Page 115 of Dead Drop

Because it does feed me. His cum in my system heals the places the pregnancy stretched and tore. Strengthens the milk. This isn't a theory—I can feel the difference. After he knots me, I'm stronger. My milk comes easier. The fatigue lifts. The body he helped remake remakes itself, one knotting at a time.

He rolls in the air. A slow barrel turn that shifts me onto his chest, his cock still locked inside me, the knot holding through the movement. I'm draped over him now, face down, my cheek on the hard crimson muscle.

Maren sleeps between us in the sling. Her small face against his sternum, unbothered by the altitude or the roll or the fact that her parents are locked together high above the canopy.

His tail comes around. The tip brushes the hair from my face, tucks it behind my ear. The same gesture since the first week of the rut. I used to hate it. Now it feels like punctuation—the tail's way of sayingdone, you're mine, rest now.

His wings level out. We glide. The vibration continues—warm, steady, not climbing. Just present. A low hum that keeps my walls clenching in slow idle pulses around the knot. Not building to anything. Just reminding my body where it is.

I close my eyes.

His heartbeat under my ear. The wind in his wings. The knot inside me, warm and full, the cum sealed at my center. Maren's small breathing. The warmth of the three of us stacked together, held aloft by wings that have carried me through terror, through pleasure, through the long slow process of building a life in the air.

I sleep.

I wake to the aerie. The furs. The quality of afternoon light that means I've been out for hours.

His knot has softened. His cock has withdrawn—the slow, careful, prehensile slide that means he pulled out while I slept, deliberate, not waking me. The absence is there, the familiar emptiness that follows the knot, but it's manageable now. I know he'll be inside me again before the day ends. He always is.

Maren isn't in the sling.

I sit up. No panic—not anymore. The first time I woke without her I went from sleep to combat-ready in half a second,my hand on the blade, my heart trying to exit through my throat. Now I know where she is.

Corvin is at the fire.

The sight still catches me. Every time.

Nine feet of crimson muscle, crown horns catching the afternoon light, claws that have opened bodies from sternum to pelvis—holding a baby. Maren is in the crook of his left arm. She's tiny against him. Absurd. A creature the size of his forearm, cradled in the bend of his elbow, her fist wrapped around his smallest finger because his smallest finger is all her fist can close around.

His tail is doing the work. The prehensile tip holds a small gourd, tipped at the angle that lets her drink. The gourd contains my milk—I pump before patrols, a habit born from the first time she was hungry and I was knotted to him in the canopy with no way to nurse.

He feeds her without looking. His eyes are on the fire. He's cooking. One-handed, the other arm holding Maren, his tail managing the gourd, his claws stripping meat with the same efficient precision he brings to everything. The fire pops. He adjusts the spit with his free hand. Maren drinks.

He didn't wake me.

He let me sleep through the knot release, through the afternoon, through a feeding cycle. He landed us, laid me in the furs, took our daughter from the sling, and handled everything while I slept off the orgasm and the flight and the bone-deep exhaustion that three months of broken sleep builds in a body.

He's humming. Low. A sound I've only heard a few times—vibration in his chest that isn't the knot's hum, something older, something that lives in whatever part of him remembers being human. It isn't a tune. It doesn't have melody. It's the bass rumble of a creature soothing something small, and it works. Maren's eyes are half-closed. The milk drips. The fire pops.

His tail lifts the gourd away. She's done. He shifts her to his shoulder—one massive hand spanning her entire back, supporting her head with a delicacy that still stuns me. He pats. Three gentle thumps with the flat of his palm, each one precise, calibrated to the force required to burp something that weighs five and a half pounds.

She burps. He makes a sound that I'm almost certain is satisfaction.

I lie in the furs and watch my monster hold our daughter.

The canopy light moves across the aerie floor. The fire is steady. The meat is cooking—deer, from the smell, the rich gamey scent that means he hunted while I slept. He's cleaned the aerie too. The water gourds are full. The furs are straightened around me. The climbing hooks are hung on the wall peg he carved, beside the blade, beside the extra sling.

He's built a life. Not just a territory. A life. With routines and rhythms and the small domestic machinery of a household that runs on his attention.

I used to run a gate watch. I used to manage a settlement's defenses. I used to think the most competent thing I'd ever see was a good soldier executing a clean breach.

I was wrong.

The most competent thing I've ever seen is a nine-foot Nethershade cooking dinner with one hand while burping an infant with the other, his dark red hair falling forward as he leans over the fire, his tail cleaning a gourd, his wings tucked to avoid knocking the drying rack he built last week, humming a sound that doesn't have a name in any language either of us speaks.

Maren falls asleep on his shoulder. He knows before I do—the change in her breathing, the way her fist unclenches from the ridge of his collarbone. He shifts her down to the crook ofhis arm. His tail wraps around her loosely, the tip resting against her belly. Monitoring. The idle, constant touch.

He turns the meat on the spit. Checks the fire. His cock is soft beneath the loincloth, the prehensile length doing its slow idle flex. His posture is unhurried. This is him in his element—the territory secure, the mate fed, the offspring sleeping, the fire burning.