Page 70 of Dead Drop

"Thank you."

His tail tightens fractionally against my ankle. He doesn't say anything. The night sounds fill the space—the insects, the water, the breathing canopy. He doesn't need to say anything. The tail against my ankle says it.

31

ADA

He brings me clothes.

I don't know when he got them—sometime before dawn, while I was sleeping, the way he does everything that costs him absence. He leaves and returns so silently that my body doesn't feel the gap. I've woken twice now to find things he's gathered while I slept: food, water, a fur that wasn't there before. He moves through the canopy like something the dark made and the daylight forgot to reclaim.

The clothes are piled on the furs beside me when I open my eyes. The morning light comes through the aerie walls in pale slats, catching the dust motes that hang in the still air. Outside, the canopy is waking—birds in the lower branches, the distant splash of something in the stream, the creak of the aerie floor as the wood expands in the warming sun.

The pile is neat. Folded. Not salvaged rags—proper wasteland gear. A jacket, thick-woven, reinforced at the elbows with leather patches that someone stitched with care. Trousers that look like they'll fit. Boots—real boots, leather-soled, laced.

I stare at the pile. I've been naked for three weeks. I'd stopped thinking about that.

I pick up the jacket. The fabric is stiff and rough against my fingers. I pull it on.

I flinch.

The seams are razors. The collar is sandpaper. Every point where fabric meets skin is an assault—scratchy, wrong, alien. Three weeks of his skin against mine. Twenty-one days of smooth red warmth, of furs, of nothing between my body and his body. My nerve endings have been remade. They want him. They will accept furs that smell like him. They will not accept cotton.

I take the jacket off. Put it back on. Take it off again. My face burns.

I don't explain. He watches me struggle with the collar for the third time and says nothing. His amber eyes track the flinch, the way I grip the fabric and then release it, the way my jaw sets when I try to push through the discomfort. He could ask. He doesn't. He watches, the way he watches everything about me—with the patience of something that has decided to learn.

The next morning, the jacket is different.

He's lined the collar with fur from the edge of his own nest—strips of it, soft, dark, cut with claws that left no ragged edges. The cuts are startling. These hands that can open a boar from sternum to pelvis with one stroke have trimmed fur with the care of a tailor. The cuffs too. The inside seams where the stitching would have scraped my wrists. The fur is warm against my skin. His scent is in it—deep, mineral, the smell I've been breathing the full rut's worth of, the smell my body recognizes as safe before my mind has time to argue.

"You noticed," I say.

"Yes," he says. Like it wasn't worth mentioning. Like the alternative—not noticing, not fixing it—didn't exist in his thinking.

I pull the jacket on. The fur settles against my neck, my wrists, the insides of my arms. My whole body goes quiet. Thewrongness of fabric dissolves into the softness of something that smells like the place I've been sleeping the span of the rut.

I wear it. I don't take it off.

Later, alone at the aerie edge while he hunts, the sun dropping toward the canopy line and the air going gold around me, I press my nose into the collar and breathe. Something in my chest cracks open that I wasn't ready for. I'm not crying. I'm breathing his scent from a strip of fur he cut from his own bed because I couldn't stand fabric against my skin. Because he noticed. Because he fixed it without asking, without explaining, without making me say what was wrong. The way someone does when they've been paying attention for longer than you realized.

I adjust. Slowly. The boots are easier—my feet remember leather, remember laces, remember the feel of something solid between me and the ground. The trousers I can tolerate once I've been moving in them for an hour. The jacket I wear open at the front for the first day, then closed the second.

The fur lining stays. It's going to stay for a long time. I'm not lying to myself about that anymore.

My hair is a problem. Three weeks unwound—it falls to my lower back when released, thick and tangled from the rut's end. I find the bone comb in the basket where I kept my things, the one I've been braiding with since I was old enough to hold a blade, and I work it through the length of it slowly while Corvin watches from across the aerie. The braid is tight when I'm done—the kind of braid a fighter wears, pulled back from the face, practical. The kind I wore on the wall.

I ask for a weapon.

I watch his face while I ask—waiting for the refusal, the possessive shutdown, the predictable response of a thing that owns me and won't let me risk the investment.

He reaches behind him and pulls out a blade. Good steel. Balanced. The grip worn with use—someone else's weapon once, claimed and maintained.

He holds it out.

My hand knows it before my mind does. The weight, the balance, the way the grip fills my palm. I've held a blade every day for four years. My fingers close around the handle and something inside me slots back into place.

I look at him. He looks back.