Page 60 of Feral Keep

“No?”

His hand presses harder against his chest. His gold eyes close. The muscles of his jaw work like he’s chewing on a word he can’t swallow.

“Al—”

The syllable comes out broken. Unfinished. His eyes snap open, frustrated, and the look on his face is the look of a man who had a thing on the tip of his tongue and the thing slipped back down. Something longer than Red. Something he used to be called when the world was different, when he was different, when he had a whole life this territory has no room for and a name that took more than one syllable to say.

“Al,” I repeat.

His eyes sharpen on my mouth. Like hearing it from someone else’s voice helps.

“Al—” He stops. Shakes his head. The concentration breaks. Whatever was surfacing sinks back under the feral, under the years, under the weight of everything he forgot when the mutation took his mind and gave him something else.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Red is fine.”

But it’s not fine. That much is plain. The thing behind his eyes, the intelligence flooding back in, is carrying fragments with it. Pieces of whoever he was before. A name. A life. Students, maybe, and children. The grave in the clearing.

He picks up a strip of meat and holds it toward me—in my direction, not at my mouth. An offering instead of a command.

I take it from his fingers. Our hands touch. His crimson against my dark skin, the contrast sharp, familiar, intimate in a way that aches. I eat the meat while he watches.

“More?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

He feeds me by hand. But the hand waits. The hand offers and lets me take, instead of pressing the food past my lips with the flat insistence of the rut. The distinction is so small and so vast it lands in my chest like a door opening.

Around nothing, my walls clench. The phantom flex, grip, release, grip, chasing his cock, chasing the fullness that isn’t there. The chronic absence. My body memorized him and won’t stop reaching for it.

“Does it stop?” I ask, looking at the bowl instead of him. “The—after. Does the feeling stop?”

He’s quiet for long enough that I think he doesn’t understand the question. Then⁠—

“No.”

One word. Said like he knows. Like the one before me, the one who died, left the same phantom in him when she went.

My stomach sinks at the answer, heavy and quiet. I wanted him to say it fades. I wanted a timeline, a number of days, something I could count toward the way I used to count toward the end of a shift. There isn’t one. Whatever happened between us in that bed is just going to live in my body now, the way the camps still live in it, one more thing I carry that nobody’s going to help me put down.

I eat. He sits. The silence stretches between us, but it isn’t hostile. It’s the silence of two people learning what they are to each other when the rut isn’t making the decisions.

I look at him—really look, without the filter of pain or venom or the feral’s flat golden stare. A nine-foot male with crimson skin, white horns, silver hair, and gold eyes that are watching me like I’m the most important thing in the world. Hands that fed me and pressed venom into my cracked bones. A body that held mine for weeks without breaking it.

A home he built and kept building. A grave he tends at the edge of it.

“Al,” I say again, gently, not pushing—just putting the sound in the air so it can exist between us.

His hand goes to his chest. The frown again. The reaching. The thing slipping away.

He shakes his head. Looks at me.

I touch my own chest. Mirror his gesture—hand flat, fingers spread over the sternum. “Maeve,” I say. My name. The sound of it strange in my own mouth after weeks of silence, weeks of being mate and mine and nothing else. “I’m Maeve.”

His lips move. Trying the shape. “M—” The syllable dies. His mouth isn’t ready for it yet. But his eyes hold the word the way his hands held the clay bowl—carefully, like something he doesn’t want to drop. Warm in a way the feral state couldn’t manage, the gold steady, patient. Whatever is underneath Red, whatever is trying to surface, it’ll come when it comes. The intelligence is returning like water filling a basin. Slowly. Unevenly. The rut burned for thirteen years.

“Red,” he says. Nods. Like he’s accepting the placeholder.

The warmth low behind my navel gives a pulse. Steady. Present.