Page 22 of Feral Keep

I grunt. The sound shoved out of me by the thrust. My ribs press into the furs. His hips snap against my ass and the impact jolts through my pelvis, my spine, my teeth.

Again. Already.

The camp ran a schedule. Work, eat, sleep. The schedule was brutal, but it was a schedule. I could count the hours between shifts. Could brace for the whistle. This has no whistle. His body decides when the lull ends.

He drives in harder. The tail grips. His balls, fuller than before, already rebuilding the load. The swollen weight of them pressed against me with every stroke. The sound is obscene. Wet. His cock driving into what’s already full of him, the cum from the last round pushed deeper by the force of this one.

“Keep it inside.”

The words grunt against the top of my head, his mouth on my hair, the command landing in my body while his cock hits the end of me.

I can’t keep it inside. My body’s already doing it without me. My body decided three fucks ago that his cum was something it wanted to keep.

The camp-brain flares: your body is cooperating with the thing inside you.

I want to be angrier about that than I am. I try, for a second, to conjure the old fury, the one that got me through the work line and empty ration days. It doesn’t come. What comes instead is the quiet, ugly relief of a body finally being given enough, and relief was never supposed to feel like betrayal, and it does anyway.

He comes. The tail releases. The flood—massive, cramping, hitting my belly so hard my abs lock. His palm lands there again. Presses down.

His palm. My belly. Warmth pressing in from both sides.

His cock softens inside me. His hand stays on my abdomen, and the starved ache in my bones goes quieter than it’s been in months. The hunger isn’t screaming anymore. It’s not even talking. It’s—listening. The way I used to listen in the barracks at night, straining to hear the humming woman three bunks down.

He’s keeping me alive.

Not the way the camp kept me alive. The camp fed me enough to stand. Just enough to produce value, nothing more.

I watched what happened to workers who stopped producing value. Saw the empty bunk the next morning, the mattress gone before breakfast, no one saying a name out loud. You learned not to ask. You learned the silence where a name used to be.

He’s feeding me past value. Past survival. The food is more than enough. Whatever the cum is doing, I can’t name it. But my ribs hurt less. My shoulder grinds quieter. The bone-deep cold that’s lived in me for months is thinner after every flood.

His gold-dark eyes find mine. He checks whatever he checks when he looks at me—the thing I can’t name, the thing that tightens his jaw when the answer isn’t good enough yet.

I don’t lean toward him.

I hate that he’s checking. Hate that I care whether the answer’s good enough. The old fear calls this weakness, and weakness was the fastest way to get noticed, and getting noticed never went anywhere good. I press my mouth shut against all of it.

But when his hand shifts on my belly, my breath catches.

And I don’t pull away.

11

MAEVE

He carries me to water.

His cock is still inside me, soft, prehensile, the idle flex pressing against my walls as he walks. I’m draped against his chest, my legs around his waist, the position as familiar now as the sleeping position in the camp barracks. My arms hang. My head rests against his collarbone. His tail around my waist, holding me steady. His stride is long, even, each footfall vibrating through his body into mine.

We’ve been connected for four days. His cock hasn’t left my body since the claiming. The soft lulls, the grinding peaks, the fast fucks. All of it happens inside me. He shifts positions, lifts me, sets me down, feeds me, tends my wounds, sleeps behind me with his arm across my ribs, all of it with his cock settled inside me like a fact that doesn’t require renegotiation.

I’ve stopped being surprised by it. I put it in the same place as the barracks, the fences. Things that don’t change aren’t worth the energy of surprise.

Surprise used to live behind my sternum, a jolt that meant pay attention, meant get ready to run. That jolt hasn’t fired in two days. Maybe that’s healing. Or it’s just a quieter kind of danger—the kind you stop being ready for.

The stream runs through a root structure at the edge of his clearing. Rainwater collected in a stone hollow—not deep, maybe thigh-high if I were standing. The water is clear. Moving. It’s a sound I haven’t heard without fear in years—running water, nothing else underneath it. Water in the camp meant the barrels being filled. Water in the canopy meant rain that made the running harder. This water is just water. Running over stones. Catching light. It smells like wet stone and green growing things, cold and clean in a way that has nothing in common with the flat, standing-barrel smell of camp water.

He steps into the hollow. The water hits my legs first, warmer than it should be—his body heat radiating enough to take the edge off. Warm water on my skin—the first clean water on my skin since before the escape.