Page 48 of Feral Keep

The thought should terrify me. Camp-brain reaches for the fear on reflex, the way my hand used to reach for the fence line to steady myself during a headcount. Bred like stock. Used for what your body can grow. That’s the voice Gretchen’s guards used, low and mean, when they wanted to scare the older girls quiet.

But the fear doesn’t land where it’s supposed to. It goes looking for a foothold and finds nothing, and instead something else settles into the space where the terror should be—small, warm, unfamiliar.

Later, after the second fuck, harder, deeper, him using my body with the confidence of someone who’s learned exactly what I can take, we’re cooling in the lull. His cock is softening inside me. His forearm is under my breasts, holding me against his chest, and his other hand is still pressed to my belly.

But then he moves.

He shifts me gently, turning my body so I’m cradled in his lap, my back against his chest, his legs framing mine. The position makes his cock slide deeper, and I gasp, not expecting the shift in angle. He rumbles approval and holds still, just keeping me there, full of him, while his hand returns to my belly.

This position is intimate in a different way—the way he holds me when we sleep, but conscious. Deliberate. His chin rests on my shoulder, and his breathing is slow and controlled, like he’s meditating on the weight of me, the space I’m taking up in his body.

“Yours,” he says. “Always.”

Belly or cunt or the entirety of me—I can’t tell which he means, and it doesn’t matter. The possessiveness in his voice isn’t violent anymore. It’s grounding.

“Yeah,” I tell him, because it’s true. I am. I’ve been his since the moment he decided I was.

One more time, his hand presses deep against my belly, and another twitch answers inside me. The physical evidence of his satisfaction. His cock is already hardening again. They never stay soft for long. I should probably be tired by now, should probably ask for a break. But my hips are already moving slightly, inviting, and he makes that sound again. That groan like he’s found something he didn’t know he was looking for.

It happens in the late afternoon, in that drowsy space between sleep and waking.

He carries me to a section of the warren I haven’t seen before. The movement is unconscious, almost, like his body knows what his mind is reaching for. His cock is still soft inside me—just barely, keeping me knotted to his body—and he shifts me against his chest carefully, making sure I don’t slip as he moves through the chambers.

The wall is carved wood, ancient-looking and weathered, and the marks cut into it are deliberate—patterned lines and curves, organized in a way that suggests intention, nothing like the aggressive gouges of a territorial claim. The wood smells old here, dry and a little sweet, like something that stopped growing a long time ago. Someone spent time on this. Someone was trying to say something.

He stands in front of the wall. His breathing changes. His chest expands against my back, and his free hand—the one not supporting my weight—rises slowly. His talons trace one set of marks, following the curves the way you’d trace a scar to learn its shape. The stone here is cooler—this chamber sits deeper in the warren, farther from the thermal vents.

The carvings catch the light differently depending on the angle. Some lines are deep, cut with a force that’s entirely deliberate. Others are shallow, hesitant. The L-shapes and circles—letters. The same alphabet I learned when I was six, when my mother still lived and the settlement still had a schoolhouse. Capital letters. Printed the way children learn, before they’re old enough to care about cursive or flourish.

His breathing gets rough.

I don’t move. Don’t ask. Just watch his eyes—focused, distant, like he’s reaching for a part of his memory that lives deeper than language. His claws follow the lines slowly, reverently. One mark, then another. They spell something. The recognition hits—B-U-I-L-D. Build. He carved the word build into a stone wall in the middle of the warren, over and over. Not once. The word appears six times across the weathered surface, each version slightly different. Early carvings are jagged, uncertain. The most recent ones are sharp and sure. He’s been doing this for years. Carving this one word again and again, trying to hold the letter-shape in his hands when his mind wouldn’t hold it.

My throat closes around nothing. I know this kind of trying. The camps had a rule about names—after enough months, the guards stopped using them, and you became a number and a bunk assignment. If you didn’t keep saying your own name in your head at night, in the dark, over and over, you’d wake up one morning and not be sure it was still yours. I used to whisper Maeve into my folded arms until Gretchen told me to shut up before the guards heard. He didn’t have anyone to whisper it to. He had a wall and his own claws and thirteen years of nobody.

He stands like that for maybe two minutes, and the silence is profound, full of something nameless—thirteen years of a man losing his own words and going on breathing anyway. A man whose hands remembered what his mouth forgot. Rain starts somewhere outside—I can hear it on the membrane-walls, soft percussion against the warren, and the smell of it drifts in cool and green, washing out the old-wood smell of the wall.

His cock pulses inside me, sharp, reflexive.

Then he turns away from the wall.

The moment fractures. He settles back into the main chamber, back into the space where we fuck and sleep and exist in the narrow band of understanding we’ve built between us. He doesn’t speak about what just happened. Instead, he lowers me slightly and starts to move.

Slow, at first. Testing. But then harder, faster, like he’s trying to fuck away whatever the wall brought up. Like he’s trying to ground himself back in the only language he has left—the one that lives in his body, in the way I respond to him, in the sounds I make when he’s exactly where he needs to be.

His hand returns to my belly as he fucks me, pressing down like he’s trying to push himself deeper into me. I come with a gasp that tears out of me before I can brace for it, my eyes stinging, my chest cracked wide open by something that isn’t the angle of him inside me. He’s desperate in a way he hides behind the pounding of his hips, and something in me answers that desperation before I decide to—reaching back, gripping his forearm, holding on like he’s the one who needs steadying and not me.

He follows maybe a dozen thrusts later. He groans and cums hard, his palm flat on my stomach, pressing down with almost painful pressure. He’s trying to keep me there, to anchor himself to this moment.

When he’s done, when he’s breathing rough and deep, he doesn’t move.

Just holds me there, belly to palm, knotted inside me, present.

The evening feeds are different now.

He’s started bringing more variation—different proteins, seasonal plants, things that taste complex instead of simple. Not for variety’s sake. I think he’s feeding me as if my body is a map he’s planning to change, like he’s already deciding what I need to build.

Tonight it’s something rich and dark, wrapped in leaves, seasoned with something that makes my mouth water. Smoke still clings to the leaves when he peels them back, thick and resinous, mixed with something sharper underneath that might be crushed herb. The meat is tender—he’s been cooking it for hours, letting the heat break down the fibers until it falls apart on my tongue. He tears a piece and offers it, and I don’t even think about reaching. My hand finds his wrist, gentle, and I pull his arm closer.