Page 27 of Feral Keep

I almost laugh. The sound comes out wet, cracked, not really a laugh at all. “What the fuck,” I say. To the stone ceiling. To the furs. To whatever is left of the person I was before this. “What the fuck.“

His chest vibrates against my back. Not the knot-vibration. Something else. Shorter, rougher. Almost—almost like a laugh, if he remembered what laughing was.

I’m still shaking when he shifts me. He lifts me off his lap—his cock dragging inside me as the angle changes, the knot softened just enough to allow the movement but still thick, still humming. He turns me in his arms. Lays me on my back in the furs with my legs open around his hips. The position change puts him over me, his forearms braced on either side of my head, the wall of his chest and shoulders above me blocking out the canopy light. His gold eyes looking down.

I haven’t seen his face straight on during sex. Always from the side, always tucked against his chest, always spooned or held or carried. But now I’m on my back and he’s above me. His eyes are gold. They are not the eyes of a feral animal.

They are the eyes of something that knows exactly what just happened.

“Again,” he says.

“I can’t⁠—”

He grinds. One slow roll of his hips, his cock pressing forward inside me, the girth dragging against tissue that is screaming-tender from the orgasm, swollen, oversensitive. The tip finds the spot on the front wall. Presses. The tail has followed me—the bone-white tip finding my clit again from this new angle, sliding between us where his body meets mine.

“Again.”

My body doesn’t care what I can or can’t do. My body is already clenching, already gripping, already responding to the pressure of his cock on the spot and the tail on the clit and the knot rehardening at my opening.

He fucks me. Slow. Shallow thrusts, the knot never fully leaving, just rocking—back, press, grind—each stroke dragging the girth through me in a long slow pull that makes my toes curl into the furs. His wings unfold above us. The membranes spread wide, blocking the light, turning everything red-dim and close. The heat of him above me. The heat of him inside me. His breath on my face.

The third orgasm builds from the ruins of the first two. There’s no energy left to clench my teeth against it. When it comes—smaller, slower, a long rolling squeeze that pulls a whimper from my throat instead of a scream—I don’t go quiet.

I don’t go somewhere else.

I stay.

He watches my face while I come, and whatever he sees there makes his jaw clench. The rumble in his chest gets louder. His hips press forward and hold, buried deep, the knot locking tight as the vibration surges. His cock pulses inside me—hot and thick, his cum flooding in while my walls are still squeezing, the smell of it rising between us thicker than I’ve ever taken at once, hot metal and something sweeter underneath that makes my mouth water even though it’s nowhere near my mouth.

“Mate,” he says. Not good, not a command, just the word, like it’s the only word left.

I close my eyes. The tears are hot on my temples where they run into my hair—what’s left of it, the sparse curls against the furs. Nothing hurts. That might be the reason I’m crying.

He feeds me while he’s still inside me. Lifts my head with one hand, holds strips of dried meat to my mouth with the other, the salt and smoke of it reaching me before the meat does. His cock is softening to the lull-state—the prehensile flex lazy again, but he’s still thick enough that every shift of him moves through me when I swallow. The knot still sealed, the vibration low. His cum heavy and warm inside me.

“Eat.”

I eat. I chew on the good side. I swallow. He holds the next piece to my lips before I’ve finished the first, impatient, the way he gets when the part of him that needs me fed is louder than the part of him that understands chewing takes time.

“Slower,” I say. My voice is raw. Wrecked from the screaming. “Give me a second.”

He waits. Holds the meat in front of my lips. His eyes stay on my jaw, watching the muscles work. When I open my mouth he puts the next piece in and I almost smile, because the patience is so thin, so barely held, the tremor in his crimson fingers the only sign that the rut is still running under the surface.

I eat from his hands. My body is full—food in my stomach, his cum in my belly, the venom warm in my blood. The shaking has slowed to a tremor, then to nothing. My walls have relaxed around the knot, though the aftershocks still come—each one making my abs tighten and my breath catch and his eyes drop to my belly.

His palm spreads over my stomach. The familiar press. The familiar check.

The check should feel like a guard counting stock at shift change, clipboard, move along. It doesn’t. My belly tightens up under his palm, but not the flinch-tightening from before. Something closer to leaning in, if leaning in was a thing my stomach muscles could do on their own.

I’ve tried before. My own hand in the barracks dark, biting my lip so no one would hear, chasing something I half-remembered from the settlement—a feeling more than a memory, warmth between my legs, pressure that meant something good. It never worked. My body was too starved. Too clenched. Too busy surviving to spend energy on anything that wasn’t keeping me upright.

And once—Lisa. In the back of the storage shed during a rain delay, the air thick with wet burlap and mildew and the mineral smell of rain coming through the gap under the door. Her hand between my legs, mine between hers. Both of us trying to find something the camp hadn’t taken. Her fingers were rough from the clearing work, careful in a way hands hadn’t been careful with me in years. I got close. A flutter, a warmth, a tightness that might have been the start of something. Then a guard’s boot on the gravel outside. We froze. The flutter died. We never talked about it.

I wanted Lisa’s hand to keep going. I wanted my own fingers to find the right place at the right speed. Those wants were small, quiet, ashamed of themselves. They lived in the dark and died in the dark.

This want screamed. This want arched my back off the furs and tore a sound from my chest that filled the warren and I didn’t bite it off. I didn’t go quiet. I didn’t go upstairs.

I wanted.