Page 31 of Dead Drop

She's lighter than she was three days ago. I feel it. The rib she guards when she shifts. She needs to sleep. She needs to eat. The rut doesn't stop for that.

My cock flexes. She makes a sound—small, still asleep—and her body answers mine without her in it. I want to drive into her. I want to take her until she cries out and comes apart around me.

I don't move.

I sit at the edge of the nest with her back against my chest and hold still. The canopy to every horizon. The smoke of her settlement in the east. She's not done with it yet. I know this.

Both hands flat against her stomach, over where my cum sits inside her. Holding still.

14

ADA

Day four. Or five. The days have developed a texture of sameness I've stopped fighting.

The aerie ceiling is a lattice of woven branches above me. Through the gaps: sky, green, the shifting dapple of canopy light. I've memorized the pattern the way I memorized the ceiling of the barracks—by staring at it during the hours when sleep won't come. Except sleep does come here, easily and deeply, which is its own betrayal.

I'm knotted. I'm always knotted. He has me on my side against his chest, his arms around me, the seal holding us together with the same irrevocable fact it's held us together since the claiming. The vibration runs—low between peaks, warm and steady, pressing against my clit at my center where the knot is seated. Finding the places in my body I've stopped pretending I don't feel.

My fingernails are harder. That's the first thing I checked when I woke—pressed one nail against the bark of the nearest branch and it didn't bend. Didn't splinter. On the wall, my nails were soft from malnutrition, from the protein-deficient rations that kept us alive but never quite thriving. I kept them shortbecause they broke if I didn't. These nails could scratch bark. I test one against his forearm while he sleeps, drawing a slow line through the fine dusting of dark hair. The nail leaves a white trail that fades to red. His skin heals it in seconds.

My skin has changed too. I found it this morning, running my fingers along my forearm while he slept. Softer. The rough patches at my elbows—years of leaning against concrete walls during watch shifts—are smooth. The calluses on my palms from my blade grip are still there, but the skin around them is different. Finer. Like something has been working through me at a level below what the venom reaches, rewriting the damage of four years on the wall.

My hair is thicker. I pull a strand forward and roll it between my fingers. On the wall it was brittle—dry ends splitting, the kind of hair that came from washing with settlement soap made from rendered tallow and wood ash. This hair has weight to it. Shine. Like someone's been feeding it where he fills me.

The white scars on my tan skin—thin lines, the marks of four years on the wall, knife slips and training accidents—are fading. I found that this morning too, running my fingers along the inside of my forearm. Where the scar tissue used to be white against my brown skin, there's just the faint ghost of a line. His cum is healing them. Making them disappear. Rewriting the damage.

Someone has.

I've put a round through the skull of one of these.

I don't know what his cum is doing to me. I know it's doing something. Three and a half days of it sealed inside me by the knot, absorbed into whatever my body will take. My body is using it the way a settlement uses a supply drop—taking what it needs, storing the rest, building something with the surplus. I'm being provisioned by a male who doesn't need a supply route. The supply route is his cock.

The military part of my brain wants to find this funny. The rest of me is too busy clenching around the vibration to laugh.

He hasn't moved in a while.

Not unusual. Knotted, he sometimes goes still—not the stillness of the rut cresting, but something different underneath it. The drive receded. Something else coming up for air. In those moments he breathes slower. His arms loosen from their grip. His cock, still locked and vibrating, seems to settle into a rhythm that matches his heartbeat rather than the rut's urgency.

In those moments, I almost forget what's happening to me. Almost forget that the warm weight behind me is a nine-foot apex predator with a territorial claim larger than any settlement I've mapped. He's just warm. Just present. Just the steady heartbeat against my shoulder blades and the slow rise and fall of breath against my hair.

"Your name."

I go still.

Two words. Rough and low and completely deliberate. Not the rut's one-word possession—mine, good—not the drive pushing him. This has the shape of a request that already knows it will wait as long as it needs to.

"No," I say.

The vibration doesn't change. Neither does he.

I wait for the thrust that doesn't come. His tail, loosely coiled around my thighs, shifts and resettles. Goes still. His cock stays sealed inside me, pulsing against my G-spot with every heartbeat, warm and thick and not moving. His arms don't tighten. He just stops. Everything except the vibration, which isn't his to turn off.

The vibration keeps running. Warm. Constant. Pressing against my clit inward with the same mindless persistence it's had since the first knotting. My body answers it—a slow clench, a building heat, the familiar upward spiral that I know now theway I know the watch rotation: intimately, exhaustively, with no possibility of surprise.

Except this time there's a surprise. The surprise is that the rut has stopped and his cock is still. The surprise is the silence where the driving should be. The surprise is the request hanging in the air between us—two words, your name—and the absolute stillness of a body that could do anything it wanted to me and has chosen to wait.

I know what this is.