Page 7 of Feral Keep

The camps were right. This is how I die.

His nostrils flare. I watch his pupils change—the amber eaten by black, slow, total, the iris swallowed until his eyes are dark as the canopy at night. The musk around him turns, thickens, goes from warning to something hot and close that pulls low in my throat. His whole body shifts, a tightening, a surge, the way the air changes before a storm breaks.

The feral switch. Shayla’s briefings. When a Shade scents his mate, the switch trips. The rut takes him. He can’t stop. He won’t stop.

I am looking up at the biggest male in this territory, watching his body switch on. Too weak to close my hand into a fist.

His tail reaches me. The white tip brushes my arm. The touch is warm and gentle, a contact so light I almost don’t feel it at first, and then I do.

It’s warmth that doesn’t hurt. That doesn’t come with a hand attached to it, a body leaning down, a voice saying shut up, don’t move, take it. This is just warmth. Contact without demand. The white tip of his tail against the skin of my arm like he’s asking a question.

The camps said Shades would eat us. That their touch meant death. But this feels like the opposite of death. This feels like the first thing in four years that’s touched me without wanting something from me. Some ashamed, guilty piece of me wants to lean into it. That shames me worse than anything the camp ever did to my body—wanting comfort from the thing I was raised to fear more than death itself. I don’t have the strength to pull away from the wanting. I’m not sure I’d pull away even if I could.

It travels up my arm, warm and steady. His tail is smooth, not scaled. Warm the way living things are warm. And under it, something else—a vibration, low, imperceptible at first, but there. Like the rumble of something vast moving carefully.

His gold-black eyes hold mine. My eyes fall shut. His stare presses them closed.

Whatever this is. Whatever happens next. I can’t fight it. I can’t run from it. My body is finished, and the thing standing over me is just beginning, and the gap between those two facts is the gap I’m going to fall into.

His tail presses against my arm with just a hair more pressure. Not pinning. Just present. Still asking. Still gentle in a way I don’t understand but my body understands. My body is answering with the only thing it has left—a willingness to be touched by something that isn’t trying to break me.

I wait.

5

MAEVE

He doesn’t claim me on the ground.

My body braces for it. Every story, every briefing, every whispered terror between bunks—they all end the same way. The Shade finds you. The switch trips. He takes you where you fall. The camps didn’t offer a version of this story where the taking waits.

I lie there bracing anyway, jaw clenched, ready for the bad thing to start, and it doesn’t come. The waiting itself turns into its own kind of fear, worse in a way, because at least a briefing gives you something to expect. This gives me nothing. Just his hands, and the not-knowing, and my whole body strung tight around a blow that isn’t landing.

His hands close around me. One under my back, one under my legs. I leave the ground so fast my stomach drops. The canopy swings overhead, the green tilting, and I’m against his chest before I can brace again.

I weigh nothing to him. His arms settle without effort, the casual hold of a body lifting weight it doesn’t have to think about. My cracked ribs, my bad shoulder, my weeks of starvation: I’m a collection of damage held together by reflex, and he carries that collection the way I’d carry a handful of dry leaves.

His skin is hot. Not warm—hot, like standing too close to a fire, heat that seems to burn from somewhere inside him. My cheek presses against his chest and the warmth soaks into my face, my neck, the bones of my shoulder. Woodsmoke and warm earth and something underneath both that’s only him thicken in my nose, thick enough to taste at the back of my throat. The camp barracks were cold. The ground was cold. I have not been warm in four years.

I am warm now.

The warmth undoes something in me faster than the fear can hold it shut. My throat goes tight and thick and I don’t know if it’s grief or relief, four years of cold cracking open at once under a heat I didn’t ask for and can’t stop wanting. I press my face harder against his chest, hiding, though I couldn’t say from what.

His chest is a wall of crimson, the skin finer up close than it looks from the ground, almost smooth. No hair. No imperfections. Under it, the rhythm of his breathing. His heartbeat against my ear is slow and heavy, a drum struck deep, nothing like the racing flutter of a human pulse.

He’s hard. The rigid press of his cock against my hip where his arm holds me—hot even through the shift of his body. The rut has fired. His pupils are still blown, the gold swallowed to black. His jaw is tight, the muscles in his neck corded, his whole body strung with a tension that hums through his arms into mine.

His arms hold me like something that might break.

I don’t understand that. Nothing in four years behind the fences prepared me for that. The predator’s arms should be pinning, crushing, forcing. They are holding me the way you hold a cracked bowl—firm enough that it won’t fall, careful enough that the cracks don’t widen.

His tail finds me. It wraps my waist, the tapered end traveling up my side, along my ribs—I flinch, the bones are cracked, the pressure sends a white flash behind my eyes—and the tail adjusts. Lighter. The tip continues, tracing the line of my shoulder, my neck, the space below my ear.

The venom hits—not a flood, not the sudden overwhelming rush the camp stories described, but a warmth, spreading from the point where his tail tip presses against the skin below my ear, seeping down my neck, across my shoulder, into my chest.

The ribs stop screaming.

I make a sound. Involuntary, pulled from somewhere deep, not a word, not a moan. The sound a body makes when a pain it has been carrying for months suddenly lifts. My shoulder goes quiet. The hunger recedes—still there, but pushed back to a place where it doesn’t drown out everything else.