Page 34 of Dead Drop

Which he isn't doing. Which is costing him. I can see the effort—the tremor in his forearms, the way his wings twitch at the tips, the muscles of his jaw locked tight. The rut is screaming at him to move. He isn't moving. Because something underneath the rut has decided that what happens next should be my choice.

I don't know what to do with the fact that the enormous thing between my thighs is giving me a choice. Nobody in the wasteland gives you choices. The wall doesn't. The Ordained don't. The supply routes don't—you run them or you starve, and the timing isn't flexible. For four years, my only real choice was which order to complete the things that had to be done. Here, knotted, sore, vibrating at my center, I am being offered something I've almost forgotten how to want.

My body has been changing since the claiming. This morning it's there—the way my muscles move differently, the way my ribs expand when I breathe. On the wall, I knew my body the way I knew my blade: every nick, every weakness, every point where it might fail. This body is someone else's inventory. Stronger in places I wasn't expecting. Softer in places that used to be hard. The ache behind my left knee—the one from a bad landing on a night run in year two—is gone. Simply gone, like something went in and dissolved the scar tissue through my walls.

His cum is rewriting me. The thought should be horrifying. What I feel instead is the relief of a body that has been running on insufficient fuel for four years and has finally been given what it needs.

His cock is buried fully inside me. Has been for hours. The knot at his base is swollen thick and locked against my cunt, too large to pull free, holding us sealed together the way it has held us sealed together for most of four days.

It vibrates. Not like anything from before. Warm and precise, tuned to somewhere inside me I didn't know existed before he found it. It runs through the knot, into the walls of my cunt, up through my stomach, into my chest. My body answers it every time with a clench I cannot stop. Four days of this has reduced me to a single sustained note I can't stop hearing.

His tail is wound three times around my thighs and waist. Tight. Proprietary.

"Let go," I say. My voice is completely destroyed. Days of screaming will do that.

His eyes snap to my face. Solid amber. The warning rumble starts in his chest—I feel it through my palms, through the wall of muscle between us, through his cock buried inside me, which makes the vibration shift. I press my lips together.

"The tail," I say. "Release me."

The rumble dies.

I watch him fight it. His jaw locks. His wings flare against the floor with a sound like a sail catching wind. The tail jerks once, twice, instinct screaming at it to hold. To keep me pinned. To keep me exactly where I am—full of him, completely and obscenely full, stretched around the knot in a way I've never been stretched before. Which is—and here is the part I hate—exactly where my body wants to be.

The coils loosen.

His tail unwinds slowly, sulking, and drops to the furs beside us with a defeated thump. I almost feel sorry for it.

Cool air hits my skin. I shiver.

I lift my hips.

An inch. Maybe two. That's all the knot allows. The shift drags him against the front of my walls, and the sound it makes is humiliating. I am past humiliation. I have been soaked for four days. The movement pulls the vibration with it. My visiongoes white at the edges, dragging a sound out of my throat that I have no control over.

My thighs shake.

He exhales. Long and low. Not a rut sound. Something underneath it—something that has been waiting under four days of animal drive for a gap to come through.

I'm so sore that even this—even this tiny movement—is almost too much.

Almost.

I hold still for a moment. His cock moves. Not thrusting—he's holding still beneath me, exactly as I asked. But the prehensile muscle flexes. Slow and searching. Adjusting its angle without pulling back. Pressing against the front of my walls at my center. Finding something.

"Don't," I say.

He does it again.

His hands come up and hover on either side of my waist. Trembling. The claws are curled inward so they won't catch my skin. He is shaking with the effort of not grabbing me. The want radiating off him—the desperate rigid restraint of a body that has spent four days taking what it needed and is now, for reasons I don't fully understand, holding still.

"I want to feel you choose it."

I stare at him.

Four days. Four days of the rut driving him, and he's said maybe thirty words to me total. This is what he spends them on. I want to feel you choose it. I want to be furious about that. I want to tell him I'm not choosing anything. That my body is running on venom, on desperation, on four days of being taken apart until I can't find my own edges anymore.

I roll my hips forward.

His head drops back. Crown horns sink into the pelts. His whole body shudders—this enormous, dangerous, scarred thingshuddering beneath me because of two inches of movement. His hands tighten on my hips for just a second before he forces them loose again.