Page 49 of Feral Keep

His tail curls sharp, pleased.

I lean in and take the food from his talons, and my mouth brushes his palm. The cooking fire crackles nearby—he must have been tending it before bringing the food. His skin is warm from the flames, his palm callused from the work. The food tastes like smoke and earth and his attention. I chew slowly, not because the meat is tough, but because I want to draw this out. Want him watching me eat. Want this moment of him feeding me, deciding I’m worth feeding well.

He makes that sound—the one that’s become familiar, the rumble that means satisfaction, approval, desire. His other hand slides down to my hip, fingers spread wide to anchor me against him.

“Hungry,” he says, and it’s not really a question.

“Always.”

He tears another piece. This one he holds close enough that I have to practically lean into his hand to get it. The tines of his talons bracket my mouth. His gold eyes watch the exact moment my lips close around the meat, the moment my teeth engage it. The intimacy of it—the trust of having my mouth so close to something that could hurt me, the trust that he won’t—aches somewhere under my sternum. Something in me has learned, bone-deep, that he keeps me whole.

I swallow. He feeds me again. And again.

The taste builds—salt and herbs, the rich mineral flavor of bone broth reduced down to essence. My body drinks it in. My jaw works—both sides, strong and even, teeth that are finally my own again. No pain. Not anymore. No glass-sharp ache in my shoulders from days of not being able to open my mouth wide enough.

By the time the food is gone, he’s hard. Hard against my hip, thick and ready. His hand on my hip is urging me toward the furs. We don’t make it far. He takes me against the wall near the feeding area, my back against the cool stone, his hands under my thighs holding me up while he drives into me with single-minded focus.

“Mine,” he says into my mouth. “You’re mine. All of you. All of it.”

I can’t argue, even if I wanted to.

Especially because I don’t want to.

His cock fills me in one long drive. I gasp into his shoulder, tasting salt and the heat of him and the sweetness of the meal still on his skin. This is different from the feeding. This is consumption too, but the kind that makes me feel bigger, not smaller.

Later, we’re in the furs again, and his hand is back on my belly.

This time I’m the one who covers it with my own hand, pressing down alongside his. I’m not sure why I do it, except that it feels like the closest I can get to understanding what he’s tracking. The future he’s already seeing presses heavy under our palms, the changes already written in my instinct. His hand is so much larger than mine that my palm fits entirely within his, skin on skin, both of us holding the same space.

“Will you tell me?” I ask. “When you know?”

His breathing deepens. His hand doesn’t move. Soft but present, keeping me knotted to him, his cock stays inside me. His heat surrounds me—his chest against my back, his thighs bracketing mine, his wings folded close, membranes warm and dry and alive with the feeling of his mood. The smell of him has settled into the furs by now, char and something like fresh-turned earth, and it stopped catching in my throat weeks ago. Now it just means safe.

“Know now,” he says. “Growing.”

The words settle into the quiet of the warren as a statement of fact, not a promise. His feral brain reading something true in my body, in the changes already happening beneath the skin. I should be afraid. The camps spent years telling me what fear should feel like. What carrying a Shade’s child means. The shape of loss. Gretchen used to lower her voice around the girls who came back from the Cages wrong, the ones whose bellies had swelled and then didn’t anymore, and she’d say that’s what happens like it was a lesson, like fear was the only sane response a body could have.

My chest waits for that fear to show up. It doesn’t. Whatever’s supposed to be there instead feels like the opposite—a loosening low in my belly, something unclenching that I didn’t know was clenched.

But I’m not afraid.

His hand presses gentle against my belly, and his cock is already stirring again, hardening slowly as his body recognizes the intimacy of this moment. His hand grows heavier as he swells inside me, pressing up, warmth spreading through the deepest part of me. His chin settles against my shoulder. His breathing slows to match mine, and we stay like that. Knotted. Together. Both of us holding the evidence that something is changing.

My own heartbeat throbs where his palm rests. Something beneath it too—smaller, fainter, but there. My body is already building. Already answering to the thing inside me, the claim his seed made when he told me I was his. My ribs are stronger now. My spine doesn’t ache. My breasts are tender in a way that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the future he’s already seeing.

My body made a decision somewhere I wasn’t standing guard, and my mind is only just now catching up to it, stumbling in the door after the fact like it missed the whole conversation.

I’m his. What’s growing in me is ours. Somewhere between the wall carved with forgotten letters and the feeding by firelight, I stopped counting backward.

I’m only counting forward now.

21

MAEVE

The light changes around midday. Gold-slant through the canopy, the kind that stretches everything longer. Red shifts against me, still half-hard inside, and there’s that hum in his chest again, something warmer than the rut’s usual drone.

“Walk with me.”