Page 28 of Feral Keep

The thought. That’s the thing that changes everything. Not the orgasm. My body did that on its own. But the thought—I wanted—means my mind was in the room. Somewhere in the scream, somewhere in the arch of my back, my mind was here, not floating above the furs watching it happen. Here. In my body. In his lap. Wanting.

I wanted more.

His thumb moves against my stomach. Absent. Slow. Like he’s marking time with it while I go somewhere he can’t follow.

Before the camps, my mother’s hands were gentle. The women in the settlement were gentle with each other, mostly. I had eight years of being touched without pain behind it before the Ordained came and took everything gentle out of my life in a single night.

Four years of camps undid those eight years completely. Four years of everything that touches you hurts you. The lesson hammered in until the settlement was a fading dream and the flinch was all that was left.

And now a nine-foot monster made my body do something it’s never finished before, something the camp never let it complete. The flutter with Lisa was the closest I got—a warmth that never caught, never burned, never ripped a sound from my chest. This caught. This burned. This tore through me so hard I screamed and didn’t stop screaming and the silence the camps taught me couldn’t find the brake.

That’s the most dangerous thing that has happened to me since the fence. Four years of camp know it in the same place they know not to eat snow and not to look the Eunuchs in the eye. Wanting is dangerous. Wanting means you have something to lose.

Probably, that instinct is right—the one that kept me alive for four years.

I think of all the days I didn’t let myself want anything more than the next meal, the next unbroken bone. Years of it. I could have wanted something all that time and I didn’t, because wanting cost more than I had to spend. I grieve those years right now, small and furious about it, here in the furs with a monster’s cum still warm in my belly, because I’ll never get them back and no amount of this, whatever this is, pays that debt.

His hand is warm against my stomach when I close my eyes. The knot hums. The tail tip rests against my clit—not pressing, not circling. Just there. A point of warmth.

A promise.

Promises aren’t something the camp let me keep either end of. The ones who made them broke them for sport, and the ones who believed them broke worse. I let this one sit in my chest anyway, a small stubborn ember, because, young and stupid about it, I want to believe a body can promise something a voice can’t take back.

“What the fuck,” I whisper again. Softer this time. Almost to myself.

His thumb strokes my belly. Back and forth. Slow.

I sleep. The dreams are not nothing this time. The dreams have heat in them.

13

MAEVE

The days don’t blur the way they did before. Before the orgasm. Before the want. Now each day has a shape to it—a rhythm that isn’t the rhythm of survival. It’s the rhythm of the rut, and it’s the most honest thing that’s ever happened inside my body.

He wakes me with his cock hardening.

Not the soft flex of the lull. The full swell. The knot already thickening at the base, already swelling toward the seal that will lock him inside me. His tail is wrapped around his cock, the bone-white length cinching just above the knot, the pressure making his balls fill heavier against his body. The venom on my neck, sharp and green, cutting through the thick, warm smell of him that’s been soaking into the furs for a week now. The rumble starting in his chest before any word comes out.

“Need,” he says. The feral speech. The word that comes when his human half is drowning. “Mate.”

I’m already opening my legs.

No permission needed, no debate. Whatever used to live in my head—the counting, the scorekeeping—has mostly relocated to the space between my thighs.

That should scare me. Some mornings it still does, a half-second lag before my body finishes the thought for me. Not this morning. This morning there’s no lag at all, and the absence of it is its own kind of frightening.

Gray early light filters down through the root-beam ceiling, thin and colorless, the kind of light that hasn’t decided yet what the day will look like. He positions me on my side, my back against his chest, the way we woke yesterday and the day before. My top leg bent, my bottom leg stretched out, the position opening me at the angle that slides his knot into the deepest seal. His arm slides under my waist. Lifts me slightly, just enough to angle my hips. His cock finds my opening.

His heat. His weight. The knot is already fat at the tip, already pressing.

He drives in.

Fast, no patient glide of the lull this time. The knot pounds through my opening, one massive swell, another, the seal snapping shut tight as the knot locks. The vibration starts immediately, the hum racing from zero to full-body buzz in the space of three heartbeats. His tail flexes, tightening around his cock, and the pressure makes the knot swell even harder against my walls.

A sound tries to come out of me, the beginning of something. His hand clamped on my thigh, holding me open, keeping me from clenching off the sensation.

The old rule fires before I can stop it: quiet, quiet, sound brings hands, sound brings punishment. My jaw clenches around the noise and traps it half-formed in my throat, and an old reflex in my spine is already bracing for the correction that never comes.