Page 64 of Dead Drop

I've spent three weeks pressed against this body. I know every inch of it through my walls—his cock learning me, his arms around me, his tail coiled around whatever part of me it could claim. But I've never seen him like this. At a distance. In firelight. Complete.

He shifts to hand me food. I look at his back—the muscles there, the wing joints, the valley of his spine. Then, with no help from my better judgment, at his ass. Then very deliberately at my food.

Three weeks. I spent three weeks with that pressed against me and I'm only having this problem now.

"You're staring," I say.

"Yes." No apology. No deflection. Just the simple admission of a male who has been watching the same body for three weeks and isn't tired of it yet.

"It's unsettling."

"I know." He doesn't stop. His eyes move across my face with the same attention his hands gave my body in the stream—memorizing. Learning. Seeing me for the first time at a distance and finding new things. "Eat."

The food is good. Better than anything I ate on the wall—real flavor, real texture, the dried fruit sweet and dense, the meat rich with fat. I eat all of it. He watches me eat. His tail, resting beside him, curls and uncurls in the slow rhythm I've learned means contentment.

"You're staring," I say around a mouthful. The fruit is so sweet it makes my eyes water. Or maybe that's something else.

"You've been eating my cum for three weeks. You deserve real food."

I choke on the fruit. He watches this with what I can only describe as enjoyment.

"That's—" I swallow. "That's the most words you've said at once."

"The rut takes the words. They come back." He hands me more fruit. His clawed fingers are careful around the soft skin of it—the same delicacy he uses on my body. "Everything comes back. Just different."

I eat the fruit. I think about that. Everything comes back. Just different.

When I'm done he comes around the fire. Kneels in front of me. His hands come to my jaw, his thumbs moving slowly along my cheekbones. He looks at me for a long time without speaking.

"You know what it means," he says.

"Yes."

"How do you feel about it."

I look at him. His amber eyes, which are just amber now—no flash, no predatory bright. The crown horns. The enormous careful hands on my face. The woman who stood on the edge of the building—I reach for her. She's there. The logic holds. But she is farther than she was on day three. Farther than she was a week ago. Each day moved her incrementally.

"I don't know yet," I tell him.

Something moves in his face. "Tell me when you do."

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true."

His thumb at the corner of my mouth. He leans forward and kisses me once—soft and precise, asking something. Not the rut. Not driven. Chosen. His lips are warm. His hand cups my jaw. He kisses me like a decision rather than a drive—deliberate, slow, in no hurry.

Something shifts in me that has nothing to do with the knot. Nothing to do with the venom or the drive or three weeks of being taken apart and reassembled. Something older than all of that. Something that belongs entirely to the part of me that is still here, still Ada, still the woman who stood on the wall and jumped off it.

The fire has gone low. The canopy is dark above us. Fireflies have appeared—or something like fireflies, small drifting lights that move through the ruins below, green-gold, pulsing in a rhythm that matches my heartbeat. Or his. At this point, the distinction is academic.

"Three weeks," I say. "I never asked your name."

He looks at me. Something deliberate in the pause. Like he's been waiting for this question the way he waited for mine—with the patience of something that has already decided how it will end.

"Corvin."

I try it, turning it over. Something the old world left in the ruins. A dark bird, patient, watching from altitude. I understand why it fits him.