Page 44 of Dead Drop

His tail tightens around my waist. I press my face against him and breathe in the mineral-warm scent of his skin while the canopy scrolls past below us. The dawn is coming—the leaves at the canopy crown catching light in slow progression, the dark retreating sector by sector. A cold breeze off the river hits my bare shoulders and I shiver against him. His wing adjusts without thought, curving forward to block the wind. The warmth behind it is immediate. Complete.

I don't think about how that felt. I don't think about the last time I felt sheltered from anything.

On the wall, we slept in shifts. Two on, two off, the wind coming through the gaps in the concrete carrying the smell of generator exhaust and coal dust. I spent four years never turning my back to an open doorway. I spent four years with my hand on my blade when I slept. The first night without a weapon in my reach, my hand opened and closed against the furs for an hour before my body accepted that there was nothing to grip.

I haven't reached for a weapon in over a week. My body has stopped expecting the next threat to come from him.

That should terrify me more than it does. Instead it feels like setting down a pack I've been carrying for so long I forgot how much it weighed. The relief of it is physical—my shoulders, myjaw, the muscles along my spine that spent four years braced for the next impact. All of it unwinding in his arms, in the air above the canopy, with his cock shifting inside me on every wing-beat and the world stretching out below us in shades of green I didn't know existed.

He clears a tree line and drops into a hover at the canopy edge. Below: scrubland. Something large moving through the low ferns—four-legged, heavy, a canopy boar by the shape of its shoulders. Two hundred pounds at least. Tusked.

His tail uncoils from my waist. The loss of it is cold and sudden against my bare skin.

Then it strikes.

Ten feet of prehensile muscle snapping downward like a whip crack. The boar doesn't flinch, doesn't startle, doesn't get a single step. The tail wraps its throat, constricts once, and the animal drops. Clean. No squealing. No thrashing. Just alive and then not.

His wings don't even falter. He hovers with me knotted to his chest, his cock shifting inside me with the motion of his body, while his tail kills something the size of a full-grown adult in a single stroke. The tail recoils, dragging the carcass up through the canopy, and tucks the kill against his side without him looking at it.

He didn't look. He felt the strike land and he didn't need to look.

The tactical part of my brain does what it always does. Ten-foot striking range. Enough force to crush a boar's windpipe in under a second. Aimed while hovering, while holding my weight, while his knot is still locked inside me. I have watched snipers with less economy of motion.

I hate that I'm impressed. I am very, very impressed.

His hips roll. One slow thrust—not the rut driving, just the idle flex, the prehensile muscle pressing against the spot whilehis body settles back into hover. My breath hitches. A moan slips out against the wall of him.

"Good?" Low. Almost conversational.

"Yes." It comes out before I can stop it.

His cock flexes—not the rut, something more deliberate—and his exhale goes rough against the top of my head. He asked because he wanted the answer. He got it.

I hate how much I meant it.

He banks west. More border. His cock still inside me, still flexing in lazy rolls with the motion of his wings. Every banking turn shifts the angle, and every shift drags the knot against my cunt. I'm still coming, slightly. A low, constant simmer that spikes with every change in direction. I've stopped being startled by it.

Another clearing. He drops to hover again. Something in the undergrowth—smaller this time, fast-moving. A canopy runner, all legs, darting between the fern stalks. His tail extends. One strike. Another clean kill.

Two animals in ten minutes. He hasn't broken a sweat. His heartbeat hasn't changed under my cheek.

He descends to a section of old stone wall—pre-fall structure, still standing, moss-covered. He lands and sets me against the stone without withdrawing. The cold of it comes through the furs against my back. Still sealed inside me. He places me with the certainty of someone setting something down that isn't going anywhere. Checks that I won't fall. His hand lingers on my jaw—thumb across my lower lip, brief and deliberate—before he turns to the kill.

He works fast. Strips bark from a dead branch, arranges stones in a ring with his tail while his claws open the boar along the belly with a single clean line. The same tail that was circling my clit twenty minutes ago is now arranging a fire pit with thesame dexterity. His claws—which trace my ribs so carefully they never leave a mark—open the animal like it's made of paper.

The fire catches. He feeds it with dry bark, sheltering the flame with one wing. Cuts the meat into pieces with his claws, threads them onto green sticks from the canopy edge. The smell hits me—roasting fat, char, the sweetness of whatever the boar was eating—and my stomach tightens.

Except it shouldn't. I'm not hungry. I haven't been hungry in days.

The cum feeds me. I know this now. His cum sealed inside me, warming me from the center, has been keeping my body running without food. I don't need the meat. My body isn't asking for it.

I want it anyway. The smell, the heat, the taste of something that isn't venom and sex and his skin. I want to eat because eating is something I used to do. Because it tastes good. Because he's cooking it for me.

He offers me the first piece. Hot, dripping, the fat crackling. I take it from his hand. The meat is rich and sweet—nothing like the reconstituted protein from the settlement mess, which tasted like cardboard soaked in salt water. This tastes alive. I eat it fast. He watches me eat with those amber eyes, steady.

"More," I say. My mouth is full. I don't care.

He hands me another piece. He flexes inside me—not the rut, just the response to my voice, my pleasure. The muscle rolls against the spot in a slow lazy stroke. I close my eyes, chew, feel it. Think about nothing at all for a few seconds.