Page 89 of Feral Keep

“Nobody comes back.” Her hand hovers, not quite touching, protecting the raw skin. “Nobody ever comes back.”

I don’t have an answer for that except to be standing here.

I go to him.

“Let me see,” I say.

“I’m—”

“Don’t.” I put my hand on his arm. The muscle hard under the crimson skin, the warmth of him familiar against my palm. “Don’t say fine. Let me see.”

He leans back against the trunk. Lifts his arm on the injured side. The movement costs him. I see it in the tightening of his jaw, the way his breath catches. The sound that doesn’t make it past his teeth.

The bruise has spread. A deep, angry purple-black covers most of his right side, from the bottom of his ribs to his hip—his blood pooling under the skin, the damage visible. The skin is hot to the touch. Underneath, the muscle is swollen, rigid with the guarding that the body does automatically around a break. The Unmade hit him twice in the same spot—the full force of those disproportionate thighs driving into already-damaged tissue.

“Cracked,” I say. I know cracked ribs. I lived with them for months after the claiming. The shallow breathing. The careful way you hold yourself, the body building a cage of tension around the break to keep it still.

Guilt lands hard and sudden, a fist under my sternum. I did this. I asked him to walk into a fight for women he’d never met, and now his ribs are the same wreck mine were three months ago. I swallow it down. Falling apart over it does nothing for him right now.

He nods, short, saving his breath.

“The cheek?”

“Surface.” He touches it. Winces. “The—the thing’s claws. Not deep.”

I press my palm flat against the bruise on his side. He hisses. But he doesn’t pull away. The same way I didn’t pull away when his venom burned through my cracked bones during the rut—you hold still because the hand touching you is the hand that heals.

“When we get home,” I say, “you’re resting.”

His gold eyes drop to mine. The ghost of the almost-smile, the tiny curve of his mouth that I’ve been seeing more often since the feral wall came down. “The women need⁠—”

“The women need you alive. You rest.”

The canopy is silent around us, the women sleeping in the hollow, their breathing mingling, the sound of fifteen bodies exhaling at once in the dark. Lisa sits at the edge of the group, awake, her back straight, her eyes on the tree line, keeping watch, because Lisa doesn’t trust anyone else to do it right.

“Twenty-five,” I say. Quiet. Just for him. “We left twenty-five.”

He doesn’t answer. He covers my hand with his where it rests on his side, the crimson fingers folding over my knuckles, claws retracted, the grip careful even though his ribs are screaming.

“We’ll go back,” he says.

“I know.”

“When I can—fight.” The words come slow, not from injury, from the effort of admitting the limitation. The male who tore an Unmade apart and ripped cattle fencing open with his hands can’t go back tomorrow. His body needs days. Maybe a week. The cracked rib, the gash, the deep bruising. Even Shade healing takes time when the damage is this real.

I lean my forehead against his arm, the crimson skin warm against my face. His smell—blood-warm, mineral, the musk of a mated Shade underneath the iron tang of his wounds—fills my breath. The twins kick. Both of them, the synchronized double-thump that I’ve started to feel as conversation. His free hand settles low, over the curve of me. Feeling the kicks. Counting them the way he counts everything, with the attention of a man who lost three children and will not lose these.

“Ruth,” I say.

“I know.”

“She was twenty-two. She sang in the barracks. After lights out. Quiet enough that the Eunuchs wouldn’t hear. She had a voice that—” My throat closes. The camp-trained part of me clamps down on it—you don’t cry about the dead, you count them and you move. But the part of me that isn’t camp anymore, the part that grew in this territory with this man’s venom in my blood, his hands on my body, his patience rewriting the rules I learned behind fences—that part breaks through. “She just wanted out. She was running toward the gap. She was almost through.”

His hand presses gently against my belly. Holding. The way he holds everything, with the full weight of attention that a nine-foot body can bring to a single point of contact.

“We’ll bury her when we go back,” he says. “Properly.”

I nod against his arm. The tears come—not camp-tears, not the swallowed, silent kind, but something else, loud enough that my shoulders shake, wet enough that his arm is damp under my face. The tears of a woman who walked into a camp and carried fifteen people out and lost one and left twenty-five behind and is sitting in the canopy with her injured mate trying to figure out how to go back and do it again.