Page 104 of Dead Drop

The intimacy of it hits me sideways. The nine-foot creature who killed three Stained and claimed me and built a room for our child, sitting by the fire and trimming his hair with his claws because it's gotten too long.

Domestic. Tender. Him.

"It's a good room," I say.

"It will be hers."

The words land in my chest like a stone. Not a question. Not a hope.

A certainty. A future written in stone and furs. A room that will hold our daughter when the time comes.

"Yes," I say. "It will."

His hand tightens on my belly. His mouth finds the top of my head. We lie there as the afternoon light shifts, as the canopy settles into evening, as the aerie fills with the sounds of the world moving toward night.

Behind us, across the aerie, the pale furs glow in the dimming light.

Waiting.

41

ADA

The storm rolls in from the west. I see it coming an hour before it arrives—the horizon going dark, the canopy birds going silent in an exodus toward lower shelter. The wind shifts, bringing with it the particular pressure that makes the old fracture in my rib ache like a bone memory of the world before.

The air tastes of ozone and electricity.

By the time the first rain hits the aerie, Corvin has moved with the fluid precision of something that's been reading weather for thirteen years alone. Both wings unfold from his back—the motion fast, controlled, the membrane opening like the pages of a book written in leather and sinew. He wraps both wings around the nest entrance, the membranes overlapping, sealing us inside.

The frame shudders as the wind hits. The rain begins to sound like projectiles, driven sideways through the branches with the force of something trying to punch through walls.

Inside the wing-cocoon the light is amber, filtered through the translucent membrane. The sound of the storm is muffled—a roar turned to a murmur, the violence of it happening behinda veil. The fire in the center of the aerie throws moving shadows against the wing walls, shadows that shift and dance with each gust of wind outside.

I can see the struts of the aerie, reinforced at every joint, holding against the storm's weight. He built this to last.

His heartbeat is steady behind me. His arms around me, massive enough to create a barrier between me and the cold world outside. His chin resting on the crown of my head, the weight of it familiar now, the specific pressure of his jaw settling into the part of my hair.

The warmth radiating from his body is profound. He's warm-blooded in a way that creates a microclimate. Winter will be survivable because he exists.

His cock is soft against my lower back, doing the slow idle flex that means he's present but not aroused. His tail is curled around my belly. The tip rests against the curve, monitoring, protective.

His breathing finds the rhythm of the wind outside, falls in step with it. This is who he is when the territory is threatened—centered, vigilant, held in perfect readiness.

"I had a team," he says.

No preamble. No runway. The words arrive the way his post-rut sentences do—fully formed, pulled from a place the mutation tried to bury so deep that finding language for it requires excavation.

The storm outside must have triggered something. The sound of wind on stone. The sense of shelter needing to be defended.

I don't move. I breathe. I wait.

"Before the asteroid. I held a sector for six years. Sixteen people.

We ran supply security through the eastern corridor. Supply runs, mostly. Making sure the supply chains didn't get cut offby the gangs that ran the fringe territories." A pause. The fire crackles. His tail shifts on my belly, a micro-adjustment. "The mutations hit eight months after the impact. We didn't understand them at first. Fevers. Tremors. Three of my people died in the first week. I thought it was a plague. I thought I was watching plague sweep through the only structure we had left."

His voice is low. Each word carrying weight that I can feel through his chest against my back. These aren't fragments anymore.

These are whole memories, preserved through thirteen years of mutation, maintained in whatever part of his mind the transformation left intact. The part that remembers being human. Being officer. Being responsible for sixteen other humans who wouldn't survive.