Page 75 of Feral Keep

“She’s still there,” I say. Not Shayla. The women. Gretchen, Lisa, the others. Still behind the cattle fences. Still being told the story that ends with death instead of the story that ends with this, a fire, a man reading by its light, a belly with two heartbeats.

He watches my face. He can read me the way he reads the bark-strips now, slowly, with effort, but getting better. He sees the thought forming before I say it.

“You want to go back,” he says.

The words land somewhere under my ribs and my whole body goes still the way it used to go still at the sound of the assembly bell, not fear exactly, or not only fear, but the old readiness snapping awake, muscles bracing for a fence that isn’t even in the room. My hands have made fists in my lap without asking me first.

I’m not ready to say it yet. The thought is too new, too sharp-edged. I need to hold it for a while. Figure out what going back means when going back means walking into the worst place I’ve ever been with the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

“I want to teach you another word,” I say instead. Deflecting. Camp-survival. Don’t show your hand until you’re ready to play it.

His mouth twitches. The first one I’ve seen on his face—an actual, human, almost-smile that looks wrong on his crimson features and exactly right on the man underneath.

He picks up the bark-strip. His finger finds the word he was working on.

“Building,” he says. Without prompting. Without sounding it out. The word whole and sure in his mouth.

The women are building.

He doesn’t know how right he is.

I sit with the knowledge like a stone in my chest, one I’m going to have to carry back through the camps. The thing I’m building here—the bond, the future beating in the twins’ heartbeats. All of it. I’m going to walk back into Shayla’s world carrying this, and I’m not going to be the same woman who came out. I’ve been remade. The camps said the Shades would unmake you, and they were right. But not the way they meant it. Red remade me into something whole instead of something broken. Now I have to go back and ask other women to let themselves be remade too. Knowing that the rut nearly killed me. Knowing that I came this close to being a mound in the clearing with wildflowers on top.

Knowing it was worth it.

The fire crackles. In the darkness, his fingers close around mine.

32

MAEVE

He’s reading by the fire.

The bark-strip is held in both hands, the crimson fingers spread wide to keep the edges from curling. His lips move. The firelight catches the white horns, the silver hair, the frown of a man working through a sentence the way other men work through stone, slow, deliberate, unwilling to quit until the shape comes clear. The bark gives off a dry, papery smell when he shifts it, mixed with the woodsmoke that’s settled into everything in this warren, into the furs, into my own skin by now.

I watch him from the sleeping hollow. My hand is on my belly. The twins are quiet tonight, no kicks, no shifting, just the warm weight of both of them settled low. I’m getting bigger. The furs don’t sit the same anymore. My hips ache in the morning from the spreading. My breasts are heavier, tender when his arm crosses them in sleep.

My body is not mine anymore. It belongs to the three of them, the two inside me and the one reading by the fire.

The thought should scare me. Camp-brain reaches for the old comparison, a body that isn’t your own is a body that gets used up and thrown away, no different from the mules that hauled water until their legs gave out. It reaches for that and comes up wrong. What’s actually sitting in my chest is something closer to relief, warm and unfamiliar, and there’s no shelf built for it yet.

I get up.

The furs slip off my shoulders as I rise. The cold catches first. The warren never quite warms at night, not even this deep in the root system. The air hits my skin in waves. Collarbone. Ribs. The stretched dome of my belly.

Then the heat. His heat, from here, the furnace of him by the fire, warming the whole half of the warren, and riding on it that low animal warmth that’s only him, thick enough now to reach me across the room. My body recognizes it before my mind does. The flush of warmth low in my belly. The slick arriving without permission, without thought. Just the body’s answer to the proximity of a male who’s spent weeks rebuilding me cell by cell.

I cross the warren.

My feet are bare on the smooth root floor he carved flat, years before I existed in his world. The cold disappears step by step as I move closer to the fire. I’ve pulled one of his furs around my shoulders like a blanket, nothing underneath—my nipples stay peaked from the chill. Cold behind me. Heat ahead, rolling off him in waves before I’m even close enough to touch. My body burns from the inside out with a deep, banked warmth.

His ear tilts before I’m within three feet. That predator awareness. The subtle fold of cartilage that hasn’t dulled even though the feral wall came down. His gold eyes lift from the bark-strip.

I put my hand on the bark-strip. His eyes follow my hand. Then lift to my face.

“I want you,” I say.

Three words. Not camp-speech, not the old bargain of if I give him this, I get that. I want him. I want him the way I wanted food in the camps—with my whole body, with the ache of something I’ve been denied so long the wanting has become who I am.