Page 18 of Feral Keep

In the camps, the women talked about knots, not often, not loudly, but in the barracks at night, after lights-out, they whispered under the thin blankets that smelled like lye and sweat. The women who’d been through the Cages, the ones who didn’t turn, who got sent to the camps after a Shade rejected them or the mating didn’t take, they sometimes talked. The broken ones. The ones who stared at nothing. Gretchen listened. I listened. We held onto everything we heard because information was the only thing in the camps that didn’t cost calories.

Twenty minutes, one of them said. A woman named Ruth who’d spent three days in a Cage before they threw her back to the labor lines. Her eyes were empty. Her voice was flat. Twenty minutes and the knot goes down.

Half an hour, said another. A girl from the eastern block who’d been pulled for a Cage trial and brought back shaking. She held up her hands. Thirty minutes, maybe. Then it was over.

Thirty minutes was the longest anyone reported. That number lodged itself the way every scrap of camp intelligence did: filed, fixed, final. Knots last twenty to thirty minutes. Move on.

His knot has been locked for over an hour.

I know because the light through the root-beam ceiling has shifted. The angle changed. The gold went to white. And his cock is still pulsing inside me, not weakening, not slowing, the same relentless contractions, the same flood of cum, the same vibration humming through my pelvis into my spine.

The camp-brain tries to make this fit. Twenty to thirty minutes. The information doesn’t match what’s happening. The knot is rock-hard. His cum is still coming. My belly is distended with it—the curve presses outward under his palm, the pressure of the cum trapped behind the seal of the knot. Nowhere to go. All of it inside me.

He shifts. Adjusts his hips. His cock pulses again and another wave of cum floods into a space that shouldn’t have room for more, and my body makes room anyway. My walls stretching. My belly pressing outward. The warmth so deep now that I can’t tell where the cum ends and my own tissue begins.

Twenty to thirty minutes. Ruth was wrong. Ruth was so wrong.

The second hour passes.

I know because the light changes again. His cock is still hard. Still pulsing. The contractions have slowed, longer gaps between the surges, but each one still pushes more cum into me. The knot hasn’t softened a fraction. The vibration hasn’t stopped.

My belly is full, not hungry-full, not food-full, but a different kind of full. A heaviness in my abdomen that presses down into my pelvis and up against my ribs. His cum is warm inside me—warmer than the rest of my body, as if the heat is its own thing, independent, radiating outward from my center. My skin feels warmer. My bones feel quieter. The cracked ribs that have been screaming for three months are just... humming. A dull hum instead of a sharp edge.

His palm settles low on my stomach again. Checking. The same gesture as before, but now there’s something new under it. A curve. A weight. His fingers trace the swell of it and the sound he makes is low, satisfied, the same rumble he made when I ate.

I lie in the furs with his cock locked inside me and his cum filling my belly and I try to locate the horror.

It’s there somewhere, waiting. I go looking for it on purpose, the way you press a bruise to make sure it still hurts, because a version of me that doesn’t feel horror at this doesn’t recognize herself. I find a thin trace of it, distant, going quiet almost as soon as I touch it. But the body has a louder voice right now, and the body says: warm. Full. Nothing hurts. Three things it hasn’t had in combination since before the camps, all three at once, all three from his cock inside me.

No word fits what I’m feeling.

It isn’t pleasure. Pleasure is a camp-word—something the guards took from you or something you pretended to feel when they wanted it. This isn’t that. This is a quieter thing. A settling. The body finding a temperature it didn’t know it was looking for.

Almost satisfied. Almost enough.

My walls clench around his cock. Not the desperate reflex-grip from before. Something softer. A holding.

His cock pulses. More cum. My belly presses against his palm.

There’s no verdict this time, no warning bell ready to fire, no litany of danger queued up behind it. Just this—a thing that is happening, and for once nothing left to argue with.

Between the peaks, he tends.

The vibration eases. Slows. The knot stays—rock-hard, sealed—but his cock softens behind it. The prehensile tip settles into a gentle idle press against my front wall. Just present. Just there.

His hands start on my back, not sexual, not rough. His crimson palms move across my shoulders, my spine, the sharp ledge of my shoulder blades. Pressing. Tracing. The same focused attention as before—understanding, not using.

He finds the wound on my forearm. The old gash from the clearing line—a mutated branch that caught me eight weeks ago. I cleaned it with stream water and wrapped it with a strip from my shirt. It got infected anyway. The scab is thick, dark, the skin around it hot and red.

He lifts my arm. Brings the wound toward his face—bending my elbow, raising my forearm until the gash is at his mouth. He’s still knotted inside me. His mouth can’t reach lower than my shoulders unless he brings me to him. So he brings me to him.

His fangs press into the wound. Not deep—just enough to break through the scab. The venom hits the infection like fire hitting deadwood, a sharp mineral smell rising off the wound before the burn even registers. I flinch. He doesn’t stop. A second bite, offset from the first, bracketing the worst of the infected tissue. The pain flares, then drops, then disappears as the venom chases it out. The infected skin goes cool.

He checks. Those gold-dark eyes on the wound. Then his tail finds the next site—a scrape on my shin, too far for his mouth to reach. The tail tip traces the scab, venom dripping into the broken skin. Cool. Targeted.

He tends my wounds.

One by one. His hands and his tail working the sites he can’t reach with his mouth, his fangs on everything he can. He knows where every cut, every scrape, every bruise lives on my body. He noticed them while I slept.