Page 36 of Feral Keep

That’s completion.

Later, I carry her to the mound like that, still knotted, my body still locked to hers. She’s deep under—my venom in the base of her spine, keeping her asleep while her body does its slow mending. Her arms hang loose against my chest. Her breath is slow on my skin.

The mound has no marker. No name to carve. Nothing to say over it that I have words for.

The dead one lies underneath.

I stop at the edge of the clearing where the white flowers grow along the roots of the mutated oaks. A beetle the color of wet copper crawls along a stem and disappears into the moss. I can pick without fully shifting weight. My hand’s big enough that it wraps around her thigh while I bend and tear the blossoms free with my other hand.

Maeve sleeps through it. Her weight settles heavier against me with every breath, trusting even in the dark of her own body.

I lay the flowers on the earth. White ones. The old dried ones underneath, going brown, going back to dirt. I carry her back to the warren and I don’t think about the grave anymore.

My living mate is warm in my arms. She is keeping.

But the thinking follows me back anyway—the slow cold that comes off that mound and gets into my chest. I press my forehead against Maeve’s hair and breathe her in. The scent clears my head. Not-wrong. All right.

She surfaces slow once the warmth of the embers reaches her, my venom thinning its hold, her body waking in pieces against mine. Her fingers find the edge of my horn. She likes to trace it, follow the curve. It’s become a habit, something her body does without her mind deciding first. The touch runs all the way down my spine. The cooking fire has burned to embers. The smell of woodsmoke sits in the furs.

“Feed,” I say.

She reaches for the dried meat on the rock beside the nest. Tears off a piece with her teeth—her new teeth, still tender, but there. Present. Strong enough to bite. I watch her chew, watch her swallow. Her ribs aren’t a xylophone anymore.

My cock is softening but my knot’s still swollen. We’ll be tied like this for another hour, maybe longer. The rut has a rhythm and we’re riding it.

She settles against me, her head tucked under my jaw. Her breathing slows. Not sleep—never quite sleep—but the drift of her body when the rut-satisfaction is heavy in her blood.

The dead mate comparison lives in my feral brain, two truths at once.

The one under the mound was sick before I ever touched her. I know it now the way my body knows things—her scent carried it from the first breath, a sweet wrong note under the fear, a body going bad from the inside. My cum could have rebuilt what the world broke in her. Bone. Blood. Muscle. It couldn’t reach the thing that was eating her. The bond reached for her and there wasn’t enough of her left to hold on to. I felt it slipping and there was no stopping it. There was no fixing it.

The rut doesn’t permit normal thinking. It sits in my blood as a fact: mate tried and failed. The grief and the guilt live there too, caught somewhere under my ribs, a weight that never quite settles because there is no settling a bond that died half-made.

But this.

This is the bond that holds.

Maeve was broken when I found her. Starved, cracked, ground down—but not sick. Nothing eating her from the inside that my body can’t answer. The reek of starving is fading. The smell of what’s wrong with her is lessening. Her bones are knitting. The inflammation in her jaw is growth, not decay.

My cum is rebuilding what was destroyed. The system is working.

Both mates are mine. The one beneath the earth and the one on my cock. Both are keeper. Both are keeper in different ways.

The rut doesn’t care about grief. It just keeps moving. When my knot finally softens, my cock stays inside her—idle, flexing in slow pulses against her walls. My mouth is still on her neck, my hand on her ribs, my tail wound around her leg. She makes a small sound at the shift in pressure, not quite a whimper. My cock is already thickening again, responding to the way her cunt clenches around the softened girth.

More. The rut always wants more.

But she needs water more than I need to flood her again. Her throat’s better but it’ll be weeks before she can drink as much as she needs. The water we find is cold and clean, filtered through the stones. I tip some into her mouth and she takes it without fear.

That’s the thing about the days bleeding together, she stops fearing me. Stops fearing my knot, the weight, the speed when my rut spikes past what she can comfortably take. Her body learns that the pain isn’t random. It serves a function. It builds toward something her cunt has learned to want.

Her first orgasm on day five was involuntary—the rut doing its work, her body answering on its own the way a wound closes without being asked. She cried after. Didn’t understand what had happened to her.

Now she asks for it. “Faster.” “More.” Her hands grip my shoulders and she pulls herself up into the strokes.

The satisfaction of it.

My tail winds around her waist again. Looser this time. I’m not driving now, just holding her, letting the rut settle into something slower. Her head tilts back and her throat is right there—the pulse visible under deep brown skin, healing scars running down the side of her neck where something or someone left marks.