Page 33 of Dead Drop

Efficient. I'd admire it if I weren't furious.

He knows my name now. He knows how I sound when I come. He knows the spot inside me that makes my vision go white. He knows the way my hips buck when the vibration finds the right angle. He knows I cry in my sleep—I don't know when he learned that, but I'm certain he did, because his arms tighten around me at three in the morning with the gentleness of someone responding to a sound I didn't know I was making.

He knows everything. My name was the last door. I opened it.

During the lull that follows, I lie against the wall of him. His cock still inside me, the prehensile muscle settling into its idle rhythm, the vibration low and warm. His arms around me. The braid he put in my hair pressing against my cheek. The canopy light filtering through the aerie gaps in long gold bars that shift with the leaves.

I'm comfortable. That's the most dangerous thing. Not the knot, not the venom, not the orgasms that come without my permission. The comfort. The devastating comfort of being held by something that has learned the shape of my body well enough to avoid my injuries. The comfort of his heartbeat against my back. The comfort of his tail tracing patterns on my hip while his breathing goes slow.

I spent four years on the wall being strong. Being the one who didn't flinch. Being the one who ran the dawn routes, trained the fighters, slept light, woke fast. Strength was the only currency that mattered. You were strong or you were dead.

I remember the first time I broke. Second winter. We'd lost two runners on a supply route—ambushed at the crossroads, the canopy wolves getting bolder as the cold stripped the lower levels of prey. I held it together through the debrief. Held it through reassigning the routes, through telling the fighters we'd adjust timing and travel in threes. Held it through the meal, the watch handoff, the walk back to the barracks.

Then I sat on my cot and my hands started shaking. Petra was asleep. Nobody saw. I sat there for twenty minutes with my hands shaking in my lap, and I didn't allow myself the luxury of tears because tears meant weakness and weakness meant someone else would die.

Here, in his arms, I don't have to be strong. The realization terrifies me more than the rut did.

What I understand, when the rut has crested and I'm lying in the warm aftermath—when my mind comes back and finds the edges of things: he's been thinking this entire time. The whole rut. Under the frenzy, under the urgency, there has been a mind sitting there. Watching for gaps. Wanting specific things. Deciding what to do about what it wants.

The military part of my brain arranges the evidence. He held still on day four, when the rut was at its hardest, because hedecided my name was worth waiting for. He braids my hair in a soldier's plait because his hands remember a life before this one. He adjusts the aerie—fresh furs, new water caches, branches woven to block the wind—because something in him is building a home around me. He held me through the grief without trying to fix it, because the mind underneath the rut knows the difference between a problem to solve and a pain to hold.

He's the most dangerous thing in this territory. He's also the most deliberate thing I have ever encountered. Those are the same quality.

I was treating him as weather. Something to survive, not to understand.

He's not weather.

I wonder if Alli got a name. Whether the Shade who claimed her gave that much, or whether the Ordained kept it clean—no names, no exchange, a force of nature and a vessel and nothing personal between them. Whether she lay in a nest somewhere and heard her name in his mouth the way I just heard mine. The thought arrives and I file it before I can look at it directly. I don't have enough information. I may never have enough.

I don't know yet whether that's better or worse. I know it's different. I know the way he said my name is something I'm going to keep hearing. I know that I gave it to him. I know exactly how he got it out of me.

I also know I'm already thinking about when he'll say it again.

The canopy ceiling above us has shifted while I wasn't watching. A vine has pushed a white bud through the woven branches—small, tight-furled, not yet open. It wasn't there yesterday. The green is pushing through every crack, every gap, every weakness in the structure he's built. The world grows. The world does not wait.

Beneath me, his heart beats. Slow. Steady. The rhythm my body has been learning before my brain issues the order. I match it without trying—my breathing deepening, my pulse slowing, my body settling into his rhythm the way water settles into the shape of its container. Not because I chose to. Because my body has been held against his for four days and has decided that his heartbeat is the correct baseline for all future measurements.

I should be planning. I should be calculating escape routes, mapping the aerie's exits, estimating the distance to the canopy floor. The tactical mind is still in here, still taking notes, still building the map she'll need when the time comes.

But the notes are getting shorter. The handwriting is getting worse. The map has started to include details it doesn't need—the pattern of his breathing in the lull, the exact pressure of his tail when it means thinking, the sound his chest makes when he almost laughs. These aren't tactical intelligence. These are the notes of someone learning a person rather than mapping an enemy.

I let it sit there. It can wait.

15

ADA

The aerie is suffocatingly hot.

I've stopped caring. That's what four days does. It takes the things that should bother you and folds them into the background until they're just the texture of surviving. The heat. The ache. The way my body has stopped feeling like mine.

My legs wrapped around him last night. In my sleep, apparently, because I woke up with my thighs locked around his waist and my ankles crossed at his lower back and my hips pressed tight against the knot. I don't know when they did that. I don't know why. I only know that when I woke up and found my body arranged like someone who wanted to be as close to him as physics allowed, the first thing I felt was not horror.

The way I've stopped wanting it back.

I hate that part most.

I'm straddling him. He's so much bigger than me that my knees don't come close to touching the furs on either side of his hips. My palms are flat against his chest. Beneath them his heart slams like it's trying to break through. He has a fighter's body—dense, scarred muscle stacked on a frame that makes me feel likesomething he could snap without meaning to. His crown horns arc above us both, massive and dark, scraping the low canopy ceiling when he moves.