Page 57 of Feral Keep

My body caught.

Under the roar, under the shaking of the stone at my back, something small and quiet under my ribs is already grieving, and I couldn’t tell you what for. Nobody asked me if I was ready. Nobody asked me anything. My body just decided, the way it decided to stay alive in the camps whether I gave it permission or not, and I lie here catching my breath around a fact that’s already true before I’ve had time to feel one single thing about it.

Outside, the canopy goes silent all at once, like the roar switched off every sound. The birds stop. The insects stop. The territory holds its breath. Then the roar rolls outward through the wasteland, through the mutated canopy, down through what used to be streets and highways and a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Every male for miles knows what just happened.

His eyes come back to mine. Gold and blazing and absolutely, devastatingly smug.

He’s still inside me. Still coming. The cum still flooding in thick waves, his cock twitching with each pulse, the knot sealed so tight my own heartbeat presses back against it. His hand hasn’t moved from my belly. His palm covers the place where the warmth has settled, and his fingers press—feeling for it, finding it, his whole body vibrating with the knowledge of what his cock just did.

“Good,” he says. The word shaking. “Good.”

He lowers us both to the furs—easing down with me still impaled, still locked. He settles onto his back and pulls me against his chest, my head tucked under his chin, his arms wrapped around me. His mouth finds the crown of my head. His breath stirs my hair—the thick coils that grew back strong, that are damp now with sweat, smelling of him and me both, tangled together in a way I can’t pull apart. His hand slides down between our bodies, pressing flat against my belly.

A sound comes out of him that I’ve never heard, something that vibrates through his chest into my cheek, through his palm into my belly. Something quieter than anything his body has produced before. Something that might be wonder, if feral males could feel wonder.

I’m crying with sound, a wet, cracked, broken noise that my throat makes without permission—nothing like the silent camp-tears. It isn’t one thing making the sound come out of me. It’s relief that he’s still holding me and it’s the fear underneath the relief and it’s grief for the version of tonight where somebody might have asked, all of it pouring out of the same cracked place at once because my body doesn’t know how to cry for only one reason anymore. My hands grip his chest. My face presses into the crimson skin above his sternum. The vibration in his chest, the rumble, drops in pitch. Lower. Warmer. The sound of a male who has finished the work he was built for and is guarding the result.

“Fuck,” I whisper. “Oh, fuck.”

His hands tighten on my hips. He’s still hard. The knot hasn’t begun to soften. Inside me, his cock gives a long, slow flex, possessive, unhurried, the prehensile tip tracing the walls that just accepted what he put there, tending now instead of driving or seeking. Feeling for the change.

The knot holds.

It holds longer than any knot before. The vibration settles into a deep, steady hum, not the climbing pitch of the rut’s peaks, not the screaming buzz of climax. Something protective. Something that’s warming the place where his hand is pressed. The warmth behind my navel pulses. Small. Steady.

Not my heartbeat.

His head lifts. His eyes find mine. The smugness is still there—the deep, satisfied possession of a male who has done the thing—but underneath it, something else. The feral is receding, softening at the edges, not gone. The gold eyes are brighter. More present. More him.

He wants to fuck me again. His cock thickens inside the knot’s lock, the prehensile tip pressing harder against the front wall, the grinding starting again. His hands grip my hips and he starts to move—slow, deep rolls that press the knot against my opening and drive the head of his cock against the deepest place. The place that now has something in it.

I come again. Quieter this time. A rolling wave that starts deep and spreads through my whole body. His cock throbs inside me and more cum floods in—not the massive conception load but the steady, thick pulses of a male who is still emptying himself, still pouring heat into the place he just seeded.

His mouth moves against my hair. His hand presses harder on my belly.

“Mine,” he says.

Not to me. To the warmth behind my navel. To the thing that’s barely begun.

The knot holds for a long time after that.

I lose track. The light shifts from amber to gold to the high white of midday. He doesn’t let go. His cock stays inside me, sometimes soft, sometimes hard, the rut cycling in waves that crest and ebb but never fully recede. Each wave brings more cum, more grinding, more of his hands on my belly pressing like he’s checking to make sure the warmth is still there.

It’s still there.

Sometime in the afternoon the knot begins to soften. The vibration drops, from the protective hum to a murmur, then to a pulse so faint I only feel it because I’ve learned its rhythm for weeks. The swelling eases a degree at a time, each fraction of space feeling enormous—a hand unclenching one finger at a time, each finger a small devastation.

His cock softens. The prehensile flex that has been my constant companion—idle, lazy, urgent, a hundred different speeds and pressures—slows. Quiets. The tip uncurls from the front wall. His cock settles.

My body clenches around the softening. Pulling. Holding. The involuntary grip of muscles that have spent weeks with something inside them and don’t know what emptiness feels like anymore.

“It’s okay,” I say. To myself. To my body. To the walls that are tightening around a cock that is, for the first time in weeks, leaving.

The knot slips free.

The sensation is—I have no word for it. The reverse of every thrust, every lock, every vibrating seal that has held me stretched and full since the night he claimed me. My walls close around nothing. The air touches tissue that hasn’t been exposed in weeks, cool where his skin was hot, carrying the faint mineral smell of the warren instead of him. The absence is physical, enormous, a shape cut out of the inside of me.

His cock slides free.