Page 72 of Feral Keep

“The hands know,” I say. “Even when the head doesn’t.”

He nods. One slow motion. The silver hair shifts. In the firelight, the color of him—the crimson skin, the white horns, the gold eyes—looks painted. Unreal. A male assembled from the worst parts of the old world’s fears, and the best parts of his own care.

“I’ll help you tend it,” I say. “After. When I can move.”

Something cracks open in his face as his eyes find mine.

“After,” he repeats. Like he’s tasting the word. Like the future it implies, the after, the continuing, is something he didn’t know how to build toward until I named it.

After.

The grief is in the room and I need him close. My hands want proof he’s here, solid, breathing, alive under my palms, the same want that used to send me checking a sleeping bunkmate’s chest in the dark, just to watch it rise. Gentleness would be wrong here—it would pretend the thing he told me is bearable, and it isn’t. I won’t insult either of us by treating it like something soft.

I cross the space between us. His eyes track me. The gold sharpens as I get close, reading my body the way he’s always read it, the skill that predates language. My hand finds the hem of my shirt. I pull it over my head. Drop it on the furs.

His breathing changes.

I straddle his lap. His back against the root wall, his legs under me, his cock hardening against my inner thigh before I’ve finished settling my weight. My hands go to his chest. The crimson skin is hot under my palms. His heartbeat is fast. His whole body is heat, like the fire inside him hasn’t cooled since the rut. This close his skin smells like it always does under the grief, warm and animal, the low musk that used to mean danger and now just means him.

“Maeve—”

“Don’t,” I say. Not don’t touch me. Don’t be gentle. Don’t be careful. Don’t treat me like I’m fragile because I just heard the worst thing you’ve ever said. I heard it and I’m still here and I want you and the wanting is the answer.

I reach between us. His cock fills my hand, massive, burning, the tip already flexing toward my body. I lift my hips and guide him in. The stretch punches the air from my lungs. The head parts my opening and I have that moment where my cunt closes around the width of him, my body reading him like words.

I sink down.

The pressure is enormous. The girth pressing me open from inside, his cock throbbing as it slides deeper. My slick eases the seat but there’s no easy about this. There’s only the taking, the claiming, the exact shape of him embedding itself in the shape of me.

His hands lock on my waist, hard, the grip of a man who just told a woman his worst secret and feels her body choosing him anyway. His fingers press into the muscle, thumb finding the place where my hip bone juts. His knuckles brush the base of his own cock as I settle lower.

I drive my hips down. Hard. Taking him to the base, the deepest seat, the angle where he sits heavy in my chest, where the head of him brushes something deep that makes my vision spark. His head drops back against the root wall. The tendons in his neck stand out. His teeth clench.

The grief is in the room. His dead mate is in the ground outside. I roll my hips and his cock throbs inside me and neither of us pretends this is separate from what he just said. In the barracks, I watched women after bad days—after the hard labor line, after an Ordained visit—find a corner and finger themselves to orgasm with their faces blank, their bodies needing release the way a body needs to breathe. The hunger doesn’t ask permission from the grief. It just gets louder.

I ride him with my hands braced on his shoulders. The pace isn’t slow. I drive down, he drives up, the collision shaking through both of us. The sound is thick, wet, obscene. The slick of my cunt around his cock, the grunt he makes on each drive. His muscles bunch under my palms.

His tail wraps my thigh, the base anchoring around my hip. The tip seeks, finds the place where my clit is swollen and aching. The pressure sends a jolt up my spine, through my belly. I gasp. My hands shift on his shoulders, nails biting in.

His teeth find my shoulder. Not the venom-fangs—his teeth, the blunt ones. The bite closes on the muscle and the pressure is grounding, the pain-that-isn’t-pain of his jaw on my body. Holding. He doesn’t release, just holds there with his teeth clenched and his breathing hard through his nose. I grip his horns. Pull his head back. Look at his face, the gold eyes blown wide, the crimson skin flushed darker, sweat beading on his brow, the mouth open and panting.

“Red,” I say. Into his face. Into the grief.

He drives up. One savage thrust that lifts me off his lap and seats me back down with a force that whites out my vision. The collision rocks through my pelvis. My cunt seizes. I come. The orgasm rips through me, my walls clamping around his cock, my nails leaving crescents in the skin over his collarbones, my thighs shaking around his waist. His teeth are still on my shoulder. The vibration of his groan travels through the bite into my muscle, into my bone.

He comes seconds after. His hips stutter, drive up one final time. The heat floods. His cock pulses deep inside me, the knot swelling thick against my opening, pressing without locking. The cum fills me, hot, thick, the slide of it as his cock pumps. His hands lock on my hips, pulling me down onto him, holding me through the flood.

The firelight catches the sweat between us, the salt of it thick in the air, mixed with smoke and the thicker musk of what we just did. His forehead drops against mine. We’re both breathing hard. In the space between exhales, I can hear the canopy outside. The insects. The green world continuing.

“She’s outside,” I say. Quiet. Meaning the dead mate. Meaning the grave. Meaning the thing that will always be between us. “And I’m here.”

His palm settles over my belly. Presses. The twins underneath, the warmth steady against his palm. His heartbeat slows against my chest.

“You’re here,” he says. The words simple. The weight of them enormous.

I stay in his lap with his cock softening inside me and his palm still resting low on my stomach and the firelight orange on the root walls. The dead mate is in the ground outside. The dead boys’ names are in the air. The living woman is in the living man’s lap. Both things are true at the same time.

The grief doesn’t leave the room. It just makes room for us beside it.