Page 47 of Feral Keep

The night of day nineteen, he’s different.

We’re in the furs—we’re always in the furs by nightfall. His cock is soft inside me, just barely, the weight of him against my back like being pinned by something warm and massive. His arm is across my waist, palm spread over my belly. This is how he sleeps most nights now. The heat coming off his skin carries its own smell, char and something like fresh-turned earth underneath, and I breathe it in without meaning to, the way I used to breathe shallow just to take up less space.

But his hand is moving lower.

His palm slides from my navel down toward my hip, and I think he’s just resettling. But then his fingers spread wide, pressing into the space below my navel. Lower. Into that soft pocket of belly that the camps never let me keep because a soft belly means weakness and weakness meant punishment.

His fingers press there, deliberate, and he makes a sound.

It’s not quite a rumble. More like a groan that gets caught in his throat, and his hand presses harder, warm palm possessive. He’s pressing into the space where his seed pools inside me, and something in his breathing shifts. His cock twitches, swelling slightly inside me, responding to his own touch through me.

“Changing,” he says, his voice rough against my ear.

I don’t understand what he means. He’s not saying I’m pregnant. I’m not, and his feral brain knows the difference. So what is he tracking? What is he sensing with those claws pressed into the soft tissue of my belly, the place where no one’s hands have been allowed since the camps took me?

My stomach drops before my head sorts out why, a fast cold lurch like missing a step in the dark. Something is happening in my own body that I can’t see, can’t name, and the old wired-in reflex behind my ribs doesn’t like that one bit, wants a number, a schedule, a way to brace. There’s none of that here. Just his palm and his one word and the not-knowing sitting heavy under my ribs.

His hand stays there, pressing, and his breathing stays deep and controlled. Like he’s reading something. Like his feral brain is tracking the shifts happening inside me—the blood moving warmer, the earliest preparations my body is making. He’s not touching my cunt. He’s touching the space above it. The place where the body starts getting ready before conception does.

He presses lower, and another groan works out of him. It sounds almost pained. Almost desperate. The air inside the warren shifts—the thermal vents warming the chamber, the stone beneath us radiating steady heat. His hips shift slightly, pressing his cock deeper in response to whatever he’s finding, whatever he’s monitoring.

“Mine,” he says. “Growing.”

The statement settles over me heavy, and for a moment, I forget to breathe.

He’s not saying he wants me to conceive. He’s not making some claim on my body beyond what he already owns. He’s saying something smaller and somehow infinitely larger—that whatever is happening inside me, the changes in my bones, in my blood, in the way pleasure moves through me now, those are mine. That my body is mine and he’s just honored to be the one shaping the landscape inside it.

His hand presses deeper, possessive. His palm sinks heavy into the soft space, the curve of my belly rising slightly under his touch. He’s tracking the way my body is changing—toward him. Toward being able to hold his size, his heat, his seed without breaking.

I reach back and find his forearm, run my fingers along the muscle there. His hand presses harder against my belly. His weight shifts, his entire body settling into that position like it’s the safest place in the warren.

I let myself lean back into it. That’s the part that scares me more than the hand on my belly ever could—not the size of him at my back, but how easy it is to stop holding myself up. Four years I kept my own spine straight because nobody else was going to. Now I’m letting his chest do the work, and some small, stubborn piece of me keeps waiting to be punished for going soft.

Like he could stay there forever.

Like holding that stubborn line down my spine is enough.

20

MAEVE

His hand has become a fixture on my belly.

Not constantly—he’s not obsessive in the way the camps were, tracking every fluctuation of my weight, measuring the space between my ribs with their eyes. But he returns to it, again and again. Palm spread wide, fingers splayed across the soft space below my navel. His thumb traces small circles, and I’ve started to recognize the rhythm of it, the deliberation.

He’s tracking something.

This morning, after the first fuck, he settles his hand there and presses deep. The pressure is careful, but focused. Concentrated on the exact spot where his seed is pooling inside me. Where I’m still sore and sensitive and slick with him. Even the air between us smells different after—warmer, thicker, something musky and mineral rising off my own skin that wasn’t there before he touched me. I’ve stopped trying to hide the way my breath catches when he does it.

“Change,” he murmurs into my shoulder. “Smell change.”

His feral brain is reading something my human one can’t. His cock twitches inside me, and he presses his palm harder, almost testing the space, like he’s trying to feel something happening beneath the skin. It shouldn’t be arousing, the way he’s treating my body like a map he’s still learning, but everything with him is arousal now. His attention is foreplay. His touch is promise.

His rumble is hunger.

“Too early,” I tell him, because I’m not stupid. I know enough about reproduction to understand that whatever he’s tracking, it’s not conception. Not yet.

“Preparing,” he says, and the certainty in his voice pulls something tight low in my ribs. He’s not hoping. He’s not even suggesting. He’s stating a fact that his body already knows, like his feral instinct understands something my mind hasn’t caught up to yet.