Page 76 of Feral Keep

He sets the bark-strip down. Careful. The teacher’s hands placing the lesson aside because something more important has arrived.

His tail uncurls from his thigh. The white tip catches the firelight—the same tip that found my clit during the rut, that wrapped around his cock to build cum in his balls until they were heavy and slapping against me. The tail knows what’s coming before the rest of him.

His cock thickens. I watch it happen, him filling out, the tip lifting, curling slightly toward me the way it does. His cock has always reached for me. During the rut it was instinct, the drive running itself with no thought behind it. Now it’s him. The man underneath, wanting what the feral wanted, but with eyes that see me and a mouth that knows my name.

I drop the fur.

The firelight hits my skin. I’m not the skeleton who collapsed at his border. The ribs are covered. The hip bones are padded. My belly rounds forward with the twins, the skin stretched taut, the dark brown of it gleaming in the warm light. My breasts are full, heavy, the nipples dark and peaked from the cold and the want. My hair is a crown of tight 4c coils, thick and healthy, the new growth that came in after the rut’s venom regrew what the camps broke.

His breath changes. The deep chest expanding, the sound of a nine-foot male breathing in his mate’s arousal, tasting it on the air the way I taste smoke on my tongue.

I climb into his lap.

His thighs are massive under me. The muscle hard beneath the crimson skin, the heat of him radiating through my bare legs. His body is that broad, my knees barely reaching the outer edges of his thighs. My belly presses against the flat plane of his abdomen. The twins shift at the contact, a lazy roll, and his hand moves to the curve of me. Rests there. Feeling them.

Then his eyes come back to mine.

I reach down.

His cock is rigid. The heat of it pulses against my palm, heavy, thick, the full impossible girth of him that I took for three weeks during the rut and still makes my breath catch when I wrap my fingers around it. I can’t close my hand. The tip flexes against my grip, curling, seeking, pressing toward the slick that’s already running down my thighs.

I seat myself on him in one motion.

The stretch—God. The stretch. My jaw drops. My eyes close. My body opens for him the way it learned to open, the walls spreading, the deep ache of being full of him blooming through my pelvis and up into my belly. I don’t stop. I take him to the base. The last inch grinds against my cervix and I make a sound that isn’t a word. My hands find his shoulders. My nails dig in.

He’s watching me. Gold eyes. Clear. No feral haze. No rut driving him. Just Red, looking at me like I’m the bark-strip he can’t stop reading—like I’m the word he’s been sounding out for weeks and he just heard it said aloud.

I ride him.

My pace. My angle. My hands on his shoulders for leverage, my hips grinding forward and back, the swivel I learned during the rut when my body figured out on its own how to chase the feeling. I’m not slow. I drive myself down on him, the rebuilt legs, the strong thighs, the body he fed back to life doing the work of fucking a nine-foot Shade from his lap.

My hands find his horns. The white bone smooth under my palms, warm from the fire. I grip them. Pull his head back. His throat stretches—the long crimson column, the tendon standing out, the pulse hammering at the base where his jaw meets his neck. I bite it. Teeth into the thick skin. Not hard enough to break through. Hard enough that he feels it.

The sound he makes isn’t feral.

It’s rougher than that. Deeper. The sound of a man surprised by his own want, a groan that starts in his chest and gets caught in his throat. My teeth are on the spot where his pulse lives. My cunt is grinding down on his cock, and his control slips. His hands lock on my hips. The crimson fingers spanning my waist, the grip tight enough that I’ll have bruises tomorrow. I want the bruises. I want his hands printed on me in a color I can see.

“Harder,” I say.

He drives up.

The thrust lifts me off his thighs. My knees leave the surface. My full weight suspended on his cock and his hands, my body folding forward, my forehead hitting his collarbone, where it reaches on a male this size. He drives up again. The sound is wet, obscene, the slap of my thighs against his and the slick noise of him pulling almost out and slamming home. My walls clamp. The orgasm is sudden, punched out of me by the angle, the force, the fact that this time I chose it. The choosing makes everything sharper.

I don’t stop moving.

I ride through it. My walls clenching around him in pulses, my hips grinding, the orgasm rolling and cresting and I don’t let it end, I chase the next one into the shaking wreckage of the first. His grip digs into my waist, holding on. His breath is ragged against the top of my head.

He stands.

Lifts me with him, one arm, the massive forearm under my ass, my legs still wrapped around his waist. His cock shifts inside me with the movement, the tip pressing forward against the front wall, and I gasp and grab his horns again. He crosses the warren in three strides and pins me against the wall.

The root wall is cold against my back. His body is a furnace against my front. The size difference—it never stops being staggering. My feet don’t reach the ground. My face is at his chest. My whole body is suspended on his cock and held up by his hands and the wall behind me.

The wall is rough. Root-bark, uncarved here, scarred by his claws from years of this—reaching up and dragging his fingers in frustration or hunger or both. The texture digs into my shoulders, into the spot between my shoulder blades where the furs usually cover. The bark smells of damp earth and old sap, cool against the heat pouring off him. It anchors me, keeping me pinned while he fills me.

He’s looking down at me the way he looked at the bark-strip. That expression. It’s the teacher looking at a student who just spoke a word he taught her weeks ago, and she’s gotten it right, she’s understood. The gold eyes are clear, bright in the firelight. He sees me. Not the bump of the twins, not the swollen breasts, not the small brown girl who was chained in a camp. Sees me. Sees Maeve. Sees the one who walked up to him naked and said I want you and meant it down to the bone.

Then he drives in.