Page 57 of Dead Drop

His forehead drops against the top of my head. Heavy. The weight of something enormous that has just finished what it was built to finish.

"Yes," he says.

One word. The most honest word he's given me.

When my mind names it, there's no horror in the naming. Just a fact arriving the way facts do: quietly, irrevocably, with no interest in my feelings about it.

25

APEX

The roar is still moving through the territory.

I can hear it rolling through the canopy, bouncing back from the old towers to the east. My chest is still coming down from it. My lungs. All of me.

She's asleep.

Her weight on me hasn't changed. Same warmth, same fit against my chest. But her scent has. I felt it shift while I was still inside her—the moment it happened, before she knew, before her body caught up to what mine had already done. My hands went to her belly before I understood why. They're still there.

I don't move them.

The knot is softening. Still inside her—my cock still filling her, the vibration running lower than it has in three weeks. Not climbing. Just there. Warm. Her walls pulse around me in long slow waves she isn't choosing to make. Her body doing what it needs to do.

She smells like mine. She's smelled like mine since the first knotting. But underneath the salt and the warmth and three weeks of the rut on her—there's something else now. SomethingI don't have a word for. Something I'm going to be guarding for a very long time.

I'm hard. Of course I am. The urgency has gone out of it—three weeks of running and now it's finished. Still want her. Still feel her warm around me. Something settled under the wanting that wasn't there before.

My hands. Flat. I hold them still.

Outside, the territory is quiet. The birds went silent when I roared and haven't come back. I can smell the perimeter in every direction—wet stone, new growth, the river to the east, the ruins. All mine. And through my palms, the warmth that wasn't there yesterday.

She breathes. Her ribs expand against my arms. I feel every one.

Mine.

Hold still.

26

ADA

I'm pregnant.

The word arrives and sits in the room. It doesn't feel the way I expected it to feel—not the cold shock of something received, not the tactical weight of a fact that needs acting on. It feels warm. It feels like the settling in my belly, the closed door, the heat that gathered there and took up residence.

The aerie is quiet around it. His arms are around me. The knot is sealed inside me. The vibration—different now. Not the relentless climbing frequency of every knot before this. This is a hum. Warm and constant. The sound a thing makes when it has arrived and stopped needing to drive anywhere. The vibration isn't seeking anymore. It's guarding. Warming the place where the heat settled.

His arms come around me. He pulls me back against his chest—his massive frame curling forward over mine, his hands returning to my belly. Both of them. Covering that place. His fingers splay wide, the claws retracted, and the warmth of his palms sinks through my skin into whatever is beginning beneath it. He holds me there, sealed to him.

The urgency is gone.

It drops out of the room like weather changing. His arms are still around me. His body is still enormous against my back. His knot is still sealed inside me. But the drive—three weeks of the rut's emergency—is simply not there. He exhales against the back of my neck. Long. Slow. A body coming down from something it's been running for weeks.

I lie in the knot's warmth and feel the silence where the urgency was.

Petra.

New Reach.