Page 54 of Feral Keep

“Your line,” he says, gesturing toward the north edge.

“Yeah.”

He’s showing me the boundaries of what’s his. What will be ours.

The fast fuck finds us on a moss-covered stone beside a waterfall. I’m on my hands and knees, the stone flat and cool under my palms, mist from the falls drifting across my skin, carrying a clean, cold, mineral smell that’s nothing like the warren. He mounts me from behind—his knees outside mine, one hand around my throat pulling me upright so my back arches against his chest, the other planted on the stone beside my hip. His wings fold tight against his back. The waterfall is loud enough to drown out the sounds we make.

He’s not holding back.

The pounding is relentless. His hips driving against my ass with enough force that I’m sliding forward across the moss, my hands clawing for purchase. His hand closes over my throat and tilts my head back against his shoulder—the white points of his horns hang above me, the sky through the gap the waterfall has carved. His cock is hot and hard and he’s fucking me like the rut is finally reaching its peak.

“There.” My voice is small but he hears it. I’m asking for deeper and he gives me deeper, angles his hips to hit the spot that makes my eyes water, and drives again.

“Harder.” The word comes out as a moan.

He goes harder. The knot is enormous now, swelling to the point where I wasn’t sure my body could fit it, but my cunt is accepting every inch, gripping him with a strength that draws a sound from him that’s almost a whimper. Feral males don’t whimper.

But he’s making it now.

“Don’t stop,” I demand, and I can hear the bossy camp-girl in my own voice, the girl who learned to take what she needed because nothing was offered.

He keeps pounding, keeps driving—doesn’t stop—until my orgasm hits like a wave and pulls him down with me. The knot locks, and the cum comes in pulses so strong they land deep in my belly, one after another.

My hands are in the furs, not on the stone, when I come back into my body—he’s carried me back to the nest. The waterfall sound is muted. The light is nearly gone.

“Bond,” he says against my throat. One word. Low and certain, like something he can taste.

My stomach drops the way it does at the edge of a height. Warning or promise, I don’t know which. Maybe it’s both. Camp-brain wants to sort the word into a box marked danger and slam the lid, the way it sorts everything, but the word just sits there instead, refusing to be simple, and some part of me the camps never got to leans toward it anyway.

The night of day twenty-three bleeds into the dawn of day twenty-four.

We’re face to face in the furs, lying on our sides. His leg is hooked over mine, holding me open, his tail looped around my ankle. One arm is under my head. The other traces the line of my spine. He fucks me slowly, deliberately, like he’s trying to commit every moment to memory—long, rolling thrusts that press the full girth of him through me before drawing back. The knot swells and holds, swells and holds. I come quietly, my hand gripping his horn, my forehead against his chest, the warmth of the bone there, the way it trembles slightly under my touch.

“Strong,” he says again. “Ready.”

For what, he doesn’t say. But the rut is building toward something. The way his body moves, the way he looks at me—it’s all pointing toward a convergence.

Soon, maybe. Maybe now.

I’m ready for whatever comes.

My body is strong. My mind is clear. The camp-girl has learned to take pleasure in her own skin, and the feral girl is learning to claim what she needs.

The two are the same girl now.

The realization should scare me more than it does. Camp-Maeve was built to survive by staying small, staying quiet, staying invisible enough that nobody bothered to hurt her more than they had to. This girl doesn’t know how to be small anymore. I don’t know yet if that’s going to get me killed or get me free, and for once I let the not-knowing sit there without trying to solve it.

Red settles against my back, his knot still inside me, his breathing heavy against the crown of my head, the smell of him thick and warm around us both, char and salt and something underneath that’s just his. He lifts his hand and covers my lower belly, pressing in like he’s checking on something precious.

I cover his hand with mine and press it deeper.

“I feel it,” he says. Not to me. To whatever he’s checking for. To the future he’s seeing in the way my body has rebuilt itself, the way I demand more.

I close my eyes and let him hold me like that—one hand on my belly, one hand on my heart, his knot locked inside me, his body curved around mine like he’s trying to contain something explosive.

Something is building.

Something is almost here.