Page 42 of Dead Drop

At one point he says, with visible effort: "Not afraid."

His hand comes to my throat. Not gripping—his palm against my pulse, feeling the beat of my blood through his skin. The touch is deliberate. He knows my pulse. He's been feeling it through my walls, through his cock, for seven days. Now he's feeling it from the outside.

He means me. I'm not afraid.

I don't say I know. But I do.

I should be hungry, I think. Seven days. No real food since the first morning, just the water from the gourd and whateverhis body is putting into mine. I should be starving. I should be weak.

I'm not.

"Why am I not hungry," I say aloud. Not really to him. To the canopy ceiling, to the furs, to the situation. Thinking out loud the way I used to on the wall during the long watches—talking to myself to stay sharp.

His hips don't stop. His cock drives into me on the next stroke, hitting the spot, and his grunt lands against the back of my skull. Between thrusts, rough and compressed: "The cum feeds you."

I go still.

His hips keep going. He keeps fucking me like he didn't just say that—like the information is incidental, something obvious, not worth pausing for. His cock presses deep on the next stroke. His tail tightens around my waist.

The cum feeds me. Seven days of his cum sealed inside me by the knot—not just heat, not just the fullness, but sustenance. My body has been living on it. That's why I'm not hungry. That's why I'm not weak. That's why the nails are harder, the hair is thicker, the lungs are deeper. He has been pouring sustenance into me every time the knot seals. Every flood of heat that fills my belly—the thick, hot pulses I've felt a hundred times, the cum pooling deep inside me, sealed in, going nowhere—has been feeding me. Rebuilding me. Every orgasm that milks his cock, every reflexive clench that draws another pulse from him—my body has been extracting what it needs from what he gives it.

The efficiency of it is staggering. No supply runs. No protein bars that taste like wet cardboard. No settlement rations portioned by the gram. Just his body, inside mine, pouring warmth and sustenance into me while the knot seals it in place. The most efficient supply chain I've ever encountered, and it runs through my cunt.

I stare at the canopy ceiling while he fucks me and I think: He understands everything. Every word. Even mid-rut, even driven, he is listening and he knows and he can answer.

He has been answering the whole time. I just wasn't asking the right questions.

Gone. The vibration finds something and presses. The thought dissolves.

The worldbuilding has been happening without my noticing. He's been adjusting the aerie's walls, weaving fresh branches into the gaps where the wind comes through. The nest has new furs—softer than the originals, smelling like canopy deer rather than old pelts. He added a second water cache on the opposite wall. A shelf of dried fruit, something dark and sweet-smelling, from a tree I don't recognize.

I think about the settlements I've seen. The way people build when they intend to stay versus when they're passing through. Passing-through is lean: walls that will hold, a roof that won't leak, nothing wasted on comfort. Staying is different. Staying has shelves. Staying has a second water cache.

New Reach started as passing-through. Four walls, a generator, a water pump that worked half the time. The first winter, we slept in shifts because there weren't enough blankets. By year two, someone had built shelves in the mess hall. By year three, there were curtains on the windows—actual fabric curtains, scavenged from a department store two miles east, carried back through contested territory because someone decided that what the settlement needed was not more ammunition but curtains. The fighters mocked it. I hung them myself.

He's building curtains. In his own way—fresh furs, dried fruit, the gap in the wall woven shut with new branches. Each improvement so small it could be instinct, could be the nesting behavior the intelligence files describe. But I ran a settlementfor four years. I know the difference between nesting and homemaking.

This is homemaking.

I lie in the furs, in his arms, full of venom. Full of his cum. My body is changing. The nails. The hair. The lungs that fill deeper than they should. The old scar on my right forearm, from a blade fight in year two, is fading. The edges of it going soft. The white line losing its sharpness against my skin.

His cum is feeding me. Healing me. Remaking me into something that doesn't carry the damage of the old world in its body anymore. I don't know how to feel about being fixed by the thing that's holding me captive. There's probably a word for that. I'm too full of venom to look for it.

The weight of it—that's what settles something in my chest. Not the pleasure, though there's plenty of that. The weight. His cock sealed deep inside me, the knot swollen, keeping everything in. The heaviness of it pressing against the inside of me from my center outward. When he's still like this, breathing steady against the back of my skull, the weight becomes almost meditative. A presence that says: you are held. You are full. You are not going anywhere.

My body has stopped bracing for the peaks. The lulls between them have lengthened into something almost like peace, and I realize I'm not reading them as the eye of the storm anymore. The vibration just runs now—no urgency underneath it. His heartbeat thuds into my spine like it's tethering me to something.

The woman on the wall is still here. She's taking notes. The notes are getting shorter. The handwriting is getting worse.

But she's still here.

19

ADA

Iwake to the sky.

Not the aerie ceiling. The full canopy dark above me, wings working, cold air against my face. My chest is against his chest. My face is at his throat, my legs hanging in the furs he's bound around us both. His cock is inside me. His knot is locked. I'm hundreds of feet above the canopy floor. The last thing I remember is the aerie, the vibration, coming until I couldn't.