Page 65 of Feral Keep

His hand closes around mine, careful of his own strength. He doesn’t tell me he’s sorry. He doesn’t say she’s somewhere better, or that it wasn’t my fault, or any of the soft useless things. He holds my hand and lets her be in the room with his boys, four dead people at one small fire, and the fire burns on anyway.

“Her name?” he asks.

“Denise.” Saying it out loud cracks something in my chest, a hairline thing, not all the way through. Her name hasn’t been in the air since the settlement. “The other women called her Dee.”

“Denise,” he says. Slow. Whole. He says it the way he lays flowers down.

Her name settles into the warren like it found somewhere warm to sit. His boys have names. My mother has a name. The woman under the mound has flowers instead, because flowers were all he had to give her. I hold his hand tighter and let the fire do the talking for a while.

Later.

The grief is still in the room—heavy, damp, the way the warren smells after rain, mixed now with the smoky char that’s soaked into every fur we own. It won’t leave for a long time, I think. You don’t hold something for thirteen years and let it go in a single day. It’ll come in waves, the way the rut came in waves. Grief-peaks and grief-lulls. I know this because I’ve been grieving my mother for five years, and the waves still come.

But the body has its own answers.

I put my hand on his chest. Over the heartbeat. Over the scars. Over the place where the grief lives, where the names sit, where Alexander is buried under Red.

I push, not hard—my strength against his is nothing, a breath against a wall—but the intent is clear. I push and he goes still, his gold eyes on my face, reading the signal.

I push again. He lets himself go back. Shoulders against the furs. His legs unfolding, his body stretching out long and massive beneath me, crimson skin gone dark in the low firelight, the white horns stark against the black furs under his head. His wings spread against the bedding, the blood-red membranes fanning wide, thin enough at the edges to show the firelight through them. His tail lies still.

Something fierce and unfamiliar rises up in me watching him go down that easy under my hands. Nobody asked me anything the morning he bred me. Nobody has to ask me now, either, but this time it’s because I’m the one deciding, and the difference between those two kinds of not-asking sits in my chest like a fact I’m only just learning to hold.

I climb into his lap.

His cock is soft. Not for long—my hand finds it, wraps around the girth as far as my fingers will reach, and the heat of it surges against my palm. All of him thickens, stiffens. The tip flexes toward my body like it knows the way. My hand strokes once, twice, and he’s fully hard, the cock curving upward, alive with the same restless seeking that drove him through a month of rut. Except his eyes are open. Clear. No feral wall. Just Red, looking up at me, the grief and the arousal sharing the same face.

I guide him in.

The stretch. God, the stretch. It hasn’t gotten smaller—the girth of him splitting me open, the slow burn as my body accommodates the same impossible width it accommodated for weeks. My breath shudders. My thighs flex on either side of his hips. I sink down. Inch by inch. His hands come to my waist—the spread of crimson fingers across my skin, the reflex he’ll never lose—and I grab his wrists.

I push them down against the furs.

His eyes widen with surprise, not fear. The strength between us isn’t close, and we both know it. He could break my hold without tensing. But I press his wrists into the bedding and he lets me, his chest rising fast, his cock throbbing inside me with a pulse I can count.

“No,” I say. Meaning: not gentle, not careful, not the way you hold broken things. The grief is in the room. I’m not trying to make it go away. I’m putting my body into the same space and refusing to let the grief be the only thing.

I roll my hips.

The angle seats him deeper. His cock presses against the front wall, the tip curling with that seeking flex, finding the spot that three weeks of rut burned into his muscle memory. My walls grip. My breath catches. I roll again—harder, grinding down, using my weight, my rebuilt thighs, the strength his body gave me.

His wrists flex under my hands—testing, feeling me hold him, not breaking free.

I grind down and his jaw clenches and the sound he makes isn’t the rut’s growl. Rougher. More present—the proof of a man being ridden by a woman who is choosing every movement.

“Maeve—”

My name in his mouth. Full. Clear. Not feral-voice.

His wrists break free. Effortless. My hands fly apart like I was holding smoke. His grip locks on my hips. His fingers dig into the flesh he rebuilt, the muscle and fat his cum, food, and tending put back on my bones. He drives up.

Hard. The full upward thrust of his hips lifting me off the furs, the force of nine feet of male underneath me driving his cock deep enough that the impact shudders through my chest. I cry out—not pain, the shock of fullness, the sudden depth, the angle that hits everything at once.

He drives again. Harder. His gold eyes open, fixed on my face. Watching my mouth drop. Watching my body take it. Choosing this force the way the rut chose it, except now it’s him behind the thrust, not the drive.

I brace my hands on his chest. The muscle underneath is burning hot, slick with sweat. His heartbeat pounds under my palms. I push down as he drives up and the collision is devastating—my whole body jolting, my walls clenching, the orgasm building from a place that feels deeper than the rut ever reached because this time I started it. I chose this. My hand on his chest. My hips in his lap. My cunt taking his cock because I wanted it there.

I come with my nails in his skin. The orgasm tears through me, my spine arching, my walls locking around him in pulses that drag a groan from somewhere deep in his chest. His hands tighten on my hips. He drives up one more time—brutal, final—and comes, head thrown back, throat exposed, wings spread wide enough that the firelight breaks red and gold through the membranes overhead, my name again: “Maeve,” rough and broken and real. The smell of him floods up between us, salt and musk and something scorched, and I breathe it in like it belongs to me.