Page 47 of Dead Drop

I don't want him to see this. The grief is mine. It belongs to the woman on the wall, to the fighter who trained Petra, to the commander who failed to protect her. It doesn't belong to the male whose cock is sealed inside me, whose arms are around me, whose heartbeat is the metronome my body has been using for ten days. This grief is from before him.

He sees it.

He doesn't speak. His arms tighten around me—not the rut's grip, not possessive, just holding. His wings fold around us both. The light goes. The warmth stays. Complete darkness, his heartbeat against my back. He curls around me, tucking his chin down, and his breath falls warm on the crown of my head.

His tail comes up. The tip brushes the wet hair from my face—the moisture isn't sweat this time, and he knows it—then settles against my back. The tip traces slow circles between my shoulder blades. Patient. Rhythmic. Like something that has decided to be present for this and has no intention of rushing.

I cry.

I cry in his arms, knotted, the vibration still running between my legs, the furs soft beneath my face. I cry for Petra. For the way she held her blade—loose grip, relaxed wrist, the way I taught her after watching her grip too tight for a month and nearly losing the knife twice. The dry edge in her voice when she said those aren't mutually exclusive—which always meant she was about to be right about something you didn't want her to be right about.

For the way she slept. The steady breathing, the trust in it. She was the only fighter in my unit who slept on her back—everyone else curled on their sides, facing the door, one handnear their weapon. Petra slept like someone who believed the walls would hold.

I built those walls for her. I trained the watch that guarded them. I ran the routes that kept the supplies coming so the settlement could feed the people who slept inside them. Everything I did for four years was so that people like Petra could sleep on their backs and trust the ceiling above them.

Whatever they dosed her with was already working through her system by the time I found it. The sixty seconds I gave myself on her cot before I stood up and went to war. The fact that the war led me here.

For the other women. The ones I've never met—the ones in the Gilded Cages, being prepared, being drugged into compliance, being delivered to Shades who won't have the restraint he has. The ones who won't get lulls. Who won't get their names asked for. Who won't get a male that holds still and waits because he decided he wants something the rut doesn't need.

For the settlement I left behind.

The watch schedule was pinned to the planning wall with four thumbtacks. I wrote it in pencil so I could adjust for sick days, for injuries, for the slow attrition of fighters who didn't come back from supply runs. Rhea was on third watch the night I climbed the building. Mari was running the eastern route at dawn. The schedule I left behind had their names on it for the next two weeks. Assignments I wouldn't be there to oversee. Rotations I wouldn't be there to adjust when someone pulled a muscle or caught the fever that swept through the barracks every spring.

I wonder if someone took over the schedule. Whether they kept my pencil marks or erased them and started fresh. I wonder if the watch is still running, if the routes are still timed, if the fighters I trained are still alive.

Maybe they think I'm dead. I hope they think I'm dead. It's cleaner than the truth. Their commander walked off a roof because a girl with steady breathing was taken. Then she was caught by a nine-foot male. Now she's crying in his arms while his cock is inside her, his tail drawing circles on her back. She can't tell anymore where the grief ends. Where the comfort begins.

He holds me through all of it. His wings block the world. His tail traces circles between my shoulder blades. His heartbeat is steady against my back—the deep, slow rhythm that I have been using as a metronome for over a week, that my sleeping body trusts, that my waking body is only now catching up to.

The crying goes on longer than I expect. Once the door opens, everything comes through. Not just Petra. The settlement. The fighters I trained—Rhea, who was sixteen and held her first watch shift with hands that trembled until I stood behind her and told her where to look. Mari, who lost three fingers to a canopy wolf on a supply run and went back out the next week because the settlement needed the protein. The old woman who ran the mess hall, whose name I never learned, who put an extra scoop of protein paste in my bowl every morning because she knew I'd be running routes and I'd need it.

The people I left behind when I climbed that building. The people I wasn't thinking about when I stepped off the edge. I was thinking about Petra. I was thinking about the gilded flower and the empty cot. I wasn't thinking about the watch schedule I left incomplete on the table. The supply run I was supposed to lead at dawn. The fighters who would wake up and find their commander gone.

I cry for the selfishness of my grief. For the fact that I chose to die instead of choosing to fight for the rest of them. For the fact that I'm here, held, warm, fed by his cum, fucked into something approaching peace—while they are still on the wall. While thegenerators still need fuel. While the watch still needs running. While the dawn routes still need someone to lead them.

I cry until the tears run dry. Then I lie there, wrung out, hollow, lighter. The grief is still there but it has changed shape. It sits differently in my chest—no longer a fist, but an open hand. Something I'm holding instead of something holding me.

His wings hold. His tail circles. His heartbeat doesn't change.

"There was a girl," I say. My voice is wrecked. "My fighter. They took her."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

He doesn't answer. His arms tighten. The silence says: I know things I'm not telling you yet. His tail traces slow circles on my back. Patient. The same pattern it draws when he's thinking. The tip moves between my shoulder blades with a pressure that is exactly right—not too light, not too heavy, just the warm steady contact of something that has learned the weight my body needs.

I let it go. For now. The grief fills the aerie the way the scent of sex fills it—everywhere, in everything, impossible to separate from the air.

But it's lighter than it was. He held me through it. He didn't try to fix it, didn't try to fuck it away, didn't try to do anything but be the warm wall at my back while I broke. The simplicity of that—of being held without agenda—is the thing I can't fit into any of the categories I have for him.

The next peak arrives.

Something has shifted. The same intensity—his hands on my hips, his cock driving deep, the wet rhythm filling the aerie—but the quality of his hands is different. Still the rut's force, still the urgency, but present in it. Attentive. His thumb traces circles on my hip bone between thrusts. His mouth finds the back of my neck—not biting, not the fang strike, just his lips warm anddeliberate against the curve of my spine. He fucks me through the grief's aftermath with a thoroughness that is almost tender. That should be impossible at this intensity. The confusion of it is its own heat.

His cock drives deep on every stroke. The prehensile muscle finding the spot with the same accuracy it always does, holding the angle, pressing. But the rhythm is different—slower, longer, each thrust fully seated before the withdrawal. He's not rushing toward release. He's staying. Filling me completely on every stroke and holding there for a beat longer than the rut would dictate. The vibration hums warm and constant, not climbing. Just there.

It feels like being held inward.