Page 65 of Dead Drop

"Ada," he says. Which he already knew. Has known since day four, when he held still and waited and I broke. The way he names everything that's his.

I've known him for twenty-one days. I've known his name for thirty seconds. Those are very different things.

The wasteland is doing what the wasteland does, and none of that has changed. The Ordained are still out there. Petra is still in a gilded room being prepared. The settlements are still surviving on supply runs timed to the dawn window. The wall still needs guarding. The world is still the world.

But I'm not who I was when I jumped. I'm someone else now—someone with stronger nails and thicker hair and lungs that fill deeper. Someone with a life inside her that wasn't there three weeks ago. Someone who knows the name of the male who caught her.

The hollow in my chest where the urgency was—underneath it, starting to take shape, there is something else. Something that has been arriving slowly for weeks, only becoming visible now that the noise of the rut is gone. It has his name in it. It has hishands in it. It has the way he said Ada against the crown of my head like something he earned.

I don't have a name for it yet. I'm not sure I'm ready to look for one.

He does. I can see it in his face across the firelight. He has had the name for a while.

The fire cracks. A spark rises and drifts upward through the canopy, joining the fireflies in the dark.

Corvin. The name sits in my mouth like something I've been tasting without knowing. A dark bird. A watcher. Something that has been circling overhead for a very long time, patient, waiting for the right moment to land.

The fireflies pulse around us. The canopy breathes—the leaves shifting with a night breeze that carries the smell of river water and wet stone. Somewhere in the ruins below, something howls. Not a threat—a territory call, distant, another creature claiming its space in the dark. His ears turn toward the sound. His body doesn't move.

I lean forward. Close the distance between his mouth and mine. Kiss him because I choose to—not driven, not the rut, not the venom. Just Ada, kissing Corvin beside a fire, in the ruins of a world that ended thirteen years ago, in a place where something new is growing.

His hand comes to the back of my neck. His mouth opens against mine. The kiss is careful. Deep. The kiss of someone who has been waiting for exactly this and intends to take his time with it.

My hands find his chest—not a decision, just where they end up, pressing against the solid heat of him. His heartbeat under my palms.

He adjusts the angle. One hand still at the back of my neck, the other coming to my jaw—claws careful, thumb at mycheekbone—and the kiss shifts. Slower. More thorough. He's not following my lead anymore.

I've spent three weeks with his body at my center. None of that prepared me for him learning my mouth.

He takes his time. Focused, unhurried, with the same attention he gives everything he's decided to know completely. The fire sounds very far away. The canopy sounds very far away. Whatever I was thinking about before I leaned forward is simply gone.

His thumb moves along the hinge of my jaw. My fingers curl against his chest. I'm aware, from somewhere very far away, that this is not what I expected when I leaned in.

When I pull back I need a full breath before I can locate myself.

"I had a thought," I tell him. "Before that. I can't find it."

The corner of his mouth does something. "I know."

His eyes are steady on mine. Something in them that isn't the rut. Something that looks like the beginning of a very long story.

"Tell me when you're ready," he says.

"For what?"

"Everything."

I stay in his hands.

29

ADA

He talks in the morning.

Not the rut's fragments—mine, stay, good. Full sentences, or something close. Rough around the edges, the words coming with visible effort, each one dragged up from wherever the mutation buried his language. But complete. Like a river that's been dammed for three weeks and is finding its way through the cracks, the water running clearer with every hour.

We're sitting across from each other. The fire between us—he built it before I woke, the coals already white and hot, meat sizzling on the green sticks he stripped from the canopy edge.