Page 74 of Feral Keep

I also know what the absence of pain feels like now. I know what it means to eat until I’m full. To sleep in warmth. To have a jaw that works on both sides. To have hair growing in thick and strong. To stand on legs that hold me. To carry two lives in my belly and know that the man beside me will tend those lives with the same ferocity he tended mine.

The lie breaks, quietly.

This is the moment where Shayla’s voice tries to speak and finds it has nothing left to say. The structure collapses under its own weight. What’s left is the truth, plain, blunt, camp-simple: they lied. About all of it. Every word.

“They said you’d kill me.”

I say it out loud. We’re by the fire. He’s holding a bark-strip, his finger on a word he’s been sounding out for the past five minutes. His eyes lift to mine.

“Kill you,” he repeats. Not a question. Testing the words. Feeling the accusation land.

“The camps. Shayla—the woman who ran it. She told us the Shades would—” I stop. Not because I can’t say it. Because the words sound absurd when I’m sitting three feet from the man they describe, watching him read. “She said you’d rape us to death. That the claiming would break us. That we’d die in the canopy.”

He sets the bark-strip down. His gold eyes are steady on my face.

“She wasn’t—” He stops. His jaw works. The frustration flickers across his features, the same look he gets when a word won’t come. Then, slowly: “Not entirely wrong.”

The silence stretches. He’s building the next sentence. The effort of it shows, the way his mouth moves before the sound arrives. His hands clench into fists and release again. This is hard for him. Not because he doesn’t want to say it. Because he has to pull it from a place where language barely exists.

“The rut doesn’t—” He presses his fist against his thigh. “It doesn’t care. If the female is strong. If she’s dying. It doesn’t—” A rough exhale. “It takes. That’s what it does. It takes.”

His eyes drop to his hands. The massive crimson fingers, open on his thighs. They’re trembling slightly.

“If you were strong. When I found you.” He stops. Swallows. “If your body wasn’t already breaking—the rut would’ve been—” The frustration comes back. He hits his thigh with his fist, lightly, the gesture of a man who has the thought but can’t find the shape of it. “Worse. Harder. I held back because you were fragile. Not because I chose to. Because the feral—even the feral knew. Break you and lose you.”

The warren is very quiet.

“If you were healthy,” he says. Each word pulled out separate, like hauling them up from deep water. “I would not have held back. The rut would’ve driven full force. No waiting. No—” His voice drops. “No gentle.”

He stands. Walks to the wall. His palm presses flat against it, and for a moment I think he’s going to hit it, but he doesn’t. He just holds himself there, breathing. His wings twitch, restless. The silver hair catches the firelight.

“She died that way.” His voice comes from a place that sounds broken. “You know what she was when I found her. Dying already. The rut didn’t care. It took a woman who had days left and it spent them.” His fist presses flat against the wall, knuckles down, holding still. “It doesn’t weigh. It doesn’t wait. It takes.”

She. The dead mate. The grave with the flowers. He told me how it ended, by the fire, and he isn’t telling me again. This is the other side of it—the side Shayla’s story is built on. Every lie that keeps women behind fences has one true bone in it somewhere, and his worst day is the bone in this one.

He comes back to the fire. Sits. His shoulders are heavy with the weight of eight years of carrying this.

“Enough of the bond took that I felt her go,” he says. His hands turn over, palms up, showing me their emptiness. “Not enough to hold her. I felt the place where she should have been go quiet.”

My throat closes around the horror before I’ve decided whether to let it in. It should be simple, a man telling me his worst thing, my body supplying the fear that fits it. What actually happens is stranger. My hands go cold. My chest aches in the specific spot that means I’m about to cry, and I don’t, because crying is for later, alone, when it won’t cost him anything to see it. Fear should be the answer. Instead there’s the enormity of what he’s telling me—that he felt that. That the bond didn’t protect her. That he was forced to be conscious of her death through every second of it.

“I felt your ribs—cracking. First night. Second.” His voice goes rough, present-tense terrible. “Couldn’t stop. The drive was—I couldn’t stop it. The venom worked. The cum worked. But close. It was close.”

He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to. If I’d been a little further gone, if my body had been too far broken to answer the venom or the cum or the heat, I would be a mound in the clearing with wildflowers on top and no name.

My skin goes cold picturing it—the old alertness, the one that used to check the exits in a room before I let myself sit down in it. For a second the fire smoke turns to something else in my head, the chemical sting of the camp’s disinfectant, the smell that meant someone was being cleaned up after. I press my hand flat against my sternum like I can hold the fear there, keep it from climbing any higher.

“Almost killed you,” he says. Flat. No softening. “That’s what she told them. She wasn’t wrong about that.”

“She was wrong about everything else,” I say.

The fire crackles. His eyes hold mine.

“Yes,” he says. “She was wrong about everything else.”

I sit with the contradiction. The monster who saved me almost killed me. The claiming that gave me new teeth and growing hair and two heartbeats in my belly started with a force that cracked my already-cracked ribs. Both things are true.

The danger was real. The love was also real. The camps only told half the story, and the half they told was the half that kept women behind fences.