Page 32 of Feral Keep

His palm finds my stomach again. The familiar press. The familiar claim. “Stay.” The word is rough. Simple. “Always.”

The promise sits in the furs between us.

I don’t believe it. Everything the camps trained into me knows that promises are weapons and anything that seems permanent is just preparing you for the pain of losing it. But my body—the part of me that just came three times and is already getting ready to come again—wants to believe it so badly it hurts.

His hand slides down. Finds the swollen heat of my clit. Presses.

“Know,” he says. His voice is feral again, the edge returning. The rut is calling him back, pulling the human out of his eyes. His hips grind forward—a slow, possessive roll. “Always.”

He’s hardening again, thickening inside me, the knot beginning to swell. The cycle is turning. The next long knot is preparing itself.

My body starts preparing too.

His hand keeps working my clit. Slow. Building. The tail finds its way between us—the bone-white tip settling against my clit alongside his fingers, the pressure doubling, the pressure climbing. His cock thickens. The knot bumps against my opening.

“Ready?” His eyes are completely gold now. The human almost gone.

“Yeah,” I say. And I mean it in a way that would have terrified me eight days ago. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

He rolls me onto my side again. My back against his chest. My leg bent and my body open. His cock finds the angle. The knot presses. Locks. The vibration climbs from zero to full in three heartbeats.

The long knot takes us both.

Hours. Days. The concept of time stops having meaning. The vibration is the only thing that exists. The knot pulsing. The tail on my clit working slow circles, the pressure steady and relentless in a way I can’t name. His cock inside me, curving and flexing, the prehensile tip pressing against the spot, releasing, pressing again. The endless warm weight of his cum. His palm at my stomach. His breath on my neck. His venom marking as he claims, as he makes it absolutely clear to whatever part of my body still remembers the camps that I belong here.

The orgasms blur. One becomes two becomes three and the line between them vanishes. I’m just coming. Just vibrating at the frequency of his knot, just clenching at the rhythm of his cock, just existing in the space where his cum sits heavy and his tail works my clit. His voice says mine and mate and good. I don’t go somewhere else.

I don’t go quiet.

I stay.

When it ends—when the vibration finally drops and the knot finally releases and I finally surface from the waves that have been carrying me for hours—my ribs don’t hurt. My shoulder moves without grinding. My body is stronger, so much stronger, than the woman who collapsed at his tree roots just a week ago.

I’m sleeping against his chest before the food hits my mouth.

Rain starts somewhere above the canopy. The sound reaches us muted, distant, like drums behind a wall, and the smell of it filters down slow through the leaves—green and cold, cutting clean through the thick, musky warmth trapped in the furs. No dreams this time. Just the deep, bone-heavy sleep of a body that’s been working hard and knows it’s safe. His hand is on my belly when I wake—hours later, maybe a day later, time still doesn’t move the right way—and his cock is already hardening again.

The cycle turns.

Another lull. Another feed. Another fast fuck. Another long knot. The repetition is hypnotic. The cycle is teaching my body something the camp spent four years trying to break: that pleasure doesn’t have to be earned, that wanting isn’t dangerous, that my body isn’t a tool to be used until it breaks.

It’s something that gets cared for. Fed. Marked. Chosen.

The camp-brain will probably never stop being afraid of that. But for now—for now, for these fourteen days—the body-part is winning every argument.

And I’m learning to live with wanting.

14

MAEVE

The pressure wakes me first. Not pain, not yet—just pressure under the gums where the gaps have been for years. The phantom spaces where the camps took my teeth, where some got knocked out whole and others broke at the root.

Now something pushes from beneath.

I surface slowly, Red’s tail loosely wrapped around my thigh, his knot still holding inside me though the worst of the rut-fever has broken. We’ve been here, knotted, tangled, for what feels like days. Maybe it has been. His body is a furnace against my back, his breathing deep and even. Sleep-breathing, not the measured thing he does when he’s fighting himself. Light from the cave mouth has shifted from gold to the flat white of midday, falling in a long bar across the stone floor and catching the curve of one folded wing where it rests against the wall, the membrane almost translucent where the light hits it, veins showing through like something under thin ice.

The pressure intensifies as I become more aware of it. I press my tongue to the inside of my cheek and feel it, a hard point of something pushing through the soft tissue. A ridge. A point.