Page 50 of Feral Keep

He says it like he’s asking. Like I could refuse. I don’t want to refuse.

He lifts me against him, his knot still soft-locked inside, his cock a warm presence that shifts with every movement. I wrap my arms around his neck and feel the angle change as he stands, his forearm under my thighs, the weight of me nothing to him. The silver of his hair catches the light. Up close, it’s not silver at all. White. Bright as bone.

We go deeper into the territory. Past the stream where he taught me to drink without cupping my hands, just bending to the water with him, his hand steady on my lower back. The water is cold against my throat. His palm presses firm, protective, and I understand that this is him saying you belong here.

Past the clearing where he hunts, where the prey-paths are worn thin through the undergrowth. Past there, and the canopy changes.

The trees get older. Thicker through. The ones I know near the nest are massive, but these are different. The bark is so deep it looks like it’s been carved by decades of weather. The light doesn’t slant here the way it does in the warren. It comes down in green-filtered beams that make the air itself look visible. Dusty. Sacred in a way I don’t have words for. The air smells older too—wet needle-fall and moss gone soft with rot, a green, mineral smell that settles heavy in my chest with every breath.

The knot shifts with every step he takes. His strides are enormous, and each one jiggles his cock inside me in a way that’s not fucking but not nothing either. It builds in tiny increments. By the time we’re deep enough that the camp-familiar part of the territory has fallen away behind us, I’m half-hard too, my cunt clenching in small, involuntary pulses around him.

The earth here is different. Less moss, more needle-fall. Softer. When he finally stops, it’s at a place where the darkness of the canopy shadow thickens into something almost like twilight, even though it’s midday. Where the earth looks worked. Deliberately shaped.

There’s a mound.

Roughly rectangular. Covered in moss and last year’s dead flowers, papery and collapsed inward. Fresh flowers lay on top of them—white ones, petaled, that couldn’t be more than a few days old, sweet and a little sharp where the stems have been bruised. Someone tends this. Someone brings flowers here the way other people bring water to a grave.

He sets me down beside it, kneeling, and I’m still straddling his thighs, still impaled, still full of him. The knot catches against my front wall as he adjusts his angle, and the sensation is so direct, so intimate, that I forget to breathe.

My stomach goes tight and small before I even understand what I’m looking at. A grave means someone died here. A grave he tends means someone mattered enough to keep tending. My hands have nowhere to go, so they stay curled against his shoulders, waiting.

His hand lands on the mound. He traces it slowly—palm flat, moving from the head-end toward the foot. Like he’s checking on something. Making sure it hasn’t shifted.

I understand what this is.

It doesn’t come all at once, and not in a way I could explain to anyone. But the way his hand moves—the same hand that fed me broth yesterday, that traced the scars on my ribs, that presses cum into my belly and watches his cock soften inside me—that hand knows this mound the way you know a body you’ve held a thousand times.

“There was someone before me,” I say, certain, not looking for him to confirm it.

He doesn’t answer with words. His fingers find the edge of one of the white flowers, a wild something with thin petals, and he arranges it so the bloom faces up instead of drooping. The gesture is so careful. So practiced.

“She here?”

“Yes.”

His word is small. Feral-speech rough, but small.

I look at the mound again. At the dried flowers underneath, yellowed and brittle. At the arrangement of white ones on top. At the careful way the earth has been tended—no weeds breaking the surface, the moss trimmed back, the shape of the mound itself maintained. Years. He’s been doing this for years.

The camp taught me about loss. How to hold it. How to carry it forward without letting it drown you. Gretchen gone. My mother gone. The girl named Sarah who couldn’t survive the dysentery. The old woman with the infected foot they had to let go because the medicine ran out. You can’t afford to cry in the camps. The guards watch for it. They use tears as an excuse to cut rations, to mark you as weak, to rotate you to a different detail where the work is harder and the deaths come faster.

You hold it. You hold it in your teeth, your fists, your chest where the breathing gets tight.

But in the camps, there’s no time for flowers.

There’s no time for bringing white petals to someone who’s gone. When someone dies in the camps, they’re removed. Their bunk is reassigned. Their rations are redistributed. Within a week, it’s like they never existed. That’s the point. That’s the mercy. No one gets to keep their dead in the camps.

He’s been keeping her.

He’s been coming to this mound, year after year, and he’s been choosing not to forget. He’s been tending her the way you tend a garden.

It isn’t jealousy that moves through me, or not only that. It’s something closer to grief borrowed off someone else’s shoulders, heavy and unfamiliar, because I know exactly what it costs to keep a dead person tended when the whole world wants you to move on and stop wasting rations on remembering. My chest aches for her, whoever she was. My chest aches for him too, kneeling here alone for years with no one to see him do it.

I shift my hips, and the knot inside me tightens slightly, drawing a low sound from his chest. He doesn’t move to pull out. He stays like this—half-hard, anchored, one hand still on the grave while the other moves to find the flowers scattered around the base. There are more white ones, bunched, a few that have started to brown at the tips. He gathers them gently, like they’re still alive.

“What was her name?”

“Don’t know.” His jaw works. “Sick. Too sick. Bond—didn’t take.”