Page 67 of Dead Drop

"Her," he says. Like a quote. Like he's giving me the word exactly as it arrived in his head, eight months ago, reading a list of names in someone else's handwriting.

"What?"

"When I read the record. What you'd survived. How many you'd trained. What you'd done to protect them." He pauses. The pause is long. The fire pops. A coal shifts. He's not searching for the right words. He's making sure the ones he has are precise enough. "I thought: her."

I don't know what to do with that. A Shade—the Apex of his territory, nine feet of crimson muscle and crown horns—read a list of names in the Ordained's records. He saw mine, saw what I'd done to survive, saw the years I'd spent keeping people alive in a wasteland that kills everything it touches. Something in him knew before he'd ever heard my voice or seen my face. Something in him chose me from a list of women he'd never met, the way I'd choose a fighter from a lineup—not by looking at them but by reading what they'd done.

"You had my name from the records," I say. "But you made me give it to you."

"Yes." His voice drops lower on the word. Not shame. Something closer to certainty.

"On day four. Knotted. Holding still. You made me say it."

"Yes."

"Why."

His tail sweeps once. Slow. The morning breeze moves through the aerie, stirring the ash at the fire's edge. "The records were intelligence. Your voice saying it was—" He stops. The word he wants isn't coming. I can see him reaching for it, the effort in his jaw, the way his whole face tightens with the frustration of a mind that used to think in complete paragraphs nowworking through a vocabulary that has holes in it. "Different," he finishes. It's not the word he wanted. I can tell. Something closer to real or mine or the difference between reading about a fire and standing in front of one. But different is what his rebuilt language gave him, and he offered it anyway.

I hold out my hand across the fire. He looks at it. Then he takes it—his fingers engulfing mine completely, my hand disappearing into the warmth of his grip.

"Show me," I say.

He doesn't ask what I mean. His tail sweeps once behind him—a quick sharp arc, the kind that means a decision just got made—and then he's moving.

He stands. The full height of him—nine feet of it, unfolding from the fire like something the ruins built and forgot to tear down. His crown horns scrape the canopy ceiling. His shoulders block the light coming through the canopy gaps, casting me in his shadow. The fire between us gutters in the wind of his rising. I look up at the wall of him—red skin, carved muscle, the V of his hips, the loincloth already tenting with the shape of what's underneath—and my breath catches. Three weeks of his body against mine. I still can't hold the full scale of him in my head when he's standing and I'm sitting in the furs at his feet.

Then he drops.

To his knees first, then lower—folding that massive frame down, his wings shifting behind him for balance, his hands finding my thighs. The effort of it is visible in every muscle, the deliberate compression of something built for height and power making itself small for me, curving his spine, dipping his shoulders, until his mouth is level with mine. His amber eyes are close. The heat of his breath touches my lips.

He doesn't kiss me.

His hands slide up the outside of my thighs. Spread me. The roughness of his palms against my skin—callused, warm, thehands that held me for twenty-one days, now choosing to hold me differently. His mouth finds the inside of my knee first—a press of warm lips against skin that twitches under the contact. Then higher. The inside of my thigh, where the skin is thin and the withdrawal has left me so sensitive that his breath alone makes my hips jerk. His mouth traces a line upward that makes my hands fist in the furs, my back arching, my body already answering before he's reached where he's going.

Then his mouth is on me.

Not careful. Not tentative. He knows my body—the full rut's worth of intelligence, every nerve known at my center—and he uses every bit of it. His tongue is wide, hot, deliberate—finding the places his cock found from inside, reaching them from outside. My hips jerk. I grab his horns—the base of his crown horns, thick, warm, ridged—because there is nothing else to hold onto. My back arches off the furs.

He doesn't stop.

He eats me out like he's making a point. His tongue pressing flat against my clit, then circling, then pressing again. His lips sealing over me, sucking gently, his tongue working inside the seal. His hands grip my thighs, keeping me spread, keeping me exactly where he wants me. I'm moaning. I'm loud. The sounds are coming out of me without permission, filling the aerie, going out into the canopy.

I come on his mouth. Hard. My walls clenching on nothing, my thighs clamping around his head, my hands pulling at his horns. He doesn't stop. He works me through it—tongue relentless, mouth sealed, the vibration of a low growl running through his lips into my clit. The orgasm doesn't end. It rolls, crests, rolls again.

His tail finds me next. The tip pressing in—slick with the same secretion, warm, tapered—sliding inside me while his mouth is still on my clit. I cry out. The stretch of it, his tongueand his tail working me at once. He fucks me with the tail in slow deliberate strokes, the tip curving to find the spot from inside while his mouth holds the pressure from outside.

I come again. Stacked on the first, the waves overlapping, my voice breaking on sounds that aren't words.

When I look down past his shoulders, I can see what this is doing to him. His cock is fully hard—thick, flushed, the prehensile muscle flexing in slow restless pulses. He is rock hard from tasting me. From making me come. Nobody touched him. He got there on his own.

That's going to live in my head for a long time. I can already feel it settling in, making itself comfortable, taking up space I don't have.

He stands. The full height again, rising from his knees, and the loincloth is long gone. His cock juts between us—hard, thick, the muscle curving toward me in slow hungry pulses.

He lifts me from the furs like I weigh nothing. My legs wrap around his waist because that's where my legs go on him—I've learned the geometry of this, the way my body fits against his, the places I can hold and the places I can only cling to.

My back hits the aerie wall. The woven branches are rough against my shoulders, the cool morning air on my sweat-slicked skin. Below us the canopy drops away into the ruins—the green world spreading beneath the aerie like something out of a story nobody tells anymore.