Page 82 of Dead Drop

It doesn't feel impossible.

"Corvin."

He looks up. The amber eyes steady, the half-finished hook in his clawed hands, the light coming through the canopy gaps on his crown horns turning them dark gold at the tips. The wood shavings have caught in the creases of his forearms. His tail is still curled around his ankle.

He looks, in this light, in this moment, like something the wasteland built specifically to confuse me—nine feet of lethal muscle and territorial instinct, sitting cross-legged in a nest, carving tools for a woman half his size because her hands can't grip the branches without them.

"Thank you."

His tail uncurls from his ankle and reaches across the space between us. The tip brushes my knee—warm, deliberate, the lightest pressure. Then it holds. Doesn't pull back. Stays against my knee while he goes back to carving, the tip resting there with the idle certainty of something that has decided where it wants to be.

"You don't have to thank me for this," he says without looking up. The words come easier now. Fuller. Each day thesentences get longer, the pauses between them shorter, the lost language rebuilding itself one conversation at a time. "This is what I do. I build things. I maintain the territory. I make it—liveable."

He pauses. The claw makes a precise cut along the grain. "Before, I did it for the territory. Now I do it for you."

I sit with that. Let it settle into me the way his scent settled into the fur lining of my jacket—gradually, without permission, until it became the thing my body reached for first.

I sit with him until the light changes. Until the gold morning goes white, the canopy shadows shifting, the breeze from the stream picking up to carry the smell of clean water into the aerie. A cloud passes over the sun. The light goes flat for a moment, then returns, warmer than before. The insects are loud in the middle branches.

Somewhere below, the stream runs over the stones it's been wearing smooth for thirteen years.

I don't need to be anywhere else. For the first time since the wall—for the first time in four years of running, fighting, keeping everyone alive one more day—I am sitting still. Not sleeping, not recovering, not waiting for the next crisis. Sitting still because the morning is warm, the company is good, and there's nothing that needs me more than this moment does.

The knife at my hip. The hook on my belt. The fur-lined collar warm against my throat. The male across from me, carving something for my hands with his claws, his tail resting against my knee, the wood shavings settling between us like something ordinary.

The wasteland is still the wasteland. The Ordained will come back. The Stained will come back. My people need me. I'm carrying something I didn't choose, something that changes everything about what comes next. I need to figure out how to be what my people need while becoming what this child will need.

It's more complicated than any supply run I ever planned.

But right now—right now the morning is warm and the aerie is quiet and the male who caught me when I fell is making me tools for the life we're building in the canopy.

I can start from here.

35

ADA

Iask to learn his territory.

Not from the air, not knotted to his chest with his cock still inside me, not through the gauze of venom and altitude and his heartbeat thudding against my spine. On foot. With my blade.

The way I learned every supply route, every dead zone, every ambush corridor around New Reach.

The way a combatant learns terrain she intends to hold.

Corvin looks at me when I say it. The amber eyes steady, the morning light catching the ridges of his crown horns. His tail, which has been doing its idle sweep behind him, goes still.

He tilts his head—the considering angle, the one that makes him look like a raptor deciding whether something is prey or puzzle.

"On foot," he repeats.

"On foot."

Something shifts in his expression. Not surprise. He stopped being surprised by me sometime during week two of the rut, when I bit his forearm hard enough to draw blood and he made a sound that wasn't pain.

This is something else.

The corner of his mouth does the thing I've learned is his version of a smile—a micro-shift in the heavy jaw, the brow ridge lifting a fraction.