Page 77 of Feral Keep

Full force. The wall shudders behind me. My back arches—or tries to, but there’s nowhere to go. I’m pinned between stone and him, and there is only the cock inside me, the depth of it, the brutal grinding thrust that bottoms out and holds. He pulls back. Drives again. The rhythm is the rut’s rhythm—relentless, deep, each thrust a statement—except his eyes are open and clear and he is choosing every single one.

His tail finds my thigh. The white tip slides between us, finds the swollen bud of my clit, and presses.

“Red—”

The second orgasm doesn’t build. It detonates. My nails drag down his chest, leaving pale tracks in the crimson skin. My teeth find his collarbone. I bite down and come with my whole body seizing, my walls locking around him in waves that drag a groan out of the back of his throat. His hands tighten on my hips. He drives in one final time—the deepest, the hardest, his hips grinding against mine—and comes, head thrown back, wings flaring wide, a roar shaking dust from the root ceiling.

His forehead drops to the wall above my head, his breath heaving. The warmth spreads inside me—his cum, the thick heat of it, the knot swelling at the base and pressing, pressing, the familiar ache of being locked on him, shorter now than during the rut. The knot holds for minutes, not hours. But the fullness is the same. The deep, heavy, claimed feeling of being filled by a male who just chose me with everything he has.

I press my face into his chest, his heart hammering under my cheek, the crimson skin damp with sweat, the smell of him thick and warm and mine, salt and musk and something underneath that’s just his skin. A palm cups the back of my head—the massive weight of it covering my skull, the claws retracted, the gentleness that isn’t gentle, the tenderness of a predator holding something he would kill the world to keep.

“Maeve,” he says. My name in his mouth. Low. Rough. Real.

I don’t answer. I just breathe against his skin and feel his knot pulse inside me. I listen to the fire crackle and the canopy shift outside.

He peels me off the wall slowly. One hand still on my head, one hand under my ass, and he’s moving backward, away from the root-bark that’s left marks across my shoulders. The cold air hits my back where his body was, shocking, and I grip his shoulders tighter. He settles onto the furs, stretched out, me still on top of him, my knees on either side of his waist, the position awkward because of the twins, because of his size. The knot is still inside me, swelling, not as big as during the rut—shorter hold, less brutality—but enough that the ache of being stretched around it is perfect.

His fingers trace the marks the wall left across my back. Light. Careful. The teacher’s touch. The reverence of someone examining something he might break.

“Bruises,” he says—plain, not asking.

“Yeah.” My voice is rough. My throat raw from biting and moaning. “I want the bruises.”

His hand stills. Then continues. Tracing the marks like he’s memorizing them. Reading the proof that I was here, that this happened, that his hands, his body did this to me—and I asked for it. Asked. Chose. Came to him naked and said I want you and meant every syllable.

The knot is softening. The release coming. Inside me it’s cooling—his cum, the thick heat of it now just warmth spreading through my pelvis. Settling. Claiming. My walls contract around him one more time as the knot shrinks and the fullness becomes just-full instead of stretched-to-breaking. The satisfaction lands different without the rut driving it. Chosen. Mine.

I know that this is the first time we’ve done this as two people who chose each other—not the rut, not instinct running itself with no thought behind it, not the feral drive or the scent that matched us before we had a say.

My throat tightens around that thought in a way I don’t expect. Choosing was never mine to do before. In the camps you didn’t choose the labor line, the bunk, the hands that touched you when the Ordained decided your body was theirs to test. Choosing is new enough that some small, stubborn part of me keeps waiting for someone to take it back.

This was mine. I chose it. I chose him.

He was never going to be gentle. I was never going to want gentle. He is nine feet of crimson muscle and I am a camp survivor who learned to love the force of him. The sex between us will always carry the weight of what we are—heavy, hard, loud enough to shake the walls.

My body knows what it wants. His body knows what it wants. The bruises forming on my hips—handprints in crimson against brown skin—are the language of that wanting. The wall-marks on my shoulders. The bite on his collarbone that drew blood. The scratches his claws didn’t mean to leave, his hands shaking with the effort of holding back.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I lay my head on his chest and let his hand settle on my belly, covering the twins, and feel the slow pulse of his heartbeat beneath my ear. The fire crackles. The knot releases fully. His cock slips out, softening, and the full run of his cum follows—too much, too hot, the proof of how deep he was, how much he filled me. His hand doesn’t move from my belly. My body’s warm weight on his. The satisfaction of being exactly where I chose to be.

Teacher and student. No more. We’re something else now.

This is what choosing feels like.

33

MAEVE

His hand is on my belly when he asks.

We’re in the sleeping hollow. The fire is low, embers, not flame, the orange glow painting the root walls in shifting copper, the shadows long and soft where the light doesn’t reach. The smell of banked coals hangs warm and dry in the air, mixed with the animal smell of him this close. I’m on my side, curled into the warm wall of him, his arm draped over me with his palm flat against the swell. The twins are active tonight. Little rolls and nudges, the strange underwater gymnastics of bodies that don’t know yet that the world outside is broken.

His thumb traces a slow circle, feeling the movement under the skin.

“Billy,” he says.

Not a question. Not exactly. The word hangs in the amber light between us, carried on the careful rhythm of a man who is still learning how to say the things that matter.