Page 29 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

She lifts herself until I almost slip out, just the head of my cock inside her, and holds there. My hands tighten on her hips. Every nerve in my body screams at me to pull her back down.

"Wait." Her voice comes out rough. She lowers herself one inch. Two. Takes me back inside her so slow I can feel every ridge of her around me. "I want to feel all of you."

I groan and my head drops back against the pillow. She rides me like that — slow, deliberate, lifting until I'm almost gone and sinking back down until I'm buried to the hilt. Each stroke drags the full length of my cock against the spot that makes her clench and her breath stutter. She's edging herself as much as me, her thighs trembling, sweat on her chest, the pendant swinging with every roll of her hips.

"Thomas." My name comes out of her mouth wrecked.

I slide my thumb between us and find her clit and she clenches around me so hard my vision whites out at the edges. I circle her clit and her rhythm falters, her hips grinding down onto me, chasing her pleasure, losing the control she's been holding onto. I thrust up to meet her and she drops her forehead against mine, her fingers locked around my horns, her breath ragged against my lips.

"Come with me, Tom," she says, and I stop holding back. I drive up into her, deep, and she comes with my name caught between her lips and her whole body pulsing around my cock. I follow her mid-thrust, buried so deep I feel her heartbeat against mine, the purr breaking open and filling the apartment, the hallway, the compound.

The horn pendant presses against my chest when she curls into me. Her heartbeat against my ribs.

Epilogue

Isla - 3 Months Later

The barred owl lifts off my glove and catches the updraft above the ridge. The same owl who clawed Tom's arm open the night he brought her in.

Her wingspan blocks the December sky for one second—five feet of recovered muscle and mended bone, the splinted wing that dragged when she arrived now cutting the air like she never forgot how. She banks east over the tree line and the cold hits the empty leather on my hand, still warm where she sat.

Twelve weeks since Knox offered me thirty acres of club land and I interrogated him about creek flow and wind patterns before I said yes.

I built the flight-conditioning line in October, strung between two Douglas firs behind the new mews, and I ran her twice a day until she could sustain altitude for a quarter mile without dropping. She screamed at me every morning. I fed her quail and mice and told her she could hate me all she wanted as long as she could fly.

Behind me, Tom stands with his hands in his jacket pockets. His glasses fog in the cold and he pulls them off to wipe them on his shirt, squinting at the ridge where the owl circles.

"Strix varia," he says, because Tom never calls an animal by its common name when the Latin exists. He tracks her across the ridge. "Strong wing."

I look back at him. "You're still showing off."

"I'm still paying attention."

His mouth pulls at the corner. He didn't always know how to do that. It took a fight in my kitchen at six in the morning and me telling him to ask me what I want before he figured out where the line sits. We are growing together.

The owl banks north and drops behind the ridge, gone. My chest fills and empties in the same breath because every release does this to me, the bird I kept alive for four months choosing the air over my glove, the way it should be.

I strip the glove off and tuck it under my arm. His hand finds the small of my back as we walk down the ridge toward the compound. I lean into it.

Twelve weeks of construction, and I still stop at the gate some mornings to look at what we built.

The raptor mews face east, the way I told Knox they would. Four flight chambers wider than anything I had on the twelve acres, heated intake cages, drainage that runs downhill instead of pooling. The brothers built in weeks what I spent six years patching alone.

The surgery station has walls and a roof and the welded table I hauled from the old property on the back of Garrett's flatbed. It took four of them to load it. Diesel lifted his end alone and looked confused when Garrett told him to wait for help.

The fawn pen runs along the creek at two hundred feet from the access road, the distance I asked for, with the windbreak Garrett framed from cedar planks I picked out myself. Two orphans in residence from a doe hit by a truck on Route 4 in November. They feed on the native plants I put in along the fence line and startle at everything but settle faster each week.

The fox habitat sits in the tree line where the Douglas firs grow close enough to block the road noise. The den family from the old-growth stump scattered during the raid—the vixen and kits I couldn't relocate because moving a wild den kills it. I spent six weeks running feeding stations along the woods edge. Two of the kits came in. The vixen hasn't. I leave food at the tree line every night.

The juvenile red-tailed hawk—the one who bit me and screamed at me every two hours while I force-fed him Carnivore Care—I released him in November. Last week I spotted him two miles north, perched in a Douglas fir above the creek, hunting. Healthy weight. Full adult plumage. I sat in my truck and watched him drop on a field mouse from fifty feet and I didn't cry because I don't cry over raptors, but I did sit there for ten minutes with the engine off and my hands on the wheel.

I brought him home in my head. The bird doesn't need me anymore. That's the whole point.

Our cottage sits fifty yards from the mews, close enough that I can hear the birds at first light and far enough that the nighttime sounds don't stress them.

Tom built it in under two weeks with Garrett and Chain on the framing. Orcs and minotaurs don't need cranes. I found the plans on graph paper under his medical texts one evening—careful measurements in his block handwriting, every dimension drawn to fit the two of us.

He drew the countertops four inches lower than standard because I'm five-six and I spend half my life reaching for things taller people put on shelves. The doorframes run wider for a seven-foot minotaur who carries medical kits in both hands and doesn't want to turn sideways every time he comes through. A mud room off the back door, deep enough for two pairs of boots, a wall hook for field bags, a shelf for the antiseptic and bandage rolls and syringes and the accumulated debris of two people who spend their days in dirt and animal fur.