Page 40 of Feral Keep

My shoulder still grinds. Less. The joint moves in its socket with something closer to cooperation than war, the venom doing work inside the cartilage, heat, deep and persistent, the kind of ache that means rebuilding instead of breaking. But it’s not fixed yet. Not the way my jaw is fixed, the new teeth crowding in strong and sharp, the bone underneath them solid. The shoulder is older damage. Deeper.

He knows it.

Being known that well should feel like exposure, like standing in the open with the fence cut and no cover in sight. Instead it just feels like being known. There’s no script yet for the difference.

The lull comes after the third—fourth?—cycle. I’ve stopped counting. He carries me to the pool at the back of the cave, still inside me, the knot softened but present, his cock a warm pressure that flexes with each step. My legs hang on either side of his hips. My face is level with his chest, the crimson skin radiating heat, the massive muscles underneath not even flexing with my weight.

He lowers us both into the water.

Cool, tempered by the cave, his body heat warming the surface around us within seconds. The water carries a faint mineral smell, wet stone and something green growing just outside the cave mouth. The shock of it against my overworked skin makes me gasp, my walls clenching around him before I can stop them, and his breath catches in my hair.

His hands find my shoulder.

This isn’t the usual checking, the brief press of fingers against the joint to feel the swelling, the tilt of his head when the feral brain reads something in my damage that I can’t name. This is different. His thumb sinks into the meat of the muscle where it meets my neck. Deep. Pressure that finds the knot underneath and bears down on it.

I hiss. My hand flies to his wrist.

“Bad,” he says. Low. He already knows the answer.

“It’s—” I don’t finish, because his tongue finds the joint.

Hot. Hotter than his skin, hotter than anything that should be touching the place where bone grinds against bone. A green, bitter smell rises off my own shoulder where his mouth is working. The venom seeps in through the punctures his fangs leave—shallow, careful, the teeth barely dimpling the skin before the warmth spreads. It hits the cartilage like liquid fire, like something melting the scar tissue that’s been holding the joint wrong for eight months.

My body arches. His arm tightens around my waist. His cock stiffens inside me, the rut never really lets him go soft, but the difference between lull-hard and fuck-hard is a difference I’ve learned. He’s crossing from one to the other.

“Hold still,” he says. Two words. His tongue drags across the joint again, pressing venom into the tissue. The pain-that-isn’t-pain blooms deep and consuming. My vision goes white at the edges.

Then his other hand comes up.

Dried meat. His thumb finds my chin, tilting my mouth open, and he presses the meat past my lips. The salt hits my tongue and my body responds the way it’s been trained to respond, saliva flooding, the throat already swallowing before the thought catches up.

“Eat,” he says. Against my shoulder. The venom still seeping in.

I chew. His cock throbs inside me. His tongue works the joint. The knot, softened for the lull, starts to swell again, the vibration beginning low, climbing, the familiar frequency that my body knows before my mind does.

I can’t process all of it at once.

His hand at my mouth, another strip of meat replacing the first. The heat of his venom spreading through my shoulder. His knot swelling against my walls, his tail tip sliding between our bodies and finding my clit, still swollen from the last time.

My teeth close on the meat. My shoulder burns. My cunt clenches. My clit pulses against the smooth pressure of his tail.

Four things at once.

My body doesn’t know which one to answer first, so it tries to answer all of them, and the trying alone is enough to make my head spin.

I’ve never—the camps were about subtraction. About taking away until there was nothing left to lose. About stripping everything down to the basics: pain, hunger, cold. Four simultaneous inputs of good is something my brain doesn’t have a place for.

My eyes are stinging.

His tail tip circles. Slow. Patient. The knot vibrates harder. The venom does something deep in my shoulder, a crack, a release, the joint shifting in its socket like a door swinging open for the first time in months. The pain crests and then drops, drops, drops into relief so sudden my whole body shudders.

I’m crying.

Quiet tears, running down my face, running over his hand where he holds another piece of meat to my lips. My jaw works. I swallow. The meat goes down easy, the throat cooperating, the belly accepting it without protest. His venom is in my shoulder and his cock is in my cunt and his hand is feeding me and his tail is making me come and I’m crying because no one has ever done four things at once for me. No one has ever done one thing for me.

The orgasm doesn’t build. It arrives. One moment I’m crying and chewing and the next my walls are clamping down on his knot so hard that his breath cuts short against my hair. My back arches into his chest. The relief in my shoulder, the stretch of his cock, the salt on my tongue, the pressure on my clit—they stack. Layer on layer on layer. The orgasm keeps climbing past the point where it should crest and break.

His hand presses the meat against my lips. “Eat.”