Page 60 of Dead Drop

He watches me try. His eyes carry something I haven't seen there before—not pity, not the amber focus of the claiming. Something quieter. A male watching a female he's spent three weeks holding upright discover what it looks like now that he's let go.

"Give me a moment," I say.

"Take it." Two words. Clear. Patient. The voice of a male who has all the time in the world and intends to give every second of it to the woman shaking on her own legs in front of him.

I stand. Barely. My thighs shaking. My calves burning. My back aching in a way that has nothing to do with injury and everything to do with three weeks of being held in positions my body wasn't designed for. I am standing on my own legs, and they are holding.

The air is on all of me at once. For three weeks it reached me through the filter of his arms, his chest, his wings—canopy breeze and temperature shift all coming to me second-hand, mediated through him. Now it hits my bare skin directly: gooseflesh rising on my arms, the cool on my stomach, the smell of wet bark and canopy moss that I've been breathing filtered through his mineral warmth.

Beyond the aerie wall, through the openings in the woven branches, the canopy. The same view I've been absorbing for three weeks—the birds, the light, the ruins greening over. I watched it. I didn't see it. There's a difference, and standing here with my own weight under my own feet, I feel it. Whatever the scouting reports said about this territory—range, threat level, what to expect—they didn't describe this. They didn't say theworld had already moved on without us. They didn't say a deer would walk through a shopping center and not look twice.

I need a better map.

I feel naked. Which is absurd—I've been naked for weeks. But nakedness against his body was different. Nakedness in his arms was warmth. Nakedness alone is exposure.

His tail twitches at his side. I can see it wanting to wrap around me. He holds it still. The effort is visible in the muscles of his jaw—the clench, the release. He's giving me space. It's costing him.

27

ADA

The withdrawal hits six hours after the knot releases.

I'm lying in the furs. Alone—not alone, because he is three feet away, crouched at the aerie's far edge cleaning the remains of a kill, but not touching me. For the first time in twenty-two days, no part of him is inside me. No vibration. No knot. No warmth sealed at my center.

My body, which has been pressed against his chest for three weeks with his cock flexing inside me and his heartbeat steady against my spine, has nothing to hold onto. The absence is physical. It has weight.

It starts in my skin.

A wrongness. Not pain—worse than pain, because pain has a source you can name and a direction you can work against. This is the absence of something I learned to need. Every nerve ending, tuned over three weeks to his temperature, his texture, the constant hum of the knot against my clit—all of them are firing at once, searching for what isn't there.

My arms prickle. My thighs clench on nothing. The morning air against my bare skin feels like static, cool where his warmth used to be, and the furs underneath me are soft but they are nothis chest. They are not his arms. They are not the steady rise and fall of his breathing that rocked me to sleep every night for three weeks.

I curl tighter. His scent is in the pelts—deep, mineral, warm—which helps and doesn't help. The smell says here but my body says not enough, not close enough, not inside.

My hands are shaking.

I watch them shake. I'm a gate watch commander. I've held position through a twelve-hour siege, through a supply run ambush that killed three of my fighters, through the night Petra was taken. My hands don't shake.

They held a blade for four years. They held his forearms for three weeks while he drove into me, while the knot locked, while the vibration did what it wanted and my fingers dug into the muscles of his arms because his arms were the only solid thing in the world. Those hands don't shake.

They're shaking now.

The pulse comes next. My heart, which spent three weeks synchronized to the slow deep rhythm of his—sixty beats a minute, steady as stone, the metronome I slept to and woke to and came to—is racing. Ninety. A hundred.

My chest feels tight. Not panic. Something chemical, something the venom built into me that I'm only feeling now that the source has been removed.

He sets food near me. Cooked meat, a gourd of water, some of the sweet canopy fruit he brought back from a dawn hunt. He doesn't hand it to me. Doesn't come close. He sets it down within arm's reach and moves back to his place at the far edge, where the morning light catches the ridges of his crown horns and throws long shadows across the woven branch floor.

He knows. He can probably smell it on me—the withdrawal sweat, the hormonal spike, whatever his senses read that mine can't name. He's giving me space I don't want, because heunderstands the difference between what I need and what I'm ready to ask for. Twenty-one days of holding me and he learned that too.

I eat. The meat tastes like nothing. I take it in because I tell myself to, the way I've told myself to do a lot of things over the past four years that my body didn't want to do.

The fruit is better—the sweetness cuts through the noise in my nerves, gives me something to focus on besides the tremor in my fingers. I drink the water in long swallows. My throat is raw from the full rut's worth of sounds I didn't choose to make.

"I'm fine," I tell the furs.

He doesn't respond to that. He's spent three weeks learning the difference between what I say and what I mean. He knows what fine sounds like, and this isn't it.