Page 38 of Feral Keep

The meat sits in my stomach. Stays there. Good.

His hand opens and closes on my ribs, feeling the knit, feeling the strength coming back. The rut doesn’t let him stop touching me. Even in the lull, even when his cock is just half-hard and his breathing has slowed, his hands are always checking. Always verifying that the system is working.

The system.

That’s the word he uses when he talks to himself, when the feral speech breaks down and something more formed slips through. “System working.” Like my body is a wall he’s rebuilding stone by stone, checking each one before he sets the next.

Hearing it, my breath goes cold, then hot, then cold again, like my body can’t decide which reaction to keep. A wall gets rebuilt because someone needs it standing. A wall doesn’t get asked what it wants to be. Some nights I would rather be the wall than the girl who has to decide if she’s allowed to want anything from the male rebuilding her. Other nights the wall thought aches behind my ribs, and it isn’t the bone that hurts.

“Why?” The word comes out before I can stop it.

His head tilts. His ears—blood-crimson tips catching the light from the cave mouth—swivel toward me. A low sound starts in his chest, not a growl, something more like a question with no words in it. His eyes focus, gold and sharp.

“Why what?” He’s still learning human speech. The words come slow. Deliberate. Like he’s pulling them out of a place that’s mostly feral now.

“Why.” I’m still holding the meat in my mouth, chewing, buying time. “Why feed me. Why—” I stop. The camp-brain knows I’m asking dangerous questions. Asking means I expect an answer. Asking means I’m starting to believe that someone is listening.

Four years of not asking anything.

My mouth goes dry around the question the second it’s out, worse than the thirst ever made it. Asking is a hand raised in a room that punishes hands. I brace without deciding to, shoulders drawing in half an inch, waiting for the answer that teaches me I shouldn’t have opened my mouth.

He sets the meat down and his palm settles over my face. The palm is massive, the span of his fingers reaching from my chin to my hairline. He turns my head toward his. His eyes are close now, gold shot through with a ring of black at the iris, the color shifting in the light.

“Mate,” he says.

It’s not an answer. It’s a statement. A fact he’s been establishing since day one. But something in the way he says it—the way his hand gentles on my cheek, the way his tail winds around my leg instead of cinching—makes it feel like maybe there’s more underneath.

“That’s not—” But what am I asking? Why does he keep me? Why doesn’t he kill me? Why feed someone the camps were so sure was a corpse waiting to happen?

His hand slides to my ribs. Spreads wide. The span of his palm covers the space where my ribs used to break if I breathed too deep. “Broken,” he says. “Fix.”

“Fix.” I turn the word over, testing it the way my tongue tests the new teeth. It’s not MINE, the way he usually claims me. It’s not possession. It’s diagnosis. Like someone identifying a problem and deciding to work the solution. Like someone who spent time understanding systems, understanding how things fit together, and decided I was worth the effort.

Something in me wants to flag that as a dangerous way to think. If he can fix me, he can also decide I’m not worth fixing anymore. But the woman who’s been waking up over thirteen days—learning to come, learning that food stays down and strength is building—she knows the truth: He’s already decided. Whatever this is, it’s not temporary.

His cock is hardening again. The thick heat of him swelling and stiffening against my leg, the knot already thickening at the base. The rut cycles every few hours now, the pattern so regular I’m starting to anticipate it. The lull, the feeding, the moment where his hand checks my healing, and then the building again.

“Need,” he says. Low. Guttural. The word that comes when the human half drowns completely.

I shift. Not much. Just my hips, angling them back slightly, enough to seat him differently inside me. Enough that the position shifts from the way we’ve been locked for the past hour.

His entire body goes rigid.

The tail tightens around my waist—not the loose, claiming hold of the lull. The full cinch. The restriction that backs pressure up into his knot, that makes his cock flex hard inside me. His hand on my ribs becomes a claw. His breathing cuts sharp against the venom marks on my neck.

“Good,” he says. Different. Quieter. Like something has shifted behind his eyes.

It lands only now: I chose to move. I shifted my body deliberately to change the angle, to participate in the mounting instead of just allowing it.

The camp-brain screams that this is wrong, that movement is dangerous, that participation means I’m complicit in my own breaking. But the strength I’m learning knows better. Participation isn’t breaking. Participation is being part of something, instead of something taking parts of me.

His cock throbs inside me.

“Again,” he says.

So I do. Smaller. Just the slightest roll of my hips, testing. The angle shifts again. His knot presses differently against my walls. The vibration climbs.

“Yes.” His palm presses to my belly, not restraining, just feeling. Feeling me work. Feeling his cock inside me and my body choosing to seat him deeper.