Page 9 of Feral Keep

I eat because refusing food is a luxury starving people don’t have. I eat because the venom has numbed the pain and my jaw can almost work. I eat because his hands are holding food to my mouth with the same steady pressure as the tail around my waist and the same intensity as the cock straining against his thigh, and the combination of those things has short-circuited every response I have.

I eat until I can’t eat more. I turn my head away. His hand follows.

“More.”

I shake my head.

His jaw tightens. His hand stays where it is. Not forcing. Insisting. A guard would have shoved it past my teeth. He holds it and waits and the waiting is its own pressure.

“More.”

I am lying in a Shade’s nest, being fed by a nine-foot crimson monster who will not accept my refusal, and the most confusing thing about this moment is that it doesn’t feel like cruelty. It feels like something I have no category for.

I eat more. When I’m done, his body settles fully—a long, slow exhale that travels through his chest, through the furs, through the ground beneath us. Whatever need came before the other need has been met.

His hands shift. From my mouth to my body. From feeding to something else. His fingers find the hem of my shirt, and those dark, blown-pupil eyes look down at me with the flat focused intensity of a thing that has been patient long enough.

The rut rises.

Food sits in my belly for the first time in days. The venom is warm in my veins, his hands are on my body, and I wait, motionless in the furs, for the next thing to happen to me the way I have waited for every next thing since I was fourteen years old.

The difference is the food in my stomach. The warmth in my veins. The difference is that he fed me before he took me. The difference is that I don’t have a word for what that means.

Full-bellied in the furs, for the first time in four years, something clenched since the fence loosens by one small degree. I don’t trust it. I hold very still, waiting for the loosening to be a trick. It doesn’t come. The stillness just sits there, unclaimed, mine to keep or not.

6

MAEVE

His hands on my body are not what the camps prepared me for.

The camp prepared me for grabbing—the closed-fist grip on an arm or a wrist or a fistful of hair, touch that moves a body from one place to another without considering that the body has opinions about it. Four years of hands that pulled me to my feet for the work detail, hands that shoved me back into the barracks at night, hands that landed on me with the blunt indifference of tools being used on a surface.

His hands are on my body. They are not grabbing.

My whole body waits for the grab anyway. It’s the only shape touch has ever had. When it doesn’t come, something in my chest stutters, off-balance, like a foot reaching for a stair that isn’t there. I don’t know how to hold still for gentle.

His fingers find the hem of my shirt, what’s left of it, the camp-issue fabric rotted thin from weeks of canopy weather. He doesn’t tear it. His claws, black at the tips of those crimson fingers, each one longer than my thumb, slip under the fabric and lift. Easing it up my body the way you peel bark from a branch, following the grain instead of fighting it.

The air hits my skin. I’m not cold. I should be—there’s no fat left to insulate, the ribs he’s looking at are a map of how a body fails. But the venom has made me warm from the inside, and his heat fills the space between us.

His gold-black eyes move down my body. I watch his jaw tighten. Something crosses his face that is not hunger, not the blown-pupil drive of the rut, but something closer to frustration—the frustration of something confronting a problem worse than it expected.

He’s seeing what the camps did. Past the scars, the bruises, down to the underneath. The bones showing through skin where muscle used to be. The ribs he can count without touching them. The collarbones jutting like blades. My breasts, barely there, the nipples dark against skin gone ashen. My hips, the bones sharp enough to cut.

Heat climbs my neck, my face, ugly and unwanted. Nobody has looked at what’s left of me this closely since the guards used to line us up for inspection, counting ribs the way you’d count damaged stock. This isn’t that. I know it isn’t that. My body doesn’t know the difference yet, and the wanting to cover myself rises up anyway with nowhere to go and no strength left to act on it.

His hand lands on my ribs. Not grabbing. Learning. His crimson palm spreads across the left side of my ribcage, his fingers spanning from my sternum to my back, and he feels. The cracked ribs—he finds them. His fingertips trace the line of the fracture with a care that makes my breath catch. Not because it hurts. The venom has that covered. Because no one has ever touched my damage with the intention of understanding it.

“Bones bad.”

Two words. Same guttural tone as eat. His fingers press gently on the fracture site. His head drops and he inhales at my ribs, his nose inches from my skin, breathing in the smell of broken bone and infection. Reading me the way a predator reads prey. Except predators read prey to find the weakness. He’s reading me to find the injury.

His hand moves to my shoulder. The bad one. His fingers close around the joint, so large they engulf it entirely, and he tests it—a slow, careful rotation. The joint grinds. I hiss through my teeth.

He stops. His tail tip finds the shoulder and presses—another pulse of targeted venom, the warmth blooming into the damaged joint, the grinding easing into something bearable. He holds the venom there until the pain goes quiet. Then he tests the rotation again. Slower. The joint moves through a range it hasn’t attempted in eight months.

“A guard did that.” The words come out flat. Camp-voice. “Eight months ago. Wrenched it out and nobody put it back.”