Page 2 of Dead Drop

She is wet. The scent of it goes into my lungs and joins everything else that is staying there.

"You bastard," she says. Flat. No force behind it.

My fangs find her throat.

The nectar was warmth going quiet. This goes deeper—into the nerves, into the places the nectar can't reach. I feel it leave my body and enter hers. The bond's permanent mark. The thing that makes her mine in a way no territory marker could.

Her breath changes. I feel it in her chest against my arm.

We are still spiraling down. The aerie is below. I am not waiting.

My claws find her collar. One pull—the jacket splits down her spine, fabric peeling away, cold air flooding in. Her voice comes back sharp through the nectar's hold:"Don't you dare—"Stillfurious. Still aimed. The voice of a soldier who chose the drop and is furious every choice is being taken from her.

I take her shirt. Collar to hem, one motion.

"—I swear to god, I'll?—"

She won't. Her hands are open at her sides. They don't close. I don't listen because the rut has no use for her threats, only for her scent, and her scent says everything her words won't.

My claws split the waistband. Her trousers go. The canopy wind takes them.

My tail repositions—one loop around each thigh from below, pulling them apart, holding her spread open in the spiraling air above my nest. My loincloth shifts aside. My cock finds the slick heat of her—not inside, not yet, just the tip dragging forward, finding everything the venom and the bond and the weeks of narrowing were always aimed at.

She is soaked. The evidence of it is on my cock now, that slick wet trail, and the knowledge of it goes through me like something breaking loose from the last of its restraints.

Her hips push back.

Yes.

That's all. That's everything. Her body rolling back into my cock in the spiraling air—the full unmistakable press of her cunt toward me, slick and warm, wanting this even as her mouth is still forming threats she can't carry out. Thirteen years of this body. Thirteen years of the rut coming and going with nowhere to go. Her hips push back and the last of the corridor collapses.

My feet hit the furs.

I drive in.

All of me. All at once. Her face goes into the nest and my cock seats inside her before she finishes falling—her cunt opening around me, the stretch immense, the slick heat of her flooding every nerve the mutation built and rebuilt and kept raw for thirteen years of waiting. She whimpers. That sound. Her wallsclench around my cock in one hot shocked pulse and I groan against the back of her neck—long, wrecked, nothing human in it, the sound of something that has just found the only thing it will ever want again.

She's tight. So tight and slick and hot all the way down my cock, every inch of her gripping me, her cunt pressing back against the thrust like her body is trying to pull me deeper even as her hands scrabble uselessly at the furs. She can't move me. Nothing moves me. I'm twice her size and buried inside her and the rut has nowhere to go except deeper.

I grip her hips. Her waist. The span of her impossibly small—I could hold all of her in one hand. This whole small body, mine. My cock inside it. My knot swelling at the base, thickening against her entrance with every thrust, the stretch widening, the wet sound of it filling the aerie. My balls heavy. Full. Thirteen years of rut with nowhere to go, and now they're pressed against her cunt and they know exactly where they're going.

Weeks.

She's mine for weeks. Her small body. Her slick cunt gripping my cock, the sound of it obscene and perfect every time I pull back. The whimper she makes when I push deep—I want that sound, I want every version of that sound, I want to hear it every hour for as long as the rut runs and the rut runs until she's bred. She'll never be more than arm's reach from my cock. She can try. She's already failed.

Her cunt pushes back on the next thrust. Involuntary. Her body answering what her mouth won't.

I groan. Long and rough. My chest against her spine, my mouth at the crown of her head, groaning into her hair because she is slick and hot and clenching and this is the only thing that has ever mattered. Not the territory. Not the years. This. Her. My cock buried in my mate.

My wings slam open. Full span. The aerie shudders.

"Mine," I say.

Not a question. A fact already written—written when the scent hit me fifty-three floors above, written permanent when I drove into her, written in the bond and the venom and every inch of my cock seated inside my mate.

I move.

The long dark begins.