Page 81 of Feral Keep

“Guards,” he says.

“Eunuchs. Six when I was there. Maybe more now.” I sit up in the furs. Pull the fur blanket around my shoulders. The morning is cold, the canopy holding the chill until the sun gets high enough to burn through. “They don’t fight well. They’re—wrong. Thin. The limbs don’t move right. But they carry weapons. Sharpened bone, mostly. A couple had metal from before. The tall one—Korrin—he’s fast when he needs to be. But they’re not—they’re not built the way a body should be. The joints bend backwards sometimes. They get tired fast from the patrols.”

He leans forward slightly, the instinct of a hunter reading prey, the weak points, the opening.

“They rotate. Four hours on the perimeter, four hours inside the barracks area, four hours sleeping. If we’re coming in at midday the rotation’s broken anyway, the women coming back from the lines, guards changing positions, the supply run to Shayla’s office.” I’m laying it out the way I’ve lived it. Camp-intelligence. The kind of knowledge you only get from being trapped somewhere and watching it breathe. “The Eunuchs always leave the main gate for the transfer check, when women move between barracks for work assignments. It’s sloppy. Shayla doesn’t care about security. She cares about numbers. How many are working. How many are eating. How many are still alive to count.”

His lip curls, the flash of white fang, the involuntary snarl of a male hearing about something that hurt his mate. His tail goes rigid behind him, the whole of it straightening like a rod, the white tip twitching with the violence happening in his chest. He knows the smell of them, he told me once, during a reading lesson, the word coming out before the sentence around it: “Wrong.”

The snarl deepens. His hands curl into fists, the claws that never fully retract digging into the leather of his flying gloves, scoring them with silvered marks. They press into his palms hard enough that blood beads at the crescents.

“They—put hands on you,” he says. Each word a separate violence.

“They did.” I don’t look away. Camp-steady. The truth doesn’t get softer by not naming it. Saying it out loud does something to my stomach anyway, a small hard twist, the same twist that used to come right before a hand landed, quick and automatic, my body remembering faster than I can stop it. I let it pass through and out the other side instead of holding onto it. “When I broke the quota one week. When they thought I was stealing food. When they wanted to make a point about the rut-cycle for the newer women.” I pull the blanket tighter, something to hold. “It’s over. I’m here. You’re about to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

His jaw works. The muscles along his neck stand out with the effort it takes him not to come off his crouch, not to tear apart the warren wall with his bare hands right now, today, before we even walk to the camp. His wings flex and spread an inch, then press back against his back. His breathing comes heavy through his nose.

“Ordained?” he asks.

“Two of their women when I left. Maybe more.” Not Ordained themselves—the Ordained come and go, collections and inspections and quotas. These are the ones who stay: human women who chose to work for the system, administrators, enforcers, believers. “Shayla is the one I know. The other handled transfers between camps and the Gilded Cages. Shayla runs it. She’s—smart. She’s not going to fight you. She’ll talk.”

“Let her talk.”

Two words. Flat. The voice of a man who has decided something and the decision doesn’t include listening.

“The fences are cattle wire. Electrified.” I’m drawing it in my head. The camp I lived in for four years, every corner of it burned into my brain the way Red’s warren is burned into my bones. “The generator runs on—I don’t know. Something from before. Fuel. It cuts out sometimes. When it cuts out, the fences go dead for hours.”

“Don’t need the fences down.” He walks to the far wall. The wall where thirteen years of carved letters catch the morning light, the A, the backwards B, the alphabet of a teacher’s hands refusing to forget. He touches the wall. Not the letters. The structure. The root-brace joints he built. “These walls—” He knocks. The sound is solid, dense. “I built these. Cattle wire is—” He makes a dismissive sound, the kind that doesn’t need words.

He can tear through cattle fencing. Of course he can. His hands carved stone and shaped root wood for thirteen years. Wire is nothing.

“The women won’t come,” I say.

He turns. His brow creases.

“They won’t come with you. They won’t come because a Shade tells them to.” I pull the fur tighter. The cold inside me isn’t temperature. It’s the memory of Shayla’s voice—the Shades will brutally rape you to death—and the knowledge that every woman in that camp has heard it so many times it’s become the shape of the world. “They need me. They need to hear it from someone who was inside the fences.”

He studies me, his gaze moving across my face, the belly underneath the furs. The pregnant mate who wants to walk back into the place that nearly killed her.

“You’re carrying—two.” He says it carefully. Each word chosen. “The walk is—far. Days.”

“I know how far it is. I ran it. Half dead.” I hold his gaze. “I can walk it fed.”

The silence stretches. The meat is burning on the cooking surface, the smell of char reaching us, the smoke curling. He doesn’t move to save it. His eyes don’t leave mine.

The weight of the decision sits on him. I’m a mate pregnant with twins, fragile in ways I wasn’t before the rut, and he’s saying yes to walking me back to the place that tried to break me. It’s the place where the women he wants to save might not want to come, and I’ll be the one who has to persuade them, standing in front of the fences while his restraint holds by a thread.

“I walked away from that camp because Lisa told me to run.” My voice is steady. Camp-steady. The voice that doesn’t crack because cracking gets you noticed. “She’s still there. Gretchen is still there. Every woman who kept me alive for four years is still behind those fences being told that what’s out here—” I gesture at the warren. The walls he built. The furs he gathered. The cooking surface where the food is burning because he feeds me every day, the patient insistence of a man whose hands were built to provide. “—will kill them.”

He crosses the warren. Three strides. Stands in front of me, the shadow of him blocking the fire. His breathing is controlled again, the predator drawing the rage back into storage for later use. His eyes drop to my belly, the swell under the furs. To the fact that I’m carrying two, and asking him to walk me back into the place that broke me.

He reaches down. His hand—the massive crimson hand that held mine in the firelight, that cradled my head after sex, that pressed venom into my cracked bones—cups my jaw, close enough now that his skin smell crowds out everything else, warm and animal and steady. Tilts my face up. His thumb traces my cheekbone. The force held in reserve, the strength of him pressed down into gentleness.

“I’ll kill them,” he says. Meaning the Eunuchs. Meaning the Ordained’s guards. Meaning anything between his mate and the thing she wants. “You—talk to the women. I’ll kill the rest.”

My eyes burn. I don’t cry. Camp-trained. You hold it in your teeth and your fists and the spot behind your sternum where the breathing goes tight. But his hand on my face is telling me something, that he sees what this costs. That he’s choosing it anyway. That a mate carrying his offspring, walking herself back into trauma, into danger, is worth the cost of his own pain.

“Okay,” I say.