Page 52 of Feral Keep

“Yeah. I can.”

He speeds up. The slow heat transforms into something sharper, and I meet him—hips tilting to catch the angle, my legs locked around him, pulling him deeper. The sound he makes is raw. Animal. But there’s something underneath it that sounds almost like gratitude.

He showed her grave his gentleness. Now he shows me his fire.

“Here,” he says, and I lift my hips to give him the angle he wants, and the change is immediate—he hits something deep inside that sends stars across my vision. The depth is different now. My body is stronger. It doesn’t just take him anymore. It claims him. Pulls him in and holds.

“There. Right there.”

He nails that spot with every thrust, and the pleasure builds in a way it hasn’t before—sharper than the slow-climbing warmth of the past weeks, more urgent, like something in me is waking up. My belly is tight. The heat builds from low and spreads outward—through my hips, across my ribs, down the insides of my thighs. His cock slides deeper with each thrust. The knot is already beginning to swell, my cunt adjusting, opening, preparing for the full lock-down.

He reaches down and presses his palm flat against my belly, just below my navel. His hand is enormous there. His fingers span from hip to hip. He presses, and the feeling of his cock inside me becomes even more intense—like he’s fucking me from the outside as well as the inside.

“Feel me,” he says, low, not waiting for an answer.

“Yes.”

“Keep me.”

“Yes.”

I come with my hands in his hair, my back arched, his name, “Red,” torn from somewhere inside me that I didn’t know was there. It’s not quiet. It’s not restrained. It’s a sound that belongs to a girl who isn’t camp-trained anymore. The pleasure hits in waves, and each one is bigger than the last—my cunt clenching around him, trying to pull him deeper, trying to lock him inside where he belongs.

He follows me down. The flood of cum is the largest load yet, so much that it overflows even though he’s knotted deep, the thick musk of it rising off the furs, mixed with sweat and the green smell of the grave-mound still clinging to both of us. The warmth spreads through my belly, and that’s when it hits me—his hand still pressed against my lower belly, and beneath his palm, a subtle throb. A gathering. A rightness I can’t name.

He stays inside me, the knot massive now, almost immobile. Our breathing syncs. The light fades outside the nest until the world is just gold and then orange and then purple.

When the knot finally releases hours later, it’s because his body has shifted into something deeper. Something that isn’t just the rut anymore.

“Tomorrow,” he says into the furs beside me. “Show you the north line.”

I nod, already half-asleep. Already planning how to move my body to match his when we go.

Already aware that something is building. Something that’s almost here. It’s in my belly—not pain, not exactly, but a kind of fullness. A warmth that doesn’t come just from his cum. A rightness that settles beneath his hand like it’s waiting to take root.

22

MAEVE

Something has changed.

My body knows it before I do, the way it used to know a beating was coming before the guard even raised his voice—a prickle at the back of my neck, a tightening low in my gut that arrives before any thought does. It sits in the same place fear used to sit, close enough to pass for it, and that confuses me more than the feeling itself. The rhythm of him inside me is different. Sharper. The fast fucks have become something else, brutal, focused, like his body is converging on one point. The knots extend deeper than before, the base of his cock swelling until I’m stretched past comfort into a place where pain and pleasure blur.

We’ve been at this for three weeks now. Twenty-one days. The rut doesn’t work like the camps taught me to understand time. There’s no beginning and ending marked by bell. There’s just the deepening. The narrowing. The way everything else falls away until there’s only his body and mine.

I’m not the girl he carried in anymore.

The ribs that were visible through skin have muscle underneath now. The scars on my back and shoulders have faded to thin white lines. My teeth are all in, solid, and when I bite his shoulder during the rough fucks he groans like I’ve done something that matters. My hair is growing back thick, 4c coils that tighten up when they dry, and he runs his fingers through them slowly, deliberately, like he’s learning the texture of me.

I’m strong. Strong in a way I haven’t been since I was a child in the settlement, before my mother died, before the Ordained came and took everything. But this is different. This is something I’ve earned in the nest with a feral male. This is something my body has rebuilt itself into.

There’s a strange grief tangled up in the pride of it, one I let sit instead of picking apart, because it doesn’t have anywhere good to go. Four years of camp should have made me this strong on its own, if strength were something the world handed out for suffering enough. It isn’t. The camps didn’t build me. They just kept trying to grind me down to nothing and mostly succeeding. It took him three weeks to give me back what four years took away.

The morning of day twenty-three, he doesn’t slow down.

I wake on my back in the furs with him already between my legs. His hands have my thighs splayed wide, pushed up toward my chest, his talons dimpling the skin. The first grey light filters through the membrane-walls of the warren, catching the white crown of his horns as he looms over me. The furs smell thick with us—sweat and cum and the char smell of his skin, gone stale and warm overnight, and it fills my head before I’m even fully awake. He’s already driving—hard, impatient. His hands shift to my hips and grip hard enough to bruise. The first bruising he’s given me. The pain is sharp and good, anchoring me. The knot is enormous, swelling larger than it ever has. The moment of the tie is so intense I can’t breathe through it.

“More,” I hear myself say. Not asking. Demanding.