Page 61 of Dead Drop

The afternoon light comes in gold through the canopy gaps, falling across the aerie floor in shifting patterns that move when the breeze stirs the leaves overhead. The white flowers on the aerie vines have started to wilt—the bloom that arrived during the last week of the rut is passing, the petals curling at the edges, dropping one by one into the pelts. A few have caught in my hair.

I watch a petal land on my forearm. White against my skin, soft, already turning brown at the tip. Below the aerie, the canopy breathes—the distant rustle of leaves, the creak of branches adjusting under new growth, the stream running over stones somewhere far beneath us. The world is still here. It kept going while I was gone from it.

I stand up.

My legs hold. They've been holding since yesterday, getting steadier by the hour. The muscles are weak from the span of the rut, being carried, braced, pinned beneath him, held against him, wrapped around him—but the mechanics are there. I can walk to the aerie edge, brace my hands on the woven branch railing, look out.

The drop is the same. The canopy below, the ruins, the distant towers with their crowns of green where the vines have reached the upper floors and kept climbing. The place where I jumped. Twenty-two days ago I stood at a different edge and chose the fall because it was the cleanest option available. Three options: the Ordained would take me, or the wasteland would kill me, or I could choose my own terms.

Something caught me before I reached them.

I stand at the edge and look down. The wind is cool on my face, carrying the smell of wet bark and the faint sweetness of canopy moss. My hands are braced on the railing—the same hands that are shaking, the same hands that gripped his forearms through all of it, the hands that held a blade for four years before that.

I'm not testing the drop. I know what the drop means. I know what's at the bottom of it. I know what's behind me.

I'm standing here because I need to know which direction my body wants to go when nothing is holding it in place.

My body wants to go back to the furs. My body wants to go back to him. Not because of the venom, not because of the withdrawal screaming through my nerves. Because weeks of his arms were the safest place I've been since before the asteroid, and my body has decided that matters more than the principle of the thing.

I turn around.

He's watching me. Still crouched, still at the far end of the aerie, his amber eyes steady in the afternoon light. His tail is draped behind him, motionless—the restless sweep gone still. He hasn't moved. He hasn't come closer. He has been watching me stand at the edge of a hundred-foot drop with shaking hands, and he has not moved to stop me.

He let me choose.

I walk back. Not to him—to the pelts, to the place where his scent is deepest, where the impression of his body is pressed into them from three weeks of holding me against him. I lie down. My skin is still wrong. My pulse is still racing. The shaking hasn't stopped.

"Touch me," I say.

He doesn't make me say it twice.

His hands first. On my shoulders, sliding down my arms, the warmth of his palms against my shivering skin. The size of him—I forget, somehow, every time he's not directly against me. Every day of his body around mine and I still lose the scale of it the moment we're apart.

His hands span my shoulders completely. His fingers wrap around my arms with room to spare, the claws careful, tucked inward, touching me with just the pads of his palms. I am small against him. Every nerve in me settles fractionally at the contact, the firing in my skin going quiet wherever his warmth lands.

His cock is soft against my thigh when he pulls me against him. Not driving. Not the rut's urgency. Just the prehensile muscle doing what it always does when he's near me—shifting, seeking, a slow idle flex that keeps me aware of it the way his heartbeat keeps me aware of his chest behind me.

His arms come around me from behind, and I'm in the place I've been for twenty-one days. His chest against my back. His warmth along every inch of my spine. The wrongness in my skin begins to quiet.

"You don't have to—" I start.

His cock flexes against me. A slow deliberate roll, the muscle pressing warm and heavy along the back of my thigh. Not accidental.

"I want to," he says. Low. Clear. More words than the rut gave him for anything except my name. His mouth comes to the back of my neck—he has to fold that massive frame downto reach it, the curve of his spine visible above me, the effort of something nine feet tall making itself small enough to press its lips to the nape of a woman who barely clears his sternum. His lips are warm. His breath is steady against my skin.

The soft prehensile flex becomes something else. A press. A seeking. He slides between my thighs from behind—still soft, still that thick heavy warmth that isn't the rut's iron hardness but isn't nothing either. The tip finds my cunt with the same knowing sureness it's had since the first week, the muscle curving to meet me where I am. I'm wet. I've been wet since his hands landed on my shoulders. I don't need convincing. I remember him the way my hands remember a blade—instantly, completely, without thought.

He enters me slowly. Soft first, stretching inside me in a long gentle flex, pressing against my walls with the careful attention of something relearning the space after an absence. The warmth of him fills me. Not the knot—no swelling, no lock, no vibration. Just him, thick and present, rolling against the places he knows because he spent three weeks learning them.

I exhale. The shaking stops. Everything in me goes still, the tremor that's been rattling through me for hours finally breaking against the fact of him inside me.

The canopy is going dark beyond the aerie walls, the evening light fading to amber through the gaps, and the world narrows to the heat of his chest against my back and the slow roll of him inside me and the quiet sound of his breathing behind my ear.

Then he hardens.

I feel every degree of it—the thickening, him filling out, the pressure against the inside of me increasing as he goes from the gentle flex to something denser, heavier. His breathing changes against my neck. His hands tighten on my hips.

The curl of him that was rolling lazily where I grip him starts to seek with purpose, finding the spot and pressing, holding the angle the way he held it a thousand times during the rut.