Page 43 of Feral Keep

The next fast fuck starts like they all do—him pulling me into position, his cock already hard, that brief moment where his feral brain syncs to mine and there’s nothing but heat and the knowledge that this is happening. I’m on my back, shoulders braced against the furs, and his hands grip the backs of my thighs, just above the knee.

But the force is different.

He spreads me wider than he usually does, and the first drive of his cock is harder than anything that came before—none of Week One’s careful, measured intensity. His hips snap forward and the impact drives me flat against the furs, my shoulders pinned, my body going small underneath him.

He was holding back before. He’s not holding back now—and the realization hits like cold water. All those days of taking care, of managing his strength like I might break. Whatever scent told him I was breakable must have faded along with the keloids. His instinct read what the camps tried to convince me I’d never be again.

Strong enough.

The words land somewhere between a compliment and a verdict, and I can’t decide which one to brace for. Some starved, stubborn part of me that spent four years being told what I wasn’t wants to stand up inside my own chest and take a bow. The rest of me is too busy being afraid of what strong enough means now that he’s decided it’s true.

The next thrust lands deeper, pressure climbing all the way into my throat. My cunt stretches around the girth of him, trying to accommodate something that’s barely fit inside my small frame even when he’s being gentle. His tail cinches around my waist, holding me in place, and the vibration starts low, building fast.

I’m making sounds I don’t recognize.

His hands shift to grip my wrists, not cruel, but firm, pressing them down against my sides. My back arches under his weight, my hips rolling up to meet the next brutal drive because somewhere in my body, that’s what’s happening. I’m not enduring this. I’m answering it.

The knot swells harder than it ever has. The burn of it stretching my opening sends a jolt up my spine. His cock pulses inside me, that vibration climbing to pitches that white out my vision at the edges. My body locks around him and everything goes electric.

I come so hard my back lifts off the furs even under the full weight of his body pinning me down.

But it’s not terror that crashes through me on the tail end of the orgasm.

It’s hunger.

And that’s when the shame arrives.

The camp voice in my head sounds like Shayla, her hand pressed flat against my belly like she’s checking for something beneath my ribs. At least in the camps, you knew what the pain was. You understood the rules. This is worse. This is a cage you’ll build yourself. You’re learning to love the trap.

There’s a face to go with the voice. Elena. I haven’t thought about her in months, but the shame pulls her up from wherever I’ve been keeping her. Elena tried to love a guard—the tall Eunuch with the scar on his neck who sometimes brought extra bread to the barracks. She thought he was kind because he brought the bread. By the end, when they found out about the bread, they made her dig her own grave at the perimeter. Made all of us watch. She was twenty-two.

His hips don’t stop. Somewhere underneath the memory his cock is still dragging through me, still hard, still climbing, Elena in the ground and his knot swelling against my opening at the same time, like my body won’t let me leave the room even while my mind goes looking for the door.

The camps taught us that loving anything in captivity is the thing that gets you killed.

My body goes rigid.

I stop moving, stop making sound, try to pull some kind of filter back over the wanting. The rut doesn’t negotiate. His cock drives into me again, harder, and I grit my teeth against the forced pleasure building at the base of my spine. His hands are everywhere, one gripping my hip, the other pressing down on my sternum like he can feel my heartbeat through bone and muscle.

This is how it starts, Shayla’s voice keeps going. The wanting. The small surrenders. The way his hands start to feel like what you’ve been missing. And then one day you realize you’ll do anything to keep feeling them, and by then it’s too late. By then you’ve already built the trap yourself, brick by brick, and the worst part is that it feels like freedom.

The second orgasm crashes through the filter I’m trying to build, and it shatters it completely.

I come screaming. The sound tears from somewhere deep in my chest, something the camps never quite managed to kill completely. It’s not pain. It’s not submission. It’s the collision of shame and pleasure, so violent they might be the same thing, and a sob dragged up from wherever in me has learned to want.

The sound keeps coming even as my body convulses around his knot, even as the edges of his cock vibrate in frequencies that unmake me. Tears run sideways down my temples into the furs.

Elena’s grave. The sight of it. The way they made us file past it to show us what happened to girls who loved the wrong thing. The way her mother didn’t come to the perimeter because she wasn’t allowed to. The way the camps made sure we learned that loving—anything, anyone—was the surest way to end up in the ground.

Stop it, I try to tell myself. Stop wanting. Stop coming. Stop letting him touch you like you’re something worth touching.

But my body doesn’t listen. My cunt is milking his knot. My back is arching. My hands are clawing at the furs because I can’t reach him, can’t do anything but take what he’s giving me and scream about it.

That’s the real shame: not that I’m wanting, not that my body is learning pleasure, but that it feels like relief. Like something in me that’s been braced for four years is finally letting go, breath by breath, because finally, finally, finally someone is touching me like I might matter. Like I won’t break if they stop being gentle. Like I’m allowed to want things that aren’t survival.

The camps lied when they said that would kill me.

It’s the truth that almost does it.