Page 79 of Feral Keep

“Thirteen years.” Flat. The fact of it landing between us. “Hands kept building. Mind was—gone. Hands didn’t stop.”

The warren looks different now, seen through eyes that know what built it. The utensils hang from bone hooks, shaped by hand, pale and yellowed where his fingers have worn the grain smooth over thirteen years. The sleeping hollows are multiple—the main one deeper and wider, the secondary one against the far wall, smaller, shallower, built for a body that never came back.

“The second hollow,” I say. “That was for her.”

“For—a family.” He corrects me carefully. The words costing him effort but coming. “Not just her. Children. The feral wanted—the feral built for children that didn’t exist.”

The twins kick. Both of them. A simultaneous double-thump that makes my belly visibly jump. His arms tighten around me.

“They exist now,” I say.

His chin presses harder against my crown. His chest expands, a deep breath, the kind you take when something lands and you need a second before you can hold it.

“I need to—make it bigger.” He sounds like he’s talking to himself. Planning. “The sleeping space. Room for—they’ll grow. They’ll need—” He stops. Swallows. “Space to climb. Billy climbed everything.”

The name slipping out like that—present tense, the dead son and the unborn son sharing a name and a verb—makes my throat close. I press my hand against his forearm. The massive crimson arm around me, the muscle warm under my palm.

“We have time,” I say.

He nods against my head. His hand moves on my belly. Slow circles. Feeling.

“The women,” I say.

He goes still, the quiet of a man who has been waiting for this.

“The camp,” I say. “Where I was.”

His arms stay loose around me, present, the way the teacher listens—body open, attention full, waiting for the speaker to find the end of the thought.

“Gretchen braided my hair. Every morning. Five years of mornings, her hands quick and sure in the grey barracks light, working three strands into rows tight against my scalp—she braided my hair and told me I was still beautiful. She’s the reason I—” My throat closes again. I push through it. Camp-muscle. You swallow the feeling and you keep talking. “Lisa hid my blood when I bled through my clothes. Stole rags from the supply tent. If the Eunuchs knew I was bleeding they’d put me on lighter duty and Shayla would dock the rations for the whole barracks.”

His growl is low. Not directed at me. The sound a predator makes when it learns something hurt what belongs to it.

My breath goes out of me hearing it, some old-held breath I didn’t know I was still holding since the day it happened. Nobody ever growled on my behalf before. Nobody ever had the size to make it matter.

“There are more,” I say. “Women. In the camp. Behind the cattle fences. Being told—” I stop. Breathe. “Being told you’d kill me. Being told the canopy is death. Being told to stay behind the fences because the world outside is worse than the world inside.”

“It’s not.”

Two words. Said with the flat certainty of a man who has seen both worlds.

“I know it’s not. They don’t.”

The fire crackles. The canopy shifts outside, the rustling of mutated vegetation, the alive sound of a world that grew over the old one. His hand has stopped moving on my belly. Still. The weight of it resting on the swell, his thumb pressed against the spot where Billy or Sam just kicked.

I don’t say the rest. Not yet. The thought is still forming, its edges sharp and dangerous. I need to hold it a little longer, figure out what going back means when going back means walking into the worst place I’ve ever been.

But the seed is planted. It grows the way the twins grow, slowly, steadily, pushing against the walls of what I thought was possible.

His arms tighten, protective, the arms of a male who has heard his mate describe harm and whose body is already moving to protect.

“They’re wrong about you,” I say. Quiet. My head against his chest, his heartbeat under my ear. “I was wrong about you.”

He doesn’t answer. He presses his mouth to the crown of my head. His breath warm in my hair. The 4c coils cushioning his lips, the healthy thickness of what grew back after the camps broke it.

The anger comes.

Not at him. At the fences. At Shayla’s voice in my head, the voice that told me this would kill me—this, the warm arm, the reading lessons, the man whose hand rests on the belly where his sons are growing. The anger makes my skin hot. Makes my body tighten around the absence of him because he pulled out an hour ago and the phantom ache is still there, the walls still reaching for what isn’t inside them.