Page 71 of Feral Keep

“The rut hit,” he says. “When I—when she was there. The switch. I couldn’t—” His hand rises. Falls. “I took her. Like I took you.”

“I know,” I say.

He looks at me. Checking, maybe, for judgment. For the disgust the camps would’ve put on my face. The propaganda voice: He took a dying woman and fucked her. That’s what they do. That’s what they are.

I don’t give him disgust. I give him the flat, waiting look of a woman who’s been taken by the same hands and lived.

“The bond didn’t take. You already know that part.” He’s speaking to the fire now, not to me, his tail shifting, restless. “What I haven’t said is the rest of it.”

He’s right. I already have the shape of the failure—a body too far gone for the bond to hold onto, venom and cum poured into a woman who was already leaving, and the thought I haven’t let myself finish since the grave: it could have been me under that mound. I press my palm flat against the furs beneath me, looking for something solid to hold onto, and wait for whatever he hasn’t said yet.

“How long?” I ask.

“Days.” His voice cracks. “Three. Maybe four. The rut was—I couldn’t stop. The drive was—” He presses both hands against his face. Crimson fingers covering gold eyes. The shake comes back. That deep tremor that lives in the bone. “I was inside her when she died.”

The warren is very quiet.

The smoke has gone bitter where the fire’s burning low, catching at the back of my throat, and underneath it I catch the change in him—something sour rising off his skin that wasn’t there a minute ago, the smell of a body remembering its worst day. My hands curl into fists in my lap, quick and hard, before I’ve told them to. My pulse goes loud in my own ears. I want to look away from him and I don’t let myself, because looking away is its own kind of verdict, and he doesn’t deserve that one tonight.

The fire pops. A branch shifts in the canopy outside. Insects hum, distant and persistent, filtering through the root walls. Normal sounds. The world keeps going around a sentence that just cracked the room open.

I don’t flinch. I don’t go still. I sit where I am, across the fire, and I stay the way the camp-women stayed for each other, without judgment, without comfort, without anything except the willingness to be present while someone says the worst thing they’ve ever said. In the barracks, I watched women sit through confessions this way, staying through the things that broke you, offering nothing but witness.

“The rut broke when she—when it—” He drops his hands. His eyes are red-rimmed but dry. “I buried her. I didn’t know her name. I still don’t.”

“I know,” I say again.

“I built the mound. The flowers.” His voice is flat now. Emptied. “I came back. Every day. Every day for eight years I came back and I put flowers on a grave for a woman whose name I never learned.”

Eight years. Not thirteen. The camps formed after the asteroid, after the males died or mutated. He was already alone. He came to the border looking for something, and found a dead woman instead. Found me.

The second sleeping space is still back there, empty, maintained—eight years of a man’s hands building a home that had nobody in it, because the hands didn’t know how to stop.

When I collapsed at his border, his body recognized what it had been waiting for: a chance, finally, to get it right.

“The bond worked,” I say. “With me.”

“Yes.” One word. Filled with everything a single syllable can hold. “Yes. With you.”

The silence stretches, easy despite everything—two people who have said the hard things, sitting in the aftermath, waiting for the air to settle.

The root walls are carved and smoothed by his hands, visible to me now in a way they weren’t before. It’s the deliberate work of a male tending a space that might have held a family—the cooking surface blackened and used, the sleeping platform built wide enough for two, the furs layered, the older ones underneath the newer ones. He kept replacing them, even though the first one failed. Even though he buried her nameless in the ground and came back to the warren every night and built it bigger, deeper, more solid.

“She’s buried in your territory,” I say. “You tend her grave. You pick flowers.” I pause. Let the next sentence form. “She matters. She doesn’t have a name, but she matters.”

His eyes find mine. The gold is warm, steady, devastated.

“Thank you,” he says. “For—the cloth. On the grave.”

Dara’s headband. The blue fabric I set on the mound. A token from one lost woman laid beside the flowers of another.

“Everyone should have something on their grave,” I say. Camp-speech. Blunt. True.

He’s quiet. His tail uncurls from the furs, shifts, settles again. The motion is restless, electric, the rut still knocking at the doors of language, the male underneath the recovered speech. The confession has cleared something but it hasn’t emptied him. He’s still full of the thing he just said.

“The flowers I pick—” He stops. Restarts. “I don’t know why. I picked them. Every day. Like my hands—” He looks at his palms. “Like my hands didn’t want to stop. Kept the grave alive. Kept her alive by keeping the flowers alive.”

I understand. In the camps, the women who were assigned to the graves—the outside detail that planted and cleared—they were the ones who survived longer than they should have. Something about the work kept you human. The grave work was a choice, even in a place where women weren’t allowed to choose.