Page 99 of Feral Keep

The twelve who came are clustered in the compound, blinking, their bare feet on the hard-packed earth. Some of them are crying. One woman carries Cora on her back, the soft-bonded girl too deep in the venom haze to walk. Her head lolls against the woman’s shoulder. Her eyes are open but she isn’t seeing the compound. She’s seeing whatever the venom shows her, the warm floating nothing her body counts as peace.

“Get them to the tree line,” I say. “North. Into the canopy.”

“What about—” Lisa jerks her chin toward the supply building. The sounds inside are getting louder. Something heavy hits the floor. The chain sings taut and snaps, a link breaking with a metallic crack.

“Red’s handling it.”

“And the Stained?”

The word drops between us like a stone in water. Lisa saw Red’s face last night when he explained what was coming. She doesn’t know what a Stained looks like. She knows what it did to a nine-foot male’s expression, and that’s enough.

“Red’s handling that too.”

Lisa’s jaw tightens around an argument she doesn’t voice. The camp built it into her — you don’t leave a pregnant woman alone in a compound with two kinds of monster. Then she turns to the women and her voice carries. Move, now, into the trees, don’t stop until I tell you. They move because Lisa says move. Lisa has never been wrong about when to run.

Shayla goes with them, in the middle of the cluster. Her grey hair has come undone from its tight pull and hangs in strands around her face. She doesn’t look at me as she passes. Her spine is straight, but there’s no authority left in it. She’s holding herself upright by will while everything she built comes apart around her.

One of the barracks women stops beside me. She’s young and thin, with a fresh bruise on her temple. She looks at the supply building. At my belly. At my face.

“Your Shade,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. “Is he going to⁠—”

“He’s freeing the one inside. Then we’re leaving.”

She stares at me. I can watch her trying to fit that into everything she’s been told. Shades don’t free other Shades. Shades are the enemy. The pregnant woman in front of her with a mated belly and new teeth and hair growing in strong shouldn’t exist.

“Move,” I tell her. Gentle. “Lisa has you.”

She goes.

I stand in the compound alone.

This place spent four years teaching my body what alone means here. My skin knows this dirt, remembers being small in it. I make myself keep my eyes on the supply building door instead of the barracks where I used to sleep. If I look at that door too long, I’m not sure which year I’ll be in.

The supply building goes quiet. The silence is worse than the noise — two predators in a small space, neither of them moving. Red pulses steady through the bond, the massive calm of a male waiting for another male’s feral brain to understand he isn’t here to fight.

I hold my breath. The twins kick. The canopy shifts.

Red comes out.

He’s bleeding from a fresh gash on his forearm. The caged Shade’s claws did it, the parting strike of a male who took the open door but had to draw blood on his way through. Red doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are bright gold, the pupils blown wide. Behind him the chain lies broken on the floor, the bolts pulled out of the wall, the metal twisted, the cuffs hanging empty.

“He’s free,” Red says.

“Is he⁠—”

The answer comes before I finish. The Shade explodes from the supply building.

He’s faster than I expected. Seven feet of mottled green-brown fury, the wings unfolding as he clears the door, the membranes stiff from weeks of binding, the joints popping as they spread. He hits the compound at a sprint. His head whips left, right, the nostrils flaring, his whole body shaking with the overload of open air and scent and space.

He sees me.

The gold eyes lock. His weight shifts forward, the massive thighs coiling, the feral brain reading female. I’m pregnant. I’m mated. I reek of Red’s venom and cum.

My whole body goes to ice. It arrives finished, no warning, no build, the same cold that used to hit when a Eunuch’s eyes landed on the wrong woman at headcount. My feet forget how to run. Some small voice under the panic measures the distance to the tree line anyway, and it doesn’t matter. I’m too slow.

Red steps between us, deliberate, all nine feet of him spreading wings in a display that says mine, not yours, do not approach. The rumble builds in his chest until the subsonic warning buzzes in my teeth.

The green-brown Shade freezes. His eyes lock on Red and I can see the challenge running behind them — size, posture, threat. Red is bigger. Red is bonded. Red is standing in front of his pregnant mate with every line of his body saying I will kill you if you take one more step toward her.