Page 25 of Dead Drop

When the wings open again, the light has changed, the copper beetle is gone from the branch above, and I don't know how many times I came.

11

ADA

The lull arrives like a ceasefire.

I feel the quality of it before my mind can name it—a downshift, a lessening. I'm on my side in the furs, his body curled behind me like a wall. His chest and arms go from coiled tension to something looser, the muscles softening fractionally against my back. His cock doesn't withdraw—the knot holds, the seal constant—but the prehensile muscle slows its seeking. The flex becomes idle rather than targeted, slow rolls against my walls that my body answers with reflexive clenches I've stopped trying to prevent.

The vibration recedes to its baseline—still there, still pressing against my clit at my center, but warmer. Constant instead of climbing. Like the difference between a current and a wave.

His hand moves to my hair. Slow. The clawed fingers finding the braid at the base of my skull—still tight, still knotted after the claiming and the hours after—and he works it loose. Strand by strand, his claws gentle against the tangles. When the last knot gives, he spreads the braid open, fingers combing through brown waves of hair that fall loose across my shoulders anddown my back. Patient. Unhurried. His claws never pull. Never snag.

Then the cleaning starts.

Water from the gourd—cool, poured slowly into his palm, then moved across my skin. He starts at my shoulders. Down my arms. His hands find the strands of hair falling across my chest and he washes it, water running through the loosened waves, and I shiver against him. His cock shifts inside me with the shiver—a sympathetic flex, the muscle responding to the clench of my abs.

The water continues. Across my ribs, carefully avoiding the fracture site. The water runs in cold rivulets across my breasts, down my stomach, and he washes the hair there too—patient, thorough, the way someone washes something they intend to keep.

He cleans me while we're knotted. Still sealed together. Still locked. His hands moving over my skin with the calm attention of someone who isn't finished with it. The water is cold where it pools in the hollows of my collarbones. His thumb follows it, spreading it across my chest.

His hands move lower. Across my ribs—lifting slightly to avoid the fracture with the unconscious care of someone who already knows the injury and works around it. Across my stomach, the water running in cold lines down the plane of muscle there. He washes the insides of my thighs—slick with his cum and mine, the evidence of hours, of claiming—impersonal and unbearable in equal measure. His clawed fingers gentle against the bruised skin where his grip was hardest.

The cum washes away. More will replace it. The cycle of his body inside mine—filling, sealing, cleaning, filling again—has its own rhythm now. I'm a supply route he maintains.

I lie here and let a nine-foot apex predator give me a sponge bath while his cock is still inside me. Somewhere in the afterlife,the version of me who trained fighters is writing a very strongly worded letter.

I speak.

"How long does this last?"

The words come out rough. My throat is raw from sounds I don't want to think about—the moaning, the crying out, the involuntary sounds that have been pouring out of me for a day and a half. My voice is not the voice I use on the wall. That voice carried. This one scrapes.

He's quiet for several seconds. His breathing is slower now—the long, measured inhales of something that has descended from a great height and is resting.

"Weeks." Low. Rough. One word, the way all his words come—dragged out through whatever the rut does to his words.

Weeks. I let that settle.

"You understand everything I'm saying." Not a question. I've been watching his responses—the way his arms adjust when I shift, the way his tail answers my moods before my mouth does, the way his cock flexes differently depending on whether I'm speaking or silent. When I said stop his hands went still for three full seconds before the rut overrode the pause. When I asked about water his tail was already reaching for the gourd. He understands every word I say. He chooses not to give me many back. Or the rut won't let him.

"Yes."

"This aerie. Your territory. How long?"

"Eight years."

I already knew that from the scouting data. But hearing him say it—in that rough, compressed voice—changes the fact from intelligence to something more personal. Eight years. Alone. Holding the largest territorial claim in the grid without a mate.

"The Ordained. You know them."

His body goes still. Not the rut's stillness—the stillness of a predator hearing something it recognizes. His arms tighten around me. Fractionally.

"I smell them." Something new in his voice. Something under the roughness that isn't the rut and isn't patience. "On you. On your skin. Under the venom."

The Ordained's scent. On my clothes—which are gone, fallen from the sky during the descent, probably tangled in canopy branches a hundred feet below. But the residue of proximity—years of it, the incense they burn, the floral oils they use, the chemical signature of whatever they give their women—is apparently readable on my skin.

The sound he makes is not a word. It is a vibration that originates in his chest and moves through both of us. Low, sustained, the frequency of it different from the knot's hum. My whole body resonates with it—my teeth, my ribs, the walls of my cunt where his cock presses. Threat. Recognition. Something that has learned the Ordained's scent and sorted it into something I have no name for.