Page 58 of Feral Keep

I make a sound of loss, not pain—the phantom of him still pressed against my walls, the ghost of the vibration still humming through tissue that’s clenching around empty space. My body reaches for what isn’t there and finds air.

He catches me before I curl in on myself, his arms tight as he lifts me, turning me against his chest. I press there, shaking. My walls flutter and clench, flutter and clench, chasing a fullness that’s gone.

“Shh.” His palm settles at my back first, then finds my belly—always my belly now, flat over the place where the warmth has settled. “Here.”

“I know.” My voice is wrecked. Raw. “I know you’re here. It’s there—what’s there inside me. That’s what I’m reaching for.”

He eases me into the furs. Carefully, the way he eased me down the first night—letting gravity take over in degrees. His hands slide from under me. His tail uncurls from my waist.

I’m lying in the furs without him inside me.

The strangeness of it, the vacancy, catches me off guard. Weeks of his cock as a constant—the idle flex, the fast fucks, the long knots—present during sleep, during feeding, during the quiet hours of the lull. It was a fact that didn’t need renegotiating.

Now it’s over.

The rut is over.

The difference in him is unmistakable. Not just the cock softening against his thigh. His whole body—the hum that lived under his skin, the heat that burned like a furnace. All of it draining. Cooling. His breathing slows to something I haven’t heard from him. Calm. Deep. Even.

His gold eyes find mine. Something different behind them. Something I haven’t seen.

Intelligence. Not the animal cunning of the feral state—the bright, watching focus of a male who knows where he is and who he’s looking at. The feral is receding like a tide pulling back from shore. What’s underneath is older. Quieter. More.

“Mate,” he says. Softer than I’ve ever heard the word from him. His palm settles low on my belly. “Rest.”

I close my eyes. Behind my navel, the warmth pulses again. Small. Steady. A heartbeat that isn’t mine.

Somewhere under the exhaustion, a thought keeps trying to surface and I keep pushing it back down, too tired to hold it and too raw to let it go: nobody asked me. It sits there, small and cold, refusing to dissolve just because his hand is warm on my belly and his voice keeps saying good like I did something right. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t have a choice in it either way. Both of those feel true at the same time, and I don’t have the strength tonight to make them stop being true together.

I sleep. My body is empty of him for the first time in weeks, and the phantom of him is everywhere—in the flutter of my walls, in the echo of the vibration, in the place behind my navel where the warmth has taken root.

My hands curl over my belly. His hand covers mine.

We sleep like that. His palm over my hands over the beginning of something neither of us has words for yet.

24

MAEVE

Istand up.

I’m not lifted, not carried, not hauled against his chest and moved like a bundle of sticks and broken bone. I put my hands flat on the furs, I push, and I stand on my own legs for the first time in almost a month.

My knees shake. The muscles are strong, stronger than they’ve been since the settlement, maybe stronger than they’ve ever been, but they’ve forgotten the shape of standing. Three and a half weeks of being held, positioned. Three and a half weeks of being part of his body, an extension of his lap, his arms. Standing is a separate act. A declaration of boundary. I am here. He is there.

My legs shake harder than the muscle alone explains. Somewhere under the ache is a want I didn’t know I had until my feet found the furs—the want to be a body that decides things on its own again, even something as small as standing up. Nobody asked before he put a baby in me. Nobody’s going to ask about most of what comes next, either. But this—pushing up onto my own two feet—this one’s mine. I hold onto that the way I used to hold onto the fence rail during a bad count, small and stupid and enough to keep me upright.

He watches me from the furs without moving to help. His eyes are gold now—the black blown-wide of the rut pulling back to show the amber underneath, warm and steady. They track my legs, my spine, the way I sway and catch myself.

“Okay?” he asks.

Two syllables. More than the feral state ever gave a single question. Already the words are coming back, filling the space the rut leaves behind as it drains away.

“Yeah.” I take a step. Another. My thighs burn with the strangeness of carrying my own weight. The furs are soft under my bare feet. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

The warren looks different from standing.

I’ve seen it from the furs, from his arms, from his lap. Always at an angle. Always filtered through pain or venom or the rut’s haze. Now I’m upright and the filtered light is coming through the woven-branch roof and the space is—bigger than I thought. Wider. The air smells different from up here too, less like furs and sweat, more like the earth under the root walls and the faint sweetness of dried herbs hanging somewhere I can’t see. The root walls arch overhead in patterns that aren’t random. He chose these roots, braced them, built around them with an intentionality that makes my chest tight.