walls grip him. His tail lies slack against the furs, spent from holding. When my second orgasm rolls through on the heels of the first, his cock is still pulsing.

He drops—controlled, barely, his weight shifting to one side, pulling me with him, rolling us so I’m draped across his chest with his cock still buried deep and the knot still swollen and vibrating low. His heart pounds under my ear. The rhythm is wrong for a human heart—too slow, too loud, the bass note of something massive and barely contained.

His palm settles low over my stomach. Presses down. Feeling the fullness. His cum sitting heavy and hot inside me, held in by the knot.

“Good,” he says. Quieter now. The feral edge softening. “Good mate.”

I don’t answer. I can’t. My body is still shaking, my shoulder throbbing with the good heat of the venom, my belly distended and warm, and the cum-fullness is doing something to my brain, a heaviness, a settling, like being drugged but from the inside.

The light changes. Gold to amber to the grey-blue of dusk. He carries me to the pool again—still knotted, always knotted, the knot softened to a thick persistent swell but never leaving, never slipping free.

This time he turns me so my back is against his chest. His knees fold underneath him in the shallow end. The water rises to my waist. His hands come up.

My hair.

New growth is coming in. Dense, tight 4c coils pushing up from the scalp, springy and strong in a way the camp hair never was. The venom, the cum, the food—whatever his body is feeding mine, my hair is drinking it. The new coils are maybe two inches now, a dark crown of curls surrounding the sparse remnants of the old breakage that still clings to the ends.

His fingers find the line where new meets old. The healthy coils springing back from his touch. The brittle ends above them catching, refusing to cooperate.