Page 8 of Feral Keep

The last person who touched me without hurting was my mother. Her hands on my face the morning the Ordained came, checking me for fever the way she always did, palm to forehead, quick and warm. Hours later she was dead and I was on the intake line and no one touched me without hurting again.

Until this.

I don’t fight it. Not because I’m surrendering—the words surrender, submission, giving up flash and don’t fit. Fighting requires energy I don’t have. I am lying in the arms of something nine feet tall, crimson, burning with a drive that wants to put itself inside me. The venom is the first painless thing I’ve felt in years. I am too empty to refuse it.

He carries me through his territory. I’m conscious enough to notice things through the fog—the canopy maintained here, the underbrush cleared, pathways worn into the roots by his feet, the air thick with sap and turned earth, sweeter than anywhere else I’ve crossed. The firepit I saw before, warm coals, ash recently tended. Carved marks on trees that aren’t the deep territorial gouges—something finer, lines and curves that might be letters, might be something else. A cleared space with a mound of earth covered in wildflowers.

The mound again. From his arms, at height, looking down. Earth packed smooth. Wildflowers bright—white, yellow, small purple things that have no business growing in the filtered canopy light. Someone has been tending flowers on this mound of earth for years.

The mound is a fact I can’t get to yet. The venom has my thoughts slow, heavy, the edges soft. I’ll come back to it.

His warren. Not high in the canopy—built into the root system of a tree so massive that its base is a structure in itself. The roots arch and interlock, forming walls, reinforced with timber, bark layered over gaps, a roof of woven branches that keeps the rain out while letting the filtered light in. Woodsmoke hangs thick in here, old smoke layered under new, the smell of a fire that’s never really gone out.

It’s a home.

The thought hits through the venom with a force that shouldn’t be possible for two words. A firepit, smaller, built with stones. A cooking surface. Utensils, carved, rough, but recognizable. A pot hanging from a branch-hook. A sleeping space lined with furs, deep, layered, warmth that comes from years of curing and maintaining, the hides holding tallow and old smoke worked so deep into them it’s part of the smell of the place now.

He’s been building a home here for years with no one to live in it.

The grief in the thought is not mine. It belongs to the space—the utensils no one uses, the sleeping hollow shaped for a body that isn’t here, the cooking surface blackened by years of meals prepared for one. But something answers it in me anyway, quiet, unwelcome. I know what it is to build a life around an absence. I did it for four years. Recognizing his grief in mine feels like a door I didn’t mean to open.

He sets me in the furs. I sink. The softness is obscene after weeks of bare ground, the fur yielding under my body in a way that makes my ribs cry out and then go silent as the venom compensates. His arms release me slowly, the way you set down something fragile. His tail stays around my waist.

I lie in the furs and look up at him.

Nine feet of blood-red male. Silver hair falling around a face tight with the rut—jaw clenched, pupils blown, the cords of his neck standing out. His cock is hard—thick, curved, the knot at the base already swelling, straining against his thigh like something alive. His wings are half-open, the crimson membranes dark against the light from the roof opening.

His tail tightens on my waist. The bone-white tip presses against the bare skin above my hip—another pulse of venom, targeted, aimed at the place where my cracked ribs are knitting wrong.

His eyes find mine. Gold swallowed to black.

His hands reach for the space beside the sleeping hollow. Not my body. A clay pot. Food inside—cooked meat, dark, glistening, the smell hitting my starved body so hard my mouth floods. He was cooking before he found me. He has been feeding himself from this kitchen for thirteen years, and some feral part of him knows now there are two mouths to feed.

He holds the meat to my face.

His crimson fingers. The food between them. His cock hard against his thigh. His tail on my waist. His pupils blown, his body vibrating with the drive the camps told me would kill me.

He feeds me first.

“Eat.”

The word is guttural. Flat. No softness in it, no tenderness. A command from something that has already decided what’s wrong with me and started fixing it.

I take the food with my teeth. Not with my lips, not with an open mouth—with my teeth, because opening my mouth that close to his fingers feels like something I’m not ready for. The meat is warm. My jaw hurts. I chew slowly, on the good side, and the flavor hits my starved body like a fist.

Good. It’s good. The best thing I’ve eaten in—I don’t know. I don’t remember food tasting like this. The camp meals were boiled grain and whatever the supply carts carried. This is meat, actual meat, cooked over a fire by hands that know what they’re doing.

A small hot flare of fury burns under the gratitude. Four years behind fences and this is what it took, a monster’s kitchen, to remember that food could taste like anything at all. I swallow that down along with the meat.

He watches me chew. His dark eyes track every movement of my jaw. He isn’t watching me the way a predator watches prey. He’s watching me the way a thing watches a problem it’s solving.

I swallow. Something in his body settles—a fraction, a degree. The tension in his shoulders eases by a measurement so small I shouldn’t be able to read it, but I’m lying two inches from his chest and the change is as clear as a spoken word.

He holds the next piece to my mouth. I take it. I chew. I swallow. He settles further.

“I can’t eat much,” I say. My voice is a ruin—cracked, thin, the first words I’ve spoken to anything besides myself in weeks. “My stomach’s shrunk.”

He doesn’t respond. His hand doesn’t move. The food stays at my mouth.