Page 106 of Dead Drop

I reach back. My hand finds his jaw. The brow ridge under my fingertips, the smooth crimson skin warm under my palm.

The jaw broader and heavier than any human jaw. A jaw I've watched clench when he comes, soften when he sleeps, lock when he's angry. A jaw that's doing something right now that I've learned is his version of leaning into a touch—the angle shifting, the muscle relaxing into my hand like he's chosen to be held.

"Tell me more," I say.

He does. Another fragment—Maren arguing about supply routes, her voice cutting through the noise of a planning session, her insistence that they were wrong about the eastern access. Her laugh, which he describes as "sharp, like breaking glass in sunlight."

The scar on her left hand from a training accident. An old wound that never fully healed. Small details preserved like insects in amber, held intact through thirteen years of becoming something else.

The specificity is what breaks me. Not the grief but the precision of the remembering. He held onto the scar on her left hand. Through the mutation. Through the territory. Through the years alone, becoming the Apex, becoming the thing that took me.

He held onto her.

The storm passes. His wings fold back, the membrane settling against his frame with a sound like cloth settling. The wasteland beyond is wet, the canopy dripping from a thousand points, water finding its way down through every level.

The stream below is running fast and loud, swollen with runoff, the sound of it carrying up through the branches.

I stay against his chest. His hand on my belly. His tail making its slow circuit—belly, hip, thigh, back to belly.

The idle constant touch of something that learned gentleness through repetition, through the sustained attention of holding one specific person for long enough that the holding became the point. He's learned me the way Maren taught him language.

The firelight settles. The storm smell filters into the aerie through the gaps in the wing-wall—wet bark, ozone, the mineral scent of rain on stone, the green underneath everything. The canopy is loud with runoff, the water reaching the stream a level at a time.

The sound is almost like being inside something living, something that breathes and transforms and survives. Like being inside Corvin's body, held in the specific warmth he creates.

"Corvin."

"Mm."

The sound he makes is at the base of his register. Acknowledgment. Attention.

"I'm glad you told me."

His arms tighten. His mouth on my hair. The words muffled against me, spoken into the crown of my head the way all his words are when we're like this—private, directed downward, meant only for the space between his lips and my skin.

Only for me.

"She would have told you herself," he says. "She was never quiet about the things she thought people needed to hear. She would have sat down with you over a fire and told you stories about the territory, about what it means to survive the unsurvivable. She would have liked that I found you. That I chose you."

Something in my chest shifts. Not the baby—she's quiet, held in the warmth of us. Something older.

Something that's been living in me since the barracks, since the wall, since I first put a blade in my hand and decided to live. The thing that lives in the space between grief and gratitude, the place where you honor someone by saying their name to someone new. The place where you make them real again by speaking them aloud to the people who matter.

"Maren," I say. Not to him. To the belly. To the small curled life beneath his hand and his tail and the warmth we've built between us. "I want to call her Maren."

His whole body goes still. Not frightened. Not defensive.

Just still. A pause in the breathing. A change in the heartbeat—I feel it against my back, a skip, a hard beat like he's caught something, then steadier. His tail wraps my belly tighter, the prehensile muscle holding the curve like he's protecting her, protecting the memory, protecting the moment I gave his dead the only thing the dead can still receive.

A future.

"Yes," he says. His voice is rough. Lower than its usual low, scraped down to something that sounds like it hurts. And he says nothing else.

Maren is real now. Not just the soldier who taught a monster to speak, but the daughter who will carry her name into a world that almost forgot it. She's in this aerie with us, in the amber light and the sound of the dying storm, in the warmth between his body and mine.

The rain slows. The canopy drips, the runoff beginning to ease. The stream runs on below, a constant sound, a constant reminder that the world moves and changes and continues.

His palm shifts on the curve. His cock remains soft. His tail makes its circuit again—protecting, monitoring, holding.