Page 1 of Dead Drop

PROLOGUE: APEX

I smell them before I see them.

The Eunuchs. That chemical stink—sweat and the compound they carry and the particular sour-metal tang of males whose biology has been broken and rebuilt into something that serves the Ordained's purpose. They're in the tower. Moving through it. Hunting.

I've been circling the tower for an hour. Not hunting—waiting. The restlessness has been building for weeks. A narrowing. Like the world is a corridor that keeps getting thinner, and everything that isn't the thing I'm looking for has been pressed flat against the walls. My territory. My patrol. The rogue Shade on the southern boundary. The Eunuchs running their routes through my canopy. None of it. None of it is the thing.

The wind shifts.

I bank hard, wings catching the updraft from the tower's sun-baked face, and the scent hits me from above. Not below. Above. From the roof. Sweat and iron and blood—she's bleeding somewhere, copper-bright—and under all of it, under the human smells and the fear and the Eunuch residue on herclothes, something else. Something that goes into my lungs and doesn't come out.

My cock goes hard.

At the scent. Before she moves. Before I see her face. The narrowing detonates at the source—roof, four o'clock, fifty-three floors up—and my body is already committed before my wings change course. Weeks of this. Weeks of the corridor getting thinner, the drive with nowhere to put itself, my cock hard at nothing, the need building in my chest like a sound I couldn't make. This is what it was pointed at. I know it the way I know the inside of my own territory. The way I know my own name.

I go still.

Mid-air. Wings locked. Everything locked. The world stops being a corridor. It becomes one point, fifty-three floors up, where a woman is standing on a ledge.

She steps off.

Not pushed. Not thrown. She steps off the way someone steps through a door they've decided to use. Her body tilts forward. Her arms don't reach for anything. The building lets her go.

She falls.

I dive.

Not the wind. Something under the wind—something in the narrow place that has no patience left. My wings fold. My body drops. I am faster than gravity because gravity doesn't want her the way I do.

She's turning in the air. A half-twist—her body still working even on the way down.Soldier.The word surfaces from somewhere the narrowing hasn't swallowed yet.

Her back is to me when I catch her.

My arms close around her chest and waist. She is small. She is so small that the shock of it goes through my hands like a current—the span of her ribcage inside my grip, the narrownessof her waist, the bird-bone weight of her. My wings snap open. The deceleration hits us both. She makes a sound—pain, her shoulder—and the blood-scent sharpens.

Her back hits my chest. My cock hits the small of her back.

Already hard. Hard since the scent, hard since before she fell, and now she is pressed against the full length of me and the contact is everything the weeks of narrowing were building toward. Her heat bleeds through her clothes. The weight of my cock against her spine. She doesn't know what's pressing into her yet. She will.

I could crack stone with these hands. I could split a boar from sternum to pelvis without slowing down. I hold her the way I hold nothing else—because she needs to reach the furs alive—but the drive underneath the hold is not gentle. It has never been gentle. It has been waiting.

She's in my arms. She's alive. She's mine.

My tail wraps her thighs in one coil and locks her legs against mine. She fights. Elbow into my ribs—nothing. The force of it doesn't register. She tries again, harder, and I don't adjust because there is nothing to adjust. Her skull catches my jaw on the backswing. The pain lands the way rain lands. The spiral continues. My wings work in long controlled strokes and she is fighting me and the fighting grinds her body against mine—every strike, every twist pressing her harder into my cock, her ass against my groin, her spine against my chest. She is trying to hurt me. She is making it worse. Worse for her. I am past worse.

"Let me go." Her voice. Sharp. Furious. The voice of someone who chose the fall and is furious the ground didn't get there first. "Let me go right now, let me?—"

She gets an arm free. Her nails open four lines along my forearm. I take the arm back.

She fights me the whole way down. Elbow. Heel. The back of her skull against my jaw. None of it moves me. None of itmatters. What matters is what I can feel under the fighting—her heat, her scent rising off her body in the wind. She is warm everywhere and I am hard everywhere and the nest is below us and when my feet hit the furs I am going to ruin her.

My tail finds her neck.

The tip presses below her ear. The nectar enters her skin. I feel the change before she does—the muscles releasing in a wave from her shoulders down, the fight draining out of her. Her hands open. Her body goes slack against mine.

The weight of her settles.

Without the fighting I feel all of her. The full press of her hips against my cock. Her ass against my groin, no resistance, her body's weight sinking back into mine. Every breath she takes moves her against me. I am so hard it has stopped being an ache and become a demand. Her scent comes off her in waves now—and underneath the fear, underneath the fury still locked in the rigid set of her jaw, her cunt. Warm and unmistakable. Her body already ahead of her mind, already doing what the bond demands.