Page 14 of Feral Keep

The vibration continues through the lock. Low. Constant. The hum buzzing through the knot into my walls, encouraging the clenching, the absorption. His tail tip stays on my clit—lighter now, not the focused pressure of before. A warmth that keeps the whole system lit. Every few seconds, a slow press that makes my walls flutter and pull another surge of his cum deeper.

He’s still inside me, deep, locked, vibrating, when his tail reaches behind him. His tail stretches toward the clay pot beside the sleeping hollow. Cooked meat, the same he fed me before. The tapered end wraps around a piece, pulls it from the pot, brings it forward. Past his hip. Past my thigh. To his hand, which takes it without looking.

His hand holds the food to my mouth.

Fed from both ends. The thought arrives and I have nowhere to put it.

I take the meat with my teeth. I chew on the good side. I swallow. The swallow moves under his gold-black eyes, tracked the same way it was before, the same settling in his body when the food goes down. Inside me, his cock pulses again—another surge of heat and fullness. His hand offers the next piece.

I am being fed and fucked at the same time. His feral brain makes no distinction.

“Why?” The word is muffled. Barely a sound. What I’m asking, I couldn’t say. Why the food. Why the knot. Why his palm resting low on my stomach. Why any of it, when the camps told me this would be teeth and claws and screaming.

His thumb strokes my lower lip. Wiping a trace of juice from the meat. The touch is so precise, so deliberate, that my breath catches around it.

His mouth is on the crown of my head—the only place he can reach without curving down. The difference in our size turning a kiss into a placement. Not gentle. Present. His breath in my hair while his hand feeds me and his cock fills me.

I eat because starving people eat. I take the food from his fingers because the fingers are there and the food is there, and the alternative is refusing food while knotted to a monster.

But something else is happening. His cum warm inside me. Food warm in my stomach. His palm steady on my ribs. The tail on my clit, not pushing for the orgasm that couldn’t crest. Just there. A point of warmth that connects to the warmth inside me.

I am warm. I am full. I am held against nine feet of crimson muscle, silver hair, gold-dark eyes, the last of the light through the roof opening gone thin and copper above us. It is inside me. Around me. Feeding me.

He’s going to hurt me. He hasn’t hurt me. He fed me. Yes. He’s inside me. Yes. He fed me while he’s inside me. Yes. This is⁠—

I can’t finish the thought. I keep reaching for what to call the thing that fucks you and feeds you at the same time, with the same hands, the same focus, the same flat golden intensity that says eat and stay and good like a vocabulary stripped to the only words that matter. I keep reaching and there’s nothing there. No word. No category. Just the furs, his hand, the warmth, the not-knowing.

His palm settles low on my stomach. The flat of it, the crimson warmth, pressing gently against the space below my navel. He presses. Not hard. Feeling. His fingers spread across my abdomen—spanning the space where his cum pools, the place where my body is full of him. The touch is two things at once: a claim—mine—and a question—is it enough.

It’s not enough. It’s a start.

His palm stays where it is, low on my stomach. The knot holds. The vibration hums.

His cock is inside me and it is going to stay there. I understand this now—somewhere below thought, the way I understood the camp fences were permanent on the first night behind them. The understanding arrives not as fear but as the strangest kind of relief.

Nothing is coming for me. No guard to drag me back to the work line. No hands to pull me from the barracks before dawn. No shove, no impact. There is a locked knot, a warm body, his palm low on my stomach, food finally in it.

My eyes fall shut, the locked knot the last thing that reaches me before the dark takes me. His cum is warm inside me, spreading through tissue that hasn’t been warm in years. The furs are soft beneath me. His body is a wall above me, around me, in me.

I sleep.

The first real sleep in weeks. Deep. Heavy. The kind that pulls you under and holds you there. The sleep of a body that has been given, for the first time since the world ended, something worth resting for.

His palm doesn’t move from where it rests. His cock doesn’t leave my body. He holds me inside his nest the way he holds his territory—completely, without negotiation, with the patient and absolute certainty of something that has decided what belongs to it.

Some last thin thread of camp-brain tries to warn me before the dark takes me all the way under. Sleeping means you’re not watching. Sleeping means whatever happens next, happens to you. I hear it. I let it go anyway. Four years of never sleeping deep enough to dream, and here, tonight, wrapped around something the camps swore would kill me, I choose to let go of the watching.

I sleep, and I dream of nothing, and nothing is the kindest dream I’ve had in four years.

8

RED

She sleeps.

Against my chest. Her ribs pressing through her skin into the crimson of my body. My knot still locked. My cock still deep. The vibration humming through the seal, into her walls, into the bone of her.

Small. She is so small against my chest.