Page 97 of Feral Keep

She’s been soft-knotted.

The evidence is right there. The bruising on her inner thighs, a pattern of marks that come from a male’s grip. The swelling in her lower belly—not pregnancy, not yet, the distension of a body filled with cum repeatedly. The sheen on her skin—the venom glow. The same glow I had during the rut, when Red’s venom was rebuilding me and my body was high on it.

“What did you do,” I say, already certain of the shape of the answer.

The barracks is smaller than the one I slept in for four years. Or maybe it’s the same size, the walls just feeling closer when the air is thick with the smell of venom and the bodies inside are still, watching. Some glazed, some sharp, all of them carrying the exhaustion of women who have been kept alive against their will by someone else’s definition of survival.

I know that exhaustion. I wore it for four years.

Shayla stands beside the girl’s bunk, her hand on the hanging cloth, the administrator presenting her project.

“The male’s venom heals. You know this. Your bones, your teeth, your hair—all repaired by venom.” Shayla’s voice is steady. Clinical. “These women are sick, Maeve. They’re malnourished, injured, infected. The male’s venom could heal them. I facilitated the application.”

The anger comes up so fast it scares me a little, a heat behind my sternum that wants to be my hands around Shayla’s throat instead of words in my mouth. I don’t let it out that way. Four years of camp taught me what happens to women who let their hands do the talking. I let it come out as words instead, low and flat and shaking at the edges no matter how hard I try to hold them still.

“You forced a girl onto a feral Shade’s cock.”

“I facilitated a soft mating. The venom is delivered through the knot. The male is feral but compliant when the—when the female is presented.” Shayla’s composure holds. Barely. “The girl volunteered. I explained the benefits. She accepted.”

“Volunteered.” Lisa’s voice is ice. “She volunteered to be knotted by a chained feral Shade in a supply building.”

“She was in pain. Her leg was infected. The infection was spreading. She would have died within the week.” Shayla meets Lisa’s eyes. “I offered her a choice. She chose to live.”

My eyes go to the girl—the venom haze I recognize from the inside, the drugged warmth, the floating distance from pain.

She looks like I looked. During the rut. When I was being healed against my will.

Looking at her is looking at a mirror that’s been left out in the rain, warped, wrong in the details but unmistakably my own shape underneath. My skin goes cold everywhere at once, a prickling that starts at my scalp and runs down both arms. I want to be sick. I press the back of my hand to my mouth for a second, just to have something to do with the nausea climbing up from my stomach, and I make myself put the hand down before Shayla sees it and calls it weakness instead of what it is.

The difference is that Red was my mate. The venom worked because the bond was real. This girl is lying on a bunk in a barracks, soft-knotted to a chained feral who was delivered by the Ordained as a replacement asset, and the venom in her body is not a bond—it’s a drug. Administered by a woman who needed leverage.

“The other women,” I say. “You gave them venom too.”

“Small doses. Skin contact—his saliva, his sweat. I diluted it.” Shayla has the decency to look uncomfortable for the first time. A flicker. Gone in a breath. “They’re healthier than they were a week ago. The infections are responding. The malnutrition symptoms are⁠—”

“You’re harvesting a chained male’s body fluids and drugging your prisoners with them.” I keep my voice steady. Camp-steady. The voice that doesn’t break. “That’s what you’re doing. Put whatever words you want on it.”

Shayla’s mouth thins. The brittle composure cracking further. “I kept them alive. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done.”

“You keep them dependent. That’s what you’ve always done.”

The barracks is quiet. Twenty-three women listening. The glazed girl on the bunk breathing slowly, her eyes on the ceiling, her body somewhere else, in the warm chemical distance from pain that I remember and that makes my stomach turn because I know how good it feels and I know how much it costs.

Red is outside. He won’t come into the barracks. The space is too small, the women too frightened. But he’s there at the door, filling it, his rage held in check, the nine feet of violence waiting for me to tell him what to do.

“The male in the supply building,” I say. “He needs to be freed.”

“If you free him, the women lose the venom. The girl⁠—”

“The girl needs a real bond or no bond at all. Not this.” I gesture at the bunk, the hanging cloth, the glazed eyes. “Not a chained feral in a cage pumped for venom by a woman who can’t let go of power.”

Shayla doesn’t answer. The barracks is silent. The women watching me, watching her. The two versions of survival standing face to face—mine, which says walk into the canopy and trust the thing that terrifies you, and hers, which says stay behind the walls and let me manage the danger.

From outside, Red’s voice. Low. Urgent.

“Maeve.”

I go to the door. He’s standing in the compound, his head turned south. The same posture as last night at the warren—the rigid lock, the wings half-spread, the tail stiff.