Page 26 of Dead Drop

The vibration says: I know them. I have known them. There is history here.

I wait for it to pass. It doesn't pass—it sinks lower, still humming through his chest, still audible in the air between us. A sustained note of hostility directed not at me but at the residue on my skin. At the organisation that put it there.

The Ordained. The keepers of the Gilded Cages. The ones who drug women into compliance and deliver them to Shades in gilded carriages. The ones who took Petra from her cot and left a golden flower on her pillow like a receipt.

He knows them. His body's response—the territorial hum, the muscles going to stone, the arms tightening around me—tells me more than words could. He doesn't just know them. He hates them.

Good. That makes two of us.

The hatred changes the shape of the room. For the first time since the claiming, I am looking at the creature wrapped around me and seeing something other than the thing that took me. He hates the Ordained. He hates them with the deep, sustained hostility of something that has been watching them operate in his territory for years. The torches moving through his canopy. The gilded carriages on the old roads. The drugs left in their wake like a chemical spill.

I think of the Ordained processions I watched from the wall—the gilded banners, the censers trailing white smoke, the carriages with their barred windows rolling east along the old highway. They passed below New Reach every few months, never stopping, never acknowledging the settlement above them. Petra used to count the carriages. She said if you knew how many went east, you could estimate how many women were being moved. The numbers were always higher than the settlements could account for.

"Tell me where the Gilded Cage is," I say. "The nearest one. Two hours east of my settlement."

"No."

"There are women in there. Being prepared. Being drugged?—"

"No."

"Why?"

He doesn't answer. His tail shifts against my thigh—a restless coil, tightening and loosening, the tip flicking against my skin. He hunches forward, curving that enormous spine, and presses his jaw against the crown of my head. Not a bite. Pressure. The pressure of something that has heard the question and is choosing not to give what's been asked for.

I push. "They have my fighter. Petra. Taken from the cot next to mine?—"

"I know."

The two words stop me. He knows. He knows about Petra. The how doesn't matter yet—the Ordained's records, the territorial intelligence networks, whatever system of information flows through these canopy levels that I haven't mapped. He knows.

My chest tightens. Petra—her quick hands, the way she held a blade with the loose grip I taught her, the dry edge of her humor when everything was going to hell. She is somewhere in an Ordained facility being prepared for exactly what's happening to me. Except the Ordained don't leave anything to chance. They drug their women first. Drugs in the food, the water, the incense they burn in those gilded rooms. Petra won't have the luxury of arguing with the thing that claims her.

The cup she handed me the morning I left—settlement tea, rust-tasting, both hands around it. Your shift, commander. She was never careless with the things she held.

That loose grip on the blade—I taught her that. Alli taught me. She held the commander's post before I did, four years before the Ordained took her in a presentation and I stepped into the space she left. Alli's hands on mine in the training yard: the thumb braced against the flat of the blade when she demonstrated, to make the point land in the body and not just the head. Loose wrist. Relaxed hand. The grip passed from her hands to mine to Petra's. Two of three links in that chain now inside gilded carriages heading east.

And I'm venom-soaked, my body learning him without my permission. I wonder if Petra's drugs work the same way—the accommodation happening below decision, resistance dissolving before you notice it going. Whether there's anyone telling her the name of what she's been given to.

I open my mouth to argue further. It hits mid-sentence.

His hands are on my hips before I've caught the change—the lull collapsing, his breathing going short, the coiled tension returning to his body like a spring that was let out and has just snapped back. He flexes inside me—hard, targeted, the seeking pressure that found the spot twelve hours ago and has been returning to it with the sureness of something that has never lost the spot—and the vibration climbs.

I was making a point. I've lost the shape of it.

I'm still on my side, still curled against him, when his body changes around me. He curves that massive frame down—I feel the effort in it, the folding of his spine, the way his shoulders round and his wings half-spread for balance as he hunches to get his mouth to my throat. He is so much larger than me that this simple act requires his entire body to restructure itself. His mouth drags along the side of my neck. His breath is hot. His cock drives into me from behind in a thrust that uses his full core.

"I wasn't finished—" I manage.

His tail slides between my thighs. The tip finds my clit and starts to circle. His mouth opens against my throat—not biting, not the fang strike, just his lips and his tongue and the heat of his mouth on the pulse point beneath my jaw.

I come mid-argument. The fury of that is its own heat—the absolute helplessness of having my body betray a position my mind was still holding. My walls clench around his cock and I cry out something that was going to be a sentence and became a sound. He drives through it. His hands grip my hips. His grunts land against my throat, rhythmic and low.

The orgasm peaks and holds. His cock pressing against the spot on every stroke, his tail circling my clit with that relentless attention, the vibration climbing with every clench. I am trying to be angry. My body is too busy dissolving to help.

I try again. "The Cage?—"

The pressure sharpens on the spot. I lose the word. My mouth opens on something that is not Cage and not please and lands somewhere between the two that I am going to be embarrassed about later.