Page 92 of Feral Keep

He reaches for me. Slow. The injured side limiting him—the right arm moving carefully, the ribs protesting the twist. His hand cups the back of my neck. Draws me forward. Our foreheads touching. The horns framing my face. His breath on my mouth.

“Careful,” I say. “Your ribs.”

“My ribs are fine.”

“Your ribs are cracked and you’re a terrible liar.”

He kisses me. The answer to the argument—his mouth on mine, the pressure careful but sure, the taste of smoked meat and the mineral tang underneath that is just him. His tongue against my lower lip. I open for him. The kiss deepening, his good hand pulling me closer, the injured side be damned.

I straddle his lap, gentle, careful of the bruised side. This close, he smells like woodsmoke and warm stone and something under both of those that’s only him, the same smell that used to mean danger and now just means safe. I settle onto his thighs, my knees wide, my hands on his shoulders. The belly between us—bigger now, the twins growing. His hands span my hips. The thumbs at the crease of my thighs, the fingers wrapping around to the small of my back. Holding me like I’m the thing he built the territory for.

His cock is already hard against my inner thigh, the heat of it, the tip curling toward me—the idle seeking that his body does when I’m close, the slow flex that finds the warmth. I reach down. Take him in my hand. He exhales—a shudder, the sound of a man who has been in pain for three days and is about to feel something else.

I guide him in. Slow. Inch by inch. Sinking down on him while his hands grip my hips and his breath goes ragged and the stretch—the endless, impossible stretch of him—fills me from the inside out. I take him to the base. Hold. Both of us breathing. His forehead against mine. The fire crackling. The warren warm and close around us. The world outside—the women, the camp, the twenty-five we left behind—held at bay by the membrane of his wings and the rasp of his breath above me.

I move. Barely. A roll of my hips, the grind that seats him deep and holds him there—no thrusting, no riding, just the slow, circular press that moves him inside me without jarring his ribs. He fills me at a different angle with each roll, the living curl of his cock finding new places inside me, the tip pressing forward and then easing, the constant subtle adjustment that means his body is listening to mine.

His hands flex on my hips. The groan building in his chest, the sub-vocal rumble low in my spine, warmer than the rut’s desperate vibration, slower.

“Maeve—” His voice breaks, wrecked with feeling.

I press my mouth to the healing gash on his cheek. My lips on the new skin, the tender line where the Unmade’s claw split him open. I kiss it. Soft. The same tending he gave me—the mouth on the wound, the breath on the skin, the message that says I see where you’re broken and I’m here.

His arms come around me. Both of them—even the right side, even with the rib, the pain overridden by the need to hold me. My whole body pressed against his. The belly between us, the twins still, the cock deep inside me, his arms tight around me, the firelight warm on our skin.

The orgasm builds like sunrise, a slow warmth spreading through my hips, the pulse of it steady, the feeling of being full of him in every way a body can be full. His mouth in my hair. His hands on my back. His cock pulsing inside me, the knot swelling gently, not the rut’s vise, just a holding, the body’s way of saying stay.

I come with my arms around his neck. Quiet. The orgasm rolling through me in long, slow waves that tighten around him. He comes after—his hips pressing up once, the controlled thrust of a man managing a cracked rib, and the groan buried in my hair. The warmth spreading inside me. The knot holding. The two of us locked together in the firelight.

I don’t move. He doesn’t let me. His arms tight. His knot pulsing. His mouth at the crown of my head, breathing into my hair.

“Two more days,” I say. “Then we go back.”

He nods against my hair.

Two more days. The cracked rib will be healed enough. He’ll be strong enough to fight what’s waiting.

I don’t know yet what’s waiting. I don’t know that Shayla has spent these same three days building something worse than a barracks door. I don’t know that the camp we left behind has changed.

What I do know, lying here with him soft and heavy inside me and his arms locked around my ribs like he’s afraid I’ll evaporate, is that this is too good. Camp-brain has a rule about that. Good things get taken. Good things are how they get you—you let your guard down for a full meal, a kind word, a night without a beating, and then the ground opens up. I don’t want to think it. I think it anyway, the small mean voice that’s kept me alive since I was fourteen, and I hate that even here, even now, my shoulders are already bracing for the bill to come due.

I just hold him. His heartbeat under my palm. His cock softening inside me, the warmth of his cum settling into the place where the twins are growing. The fire crackles. The canopy shifts. The women’s breathing from the shelters below rises through the floor of the warren.

I count the days. I count them the old way, the camp way, like counting is the only thing standing between me and whatever’s coming.

39

MAEVE

Day five. Red is almost healed.

The bruise is a yellow smear on his side. The gash on his cheek is a faded line. In a week it’ll be invisible against the crimson. He moved a root-brace this morning that weighed more than me, and the hitch was barely there. Shade healing—the body that rebuilds its mate can rebuild itself almost as fast.

The warren has become something else while we healed. Lisa did that. Five days of her voice directing traffic, five days of her chalk-stone marks and her head counts and her blunt, practical authority. Fifteen freed women have started to look less like refugees and more like something. A group. The terror of the first night has given way to the rhythms Lisa imposed on them: water at dawn, food distribution, clearing work in shifts, fire tending in rotation. The structure is a mirror of the camps, Lisa knows this, the tight set of her mouth says so, but the difference is the women can walk away from it. They just don’t.

Watching it settle into place pulls me in two directions at once, something strange and hard to name. Relief, because bodies starved of order for four years come apart without it, and Lisa giving them a shape to move inside is its own kind of mercy. And underneath the relief, something that itches, some old alarm that doesn’t care that this schedule is kind. I hear water at dawn, food distribution, shifts and my shoulders still brace for the whistle, for the hand that grabs an elbow too hard. I have to keep telling myself that Lisa’s voice isn’t Shayla’s voice just because the words rhyme.

Red hasn’t pushed. He builds the shelters and brings the food and stays at the edge when the women cluster, giving them the distance their bodies need before their minds can catch up. Three of them came to the cooking surface today, close enough to watch him turn the meat. They didn’t speak to him. He didn’t speak to them. But they stood there for ten minutes before drifting back, and one of them, a thin woman with a scar that runs from her ear to her jaw, looked over her shoulder as she left, just looking.