Page 109 of Feral Keep

Lisa looks at me. Her sharp eyes soften for a second. She’s watching me turn into something she hasn’t seen before, past camp survivor, past pregnant woman waiting on rescue. The word she used on the walk was settlement.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll build the schedule.”

Red hunts at dusk.

He comes back with a deer slung over his shoulders, mutated, the antlers wrong, the hide mottled green and brown for the canopy. The meat is still meat. He field-dressed it out there, so the carcass is clean when he sets it by the fire. The blood on his hands mixes with the blood from his own wounds, and the two smells follow him across the clearing in one copper cloud.

The women watch him. The first-trip women are used to it. The new women go rigid, the freeze the camps taught. Don’t move. Don’t attract attention. If you’re still enough, maybe it passes.

A young woman with her arms wrapped around herself starts crying when he walks past. He did nothing. He’s just big and male and close, and her body doesn’t know the difference between the thing that hurt her and the thing that’s feeding her. Everything male is danger. Everything large is death.

Red stops. He doesn’t look at her. He sets the deer by the fire, fifteen feet from where she’s standing, and walks back to the perimeter. He understands what he represents, and he is choosing not to make it worse.

I go to her and sit down. I don’t touch her. Camp-instinct: you don’t touch a woman in crisis unless she reaches first.

“He won’t hurt you,” I say.

She shakes her head. It isn’t agreement or refusal, just shaking, the way a body shakes when it has no words for what’s happening inside it.

“He’s mine,” I say. Quieter. “He’s bonded to me. He can’t—his body won’t let him hurt the people in his territory. You’re in his territory now.”

Her eyes find mine, red rimmed and exhausted. “They said that in the Cages too.”

The sentence hits me in the chest, because she’s right. The Gilded Cage recruiters said the same thing—he won’t hurt you, the bond protects you, the venom is a gift. Only the context is different. How is she supposed to know that? How is anyone?

For a second I have nothing. I believed those words once too, and somewhere in a Cage they cost a woman her body when the bond didn’t take. Mine is true because I lived it. That isn’t proof she can hold in her hands.

“Yeah,” I say. “They did.”

It’s the only honest thing I’ve got. I sit with her until the crying stops and her breathing evens out. She watches Red across the clearing, muscle shifting under the crimson skin, his tail swaying while he works. Something in her face changes, the first crack in the wall between what they told me and what I’m seeing.

It isn’t trust. It’s enough for now.

Night comes. The clearing fills with the sounds of fifty-two women settling, the murmurs, the coughs, the quiet crying that starts in the dark when the day’s endurance runs out.

Woodsmoke and unwashed bodies and the green tang of crushed bedding fill the air. It smells like a barracks built out in the open instead of behind a fence.

Lisa has them sorted into the shelters, three to a platform where there used to be one. Bodies press together for warmth the way the barracks taught us, breath in each other’s hair. Women sleep in groups because sleeping alone means no one hears you die.

Cora is in the sleeping hollow with Marta beside her, arms around the girl, holding her through the shaking. I checked on her an hour ago. The withdrawal is worse at night, the last of the venom warmth draining out, the pain settling into bones that forgot they were broken. Cora whimpered when I touched her hand. She sounded very young, and in the kind of pain that has no ceiling.

I couldn’t stay. The pregnancy and the exhaustion wouldn’t let me sit on the hard floor of the hollow. I hated leaving. Marta nodded at me. Go. I have her.

Red finds me by the fire. He’s done building for the night: four new shelters, a windbreak, a second fire pit. The Stained’s claw marks are crusting dark on his forearms, and the cracked rib announces itself in the hitch of his breath as he lowers himself down.

He settles close, his thigh against mine, warmth bleeding through where we touch. His palm rests low over my stomach. The twins answer with a kick, then another, the greeting that has become their language with their father. We’re here. You’re here.

“Fifty-two,” he says. The number settles in his mouth like a stone.

“Fifty-two.”

He’s quiet, eyes on the fire, the flames gold in his pupils, the light making his crimson skin glow like something forged. He’s working through the size of what we’ve taken on: food, shelter, room.

“I need to build more,” he says. It isn’t a complaint. He says it the way he says the fire needs wood or your feet need wrapping.

“You need to heal first.”

“I can build and heal.”