Page 19 of Feral Keep

The infected one on my shin, hot to the touch for days. Venom drips into it. Burns, then cools.

“Bad.”

The word is aimed at the wound. Not at me. At the infection, at the weeks of dirt ground into the scab, at the body that let this fester.

He lifts my hand to his mouth. The restraint marks on my wrist—layered, old. His fangs press into the scar tissue. Gentle. The venom softens the tightness, makes the skin more pliant.

“You don’t have to do that,” I say. To the ceiling. To the root-beams and the filtered light. Not to him, because talking to him would mean acknowledging that his fangs on my wrist are a conversation.

He bites the restraint mark again. Slower.

“I said you don’t have to⁠—”

“Bad.”

The word aimed at the scar. Not at me. The same flat tone as eat, the same guttural certainty. The scar is bad. Therefore the fangs stay.

Four years of fences never built a category for being held inside a predator’s body while it tends you.

My throat tightens around nothing, no words left to argue with him, just the strange, unsteady feeling of being fussed over by something that could end me with one closed fist and chooses, instead, to worry a scar on my wrist. I don’t know what to do with being someone’s concern. I’ve been an asset, a body, a headcount. I have not been a concern in four years, and it sits wrong and warm in my chest at the same time.

He feeds me.

Cooked meat from the clay pot, the smoke-and-fat smell of it filling my head before the taste even hits my tongue. His crimson fingers holding the food to my mouth. His dark eyes tracking every movement of my jaw.

I take the food. I don’t flinch at his hands.

I don’t notice that I don’t flinch.

He notices.

His eyes settle. The tension around his jaw releases a fraction. The sound he makes is quiet, not a word, not praise, something closer to the exhale of a problem becoming less of a problem.

I eat while his cock is still knotted inside me. The vibration low. The cum warm in my belly. My body taking food from his fingers while it holds his cum behind his knot. Both at once. Both the same settling.

I eat the last piece of meat from his fingers. He makes a sound—low, a rumble that vibrates against my back. The palm resting low on my stomach presses.

I’m not sure what he’s building.

I know my body is starting to cooperate with whatever it is.

That should frighten me more than it does. Somewhere under the warmth and the full belly, a small, familiar voice keeps asking what happens when the rut ends, when the food runs out, when whatever this is stops being enough to keep the horror quiet. I don’t have an answer. For once, I let myself not need one yet.

10

MAEVE

Ithink it’s been three days. Maybe. The light has shifted through the root-beam ceiling in a pattern that might be two sunrises, or might be one long day with clouds. Time is a thing that happens outside the furs. The den smells the same at every hour of it—packed earth, old moss gone dark with damp, and underneath both of those a warm mineral smell that’s just him, steady as a heartbeat, the only clock in here that hasn’t lied to me yet. Inside the furs, time is measured in cycles: the vibration climbing, the knot sealing, the grinding, the surge of heat, the lull. Then again.

I’m learning the pattern without deciding to.

Not knowing what day it is used to mean something bad. In the camps, losing count meant a docked ration, a clipboard tapping against someone’s hip while they decided what missing a day cost you. My chest still tightens when I try to count and land on nothing. But the tightening has nowhere to go. No clipboard here. No ration to lose. Just the shift of light through the roots and my body letting go of counting because counting doesn’t keep me alive anymore.

His cock does.

The lull is the strange part.

During the peaks—the knotting, the vibration, the grinding rhythm that pushes against things inside me that keep sending signals I can’t translate—my body has a job. Endure. The camp taught me that. My body endures the way it endured the work line: go quiet, hold still, wait for it to pass.