Page 51 of Feral Keep

Sick. I turn the word over and it doesn’t give me much. However long he had her, it wasn’t long enough to learn her name. There’s nothing of her in the warren—no worn place, no kept thing, no scent under the furs. A whole woman lived and died in this territory, and the only proof she existed is this mound and the care he takes with the dirt.

She didn’t survive the mating. Too sick for whatever a bond needs from a body. She didn’t survive.

And for years, he’s come to this mound and brought flowers. Tended her like you tend something you’re trying to keep from being forgotten.

I reach down.

My hand lands on the mound next to his. Our palms touch across the earth. The moss is cool. Damp underneath, where the sun hasn’t reached, and it smells dark and rich, the way turned soil smells right before something grows in it. My fingers are small against the dark soil, but they’re there. They’re touching the same spot his fingers are touching.

Something wells up in my throat, thick and urgent, and I don’t understand it until it’s already coming out of my mouth. Like I owe the dead woman a report. Like she deserves to know what happened to the space she left behind.

“I’m strong,” I say, not sure why, not sure what I’m promising.

“I know.”

“I’m alive.”

“I know.”

His hand turns slightly, and his fingers brush mine—just touching, the way you touch something to confirm it’s real.

The knot inside me pulses—the throb of his cock, the catch of the swollen base, the slight give and then the catch again. He doesn’t move to fuck me. We just stay like this. Kneeling at the grave of someone who came before me. His body inside mine. Both our hands on the mound.

The white flowers are scattered across her and across us. Across the nest where I sleep. Across the territory where I’m learning to be alive again.

“Thank you,” I say. Not sure if I’m thanking him for tending her or for choosing me or for showing me this at all. The words come out rough.

He lifts his hand from the mound and tips my jaw toward him, tilting my face up to his. His eyes find mine, gold, bright as danger.

“Keep you,” he says.

The rut is in those words. The bond is in those words. The fact that he’s shown me her grave and is still here, still inside me, still choosing, every day, to keep moving forward—all of that is in those words.

My eyes burn, sudden and unwelcome, and I have to blink hard against the sting of it. Nobody has ever told me they’d keep me. Not once, not in four years, not before that either—my mother meant to, I think, but the world took her before she got the chance to say it out loud.

I believe him.

The knot swells slightly as he says it, and my body clenches around it without my permission. The arc of pleasure is small but sharp. He feels it—I see the gold of his eyes flare, the twitch of muscle across his chest. But he doesn’t push. He stays still, lets me adjust, lets me breathe.

We stay at the grave until the angle becomes too much for either of us. Until the knot needs to release and my legs need to move. Until the sun has shifted enough that the gold-slant turns orange.

When he carries me back to the nest, I’m quiet. But my hand is curled against his chest, and I’m thinking about the way his fingers moved across that mound. The way he carries grief so easily he can tend it with one hand while inside me with the other.

The nest smells like us now. Like his musk and my slick and the furs we’ve been lying in for nearly three weeks, a warm animal smell that used to make me gag and now just means mine. He settles me back into the depression where my body fits, the shape of me worn into the furs by three weeks of us, and when he covers me with his body the rightness of it settles over me like a physical thing.

His cock hardens inside me as soon as we’re settled. No patience. The rut is always there, always pushing, but now there’s something else underneath it. Something that feels like intention.

He moves slow at first. Long strokes that build the heat gradually. His hands find the new strength in me—the places where the scars have faded to thin white lines, where the muscle underneath has returned. He traces them like he’s learning me again. His touch isn’t reverent, exactly, but it’s thorough. Checking. Making sure I’m really here, really mine.

His hands find both at once—what I used to be, layered under what I am now—and the gap between them makes my eyes sting again. Nobody in the camps got to heal like this. Healing cost calories nobody could spare. Being allowed to grow strong here is the strangest gift anyone’s ever handed me.

“Stronger,” he says against my throat.

“Yeah.”

“Take more.”

It’s not a question, but I answer anyway.