Page 45 of Dead Drop

He eats beside me. Efficiently. Tearing the meat with his teeth, the muscles of his jaw working. The boar is gone in minutes. He cracks the bones with his claws and sucks the marrow. The runner he wraps in leaves and tucks against the wall—stored. For later. For me.

The dried fruit on the shelf in the aerie. The gap woven shut. The second water cache. A runner in leaves against a pre-fall stone wall. I keep adding to a list I don't have a name for.

I watch his hands work. The same hands that pin my hips to the furs, that press my thighs open, that grip my ass while his cock drives—these hands are stripping bark from branches with the fluency of thousands of repetitions. He doesn't fumble. Doesn't hesitate. The claws extend and retract without him looking at them, and the meat falls into portions that are almost identical in size. This is muscle memory. Military conditioning. The efficiency of someone who learned to move his body like a weapon a long time ago.

The tail helps. I watch it arrange stones in the fire pit while his hands work the meat. One limb solving problems while the others tear and strip and portion. It's obscene how capable he is. How practiced. How little effort the whole operation costs him. He's not sweating. His breathing hasn't changed. The only sign that he's been hunting, killing, cooking for the last twenty minutes is the smell of smoke, the blood matted into the dark fur along his forearms.

The same forearms that are now careful not to press against my ribs. The same muscular trunk that just drove his cock into me while anchored against a wall is now kneeling beside me, watching me eat with the focused attention of something that has decided this matters.

"I'm living," I murmur around a mouthful of hot meat, mostly to myself, mostly not caring if he hears. "With a monster. In a tree. Eating meat he killed and cooked while I was literally knotted onto his cock."

His eyes find me. That flash of something that isn't quite laughter.

The sun is coming up through the canopy. The dawn window—the thirty minutes of lowest patrol frequency. I've beenmarking it every morning for over a week, the same running count.

I look at the top of the stone wall. Eight feet. Wasteland scrub below. No immediate threats visible. His attention is on the last of the bones.

"Don't." He doesn't look up.

The pressure sharpens. I stop looking at the wall.

"I need to stop trying to escape," I say. "Not because I've given up. Because I had a clear window and I spent it coming on your cock. I have to be honest with myself about that."

His eyes find mine. Amber. Something in them that is not quite amusement but occupies adjacent territory.

He lifts me from the wall like I weigh nothing. His arms under my thighs, his knot still locked inside me, my legs wrapping around his waist because there's nothing else to do with them. His wings fold around us both, blocking the wind that's picked up from the east—the cold canopy air carrying the scent of green growth and distant water.

Then he fucks me.

Standing. His full height. His arms under my thighs, his hands gripping my ass, the sheer muscular power of him driving up into me while I cling to his shoulders and try to remember how to breathe. My face is at his chest. The scale of it from this position is overwhelming.

His tail splits its attention. The lower coil around my thigh for stability. The tip circling my clit, slow and precise. A second loop curves up to brush across my nipple, the warm muscle tracing and teasing while his cock hits the spot from below on every stroke.

I hate how good it feels. I hate how good he is at this—not just the rut driving, but something more practiced, more deliberate. Every shift of his cock comes from a mind that has been paying attention for over a week. He's not just rutting. He'slearning me. The women in the barracks were kind but clumsy—fumbling in the dark, guessing, hoping for the best. He doesn't guess. He knows. He knows because his cock has been inside me long enough to learn my body where he fills me out, because it has found every sensitive spot and returned to each, because the vibration reads my arousal and adjusts in real time.

I've never been known like this. The intimacy of it is almost unbearable. Not the cock, not the knot, not even the orgasms—the knowing. The fact that something this large and this dangerous has spent ten days learning the exact angle that makes my breath catch.

I come with his wings around me, his tail on my breasts, his cock buried deep. My face is pressed against his heartbeat—that's where my face reaches on him. He doesn't stop. I come again. I bite his pectoral and he groans—a sound that shakes through my teeth and into my skull.

After: his tail sweeps the damp hair from my face. His cock is still inside me, still restless, the prehensile flex slow and lazy now. He carries me back to the aerie without withdrawing.

I don't fight being carried. I'm well past fighting being carried. Somewhere over the grid, between one kill and the next, he asked if it was good. I'm past a lot of things I thought I wouldn't be past.

20

ADA

Aquiet lull. The longest one yet.

The lulls are stretching. I've been tracking them—not with the sharpness I had on day one, when the counting was clean, but with the body's rough estimation. Two hours between peaks, then three. Now closer to four. His body is changing the rhythm. The rut still drives, but the drive is spending more time between surges.

He gives me more rest. I don't know if his body is winding down or if he's choosing to give me more rest. I'm not sure the difference matters anymore.

I'm lying on my side in the furs, curled against him. His chest is against my back, his knees behind mine, his arms around me. The vibration runs low and warm. Outside the aerie, the late afternoon is doing its slow gold descent through the canopy—the light angling lower, the shadows lengthening, the air cooling by degrees. A vine has pushed a new tendril through a gap in the aerie wall since this morning. The growth here is relentless.

I run my fingers along my forearm. The scar from year two is almost gone now. A faint line, barely visible, where a week ago there was a raised white ridge I could trace with my eyes closed.The scar on my shoulder—the deep one, from the stairwell fight that first winter—is softening. The tissue going smooth.

I press my fingers into my ribs. The fracture from the stairwell—the one that was grinding when I inhaled on day one—is silent. No catch. No grind. I take a deep breath, testing. My lungs fill completely, expanding into spaces that haven't been available since the break. I take another breath, deeper. My chest opens like it belongs to someone who grew up breathing clean air instead of coal dust and settlement smoke.