Page 80 of Feral Keep

I turn in his arms. Shove his chest. He goes back against the wall, letting me push him, not because I’m strong enough to move nine feet of muscle but because he’s learned that when I push, I need him flat.

I straddle him. Reach down. His cock is already thickening. He reads my body faster than I read my own, the scent of my arousal hitting him before I’ve registered the wanting. I take him in my hand. He’s not fully hard yet. The tip curls against my fingers, flexing, seeking. I don’t wait. I guide him to the opening and sink down.

The stretch on a half-hard cock is different. The girth building inside me as he stiffens, the impossible widening of my walls as he goes from thick to iron while he’s already inside. My breath stutters. My hands flatten on his chest. The crimson skin under my palms, the hard muscle, the scars from whatever he fought to claim this territory. He finishes hardening inside me, full, rigid, pulsing, pressing against every wall I have.

I grind down.

The anger drives my hips. The cattle fences. The rations. Shayla’s voice telling me the canopy would kill me. The years of sleeping on hard ground, of cracked ribs, of teeth knocked out. The years of believing the thing under me was a monster. I grind down on his cock with the fury of a woman remembering what was done to her while sitting on the proof of what was done for her.

He grips my hips. His hands spanning my waist, the crimson fingers pressing into the flesh that wasn’t there three months ago. He doesn’t thrust up. He holds me. Lets me take what I need. His gold eyes watching my face with the steady, burning attention that makes my skin feel transparent.

I come snarling. My nails in his chest. My teeth bared. The orgasm ripping through me with the anger still hot behind it, the grief and the fury tangling in my hips. He comes after me, his hips finally driving up, the restraint breaking, the full upward thrust that lifts me and slams me back down and he roars against my throat. His teeth on my neck. The blunt ones, not the fangs. The pressure fierce enough to echo in my spine.

I collapse against his chest. His cock softening slowly inside me. His arms wrap around my back, fingers finding my hair, cradling my head against the space between his pectorals where my head fits, the smell of sweat and smoke and him settling thick around both of us like the fire’s pulled closer.

The twins move.

His palm finds the curve of me. Rests there. Billy and Sam turn in the dark, alive and growing, while their mother lies on their father’s chest, planning the thing she hasn’t said yet.

Underneath the resolve there’s a smaller, colder thing that doesn’t want to go anywhere near those fences again. That would rather stay in this warren with the fire and the reading lessons and never smell the camp’s chemical stink for the rest of my life. I let it sit there next to the resolve without pretending it isn’t real. I’m not going to lie to myself about which one is louder some nights.

I’m going back.

I’m going back and I’m taking him with me and I’m opening every cage Shayla ever built.

But not tonight. Tonight I lie here. Tonight I breathe against his skin and feel his heart and hold the names of two boys—one dead, one coming—in my mouth.

Billy. Sam.

The fire burns. The canopy shifts. Red’s arms hold me and the anger cools to something harder. Something with edges. Something that will cut a fence open.

34

MAEVE

“Take me back.”

Three words. I say them in the morning, and my voice doesn’t shake saying them even though something underneath my ribs is shaking plenty. I’ve turned this thought over for two days now, at night while he slept, testing whether it would still feel true come daylight. It does. He’s crouched by the cooking surface, turning meat on the flat stone, the firelight catching the white horns and the silver hair falling across his face. The smell of roasting meat fills the warren, rich and smoky, mixing with the green morning smell coming down through the root gaps. The domestic posture of a nine-foot predator making breakfast for his pregnant mate. My chest hurts looking at him.

He doesn’t turn around.

“The camp,” I say. “Where I was. Where they still are.”

Now he turns. Slow. The gold eyes finding me across the warren. He reads my face the way he reads the bark-strips, carefully, making sure he has the meaning before he speaks.

“You want to go back.”

It isn’t a question. He said it last night, when the thought was still new and sharp in my mouth. He’s been waiting. The teacher’s patience, the predator’s stillness, both of them holding the same posture, which is: I see what’s coming. I’m ready.

“I want to get them out.”

He straightens, the full nine feet of him unfolding from the crouch, his wings shifting against his back, the membranes rustling, the cooking surface forgotten. The meat will burn. Neither of us cares.

“How many,” he says. Not how many women. Not how many do you want to save. How many is the whole question. The answer determines what he’s walking into.

“When I left—forty. Maybe more.” I close my eyes. Try to count. My stomach turns doing it, running the numbers the way I used to run them at the evening count, waiting to hear which bunk didn’t answer. The barracks held twelve per building. Three barracks in the main compound. But women died. Women got transferred. New ones came from other camps or from the Gilded Cages when a mating failed. Some had miscarriages and didn’t come back from the infirmary. Some got pulled for the Ordained’s breeding experiments, the ones they said weren’t healthy enough for the labor lines. “Forty is—a guess. Could be less. Could be more if they’ve been running transfers from the eastern camps.”

He nods, taking it in, the intelligence behind his eyes working the way it works on the bark-strips, slow, deliberate, building the picture one piece at a time.