Page 87 of Dead Drop

The smallest micro-shift in his expression. The smile. "I expected you would."

He adjusts the patrol route that evening. Doesn't announce it. Just changes the path he's walked for six years based on a conversation we had over morning coffee.

The shift is subtle—different entry point to the eastern approach, a new secondary loop that covers the ground I identified as tactically weak, markers repositioned to account for what we discussed about Stained approach patterns. I see it all.

The fact that I see it—that the adjustment matters to me, that watching him weave my thinking into his routine doessomething warm and real to the place behind my sternum—is something I don't have a military term for. It's not conquest. It's not ownership. It's partnership.

The first mission together happens three days later.

A Stained scouting party. Two of them, circling the eastern boundary—the boundary I said was exposed, the boundary he's already started reinforcing with additional markers. The ground reeks of them: chemical, sour, the scent of stolen venom burning inside bodies that weren't built for it.

They're edgy. Hungry. Desperate in the way that comes when the need for a mate starts overriding the need for survival.

He could handle them alone. He's handled everything alone for six years.

He takes me with him.

I ride on his back. Not knotted, not the rut's pull holding me locked in place. Just me, my arms around his neck, my legs gripping the massive width of his torso, the fur-lined jacket pressed between my chest and the hard planes of his back.

My knife on my hip. The climbing hooks on my belt. His wings catch the thermals as he moves through the canopy, and I feel each adjustment—the tilt, the correction, the subtle shifts that keep us balanced. The way his body reads the air the way mine reads terrain. The way I trust his balance with my own.

When we find the scouts, he slows. Descends. Sets me down on a low branch.

He sets me down.

Not behind him. Beside him. In the working space.

He gives me room to work. The trust of it settles into my bones.

The first one comes at me fast. Seven feet of mottled gray-green, the sour smell of stolen venom, jittering eyes that lock on me with the desperate hunger of something that can smella mated female. He's faster than the Stained who attacked the aerie.

Leaner. Hungrier. His movements are erratic—the venom coursing through him with no outlet, no rut to channel it. He's unstable.

I'm stable.

Four years of the wall. Four years of dawn runs, blade drills, breach scenarios, hand-to-hand in the dark with things that wanted to kill me. The muscle doesn't forget.

My body drops into the stance the way it always has—low, balanced, blade out, center of gravity settled into my hips. My breathing steady. He lunges, shrieking something that isn't language. I sidestep with a half-turn—let his momentum carry him past me while using his own force to pivot—and drive the blade into the soft tissue behind his knee. The move is textbook, the exact movement I've taught a hundred times.

He drops to one knee. The scream is animal, raw, something that's never known pain before. I take the second strike carefully.

His throat opens. The blood is wrong—too dark, venom-thick, viscous. He falls sideways into the leaf litter.

Clean. Efficient. The way I trained a hundred fighters to work.

Corvin takes the other one.

I don't see most of the fight—just glimpses between the trees. The blur of red muscle moving with control, the snap of his wings creating sudden shifts in the light, his claws finding purchase in the Stained's body. He's controlled.

Not the rut's mindless frenzy, but something worse: deliberate force. He knows exactly how much strength it takes to kill something this size. He knows where the vulnerabilities are.

When I turn around, he's standing over the body. His chest heaving. His wings spread wide, catching the light, the membrane scarlet with blood.

His hands are covered—not with his own blood, but the Stained's, dark and thick and wrong. The shape of him obvious through the loincloth.

He looks at me across the small clearing. The dead between us. My blade wet.

My breathing hard, my heart hammering in my chest like something trapped, my blood singing the way it always does after a fight—the high of surviving something that tried to kill me, the electricity that lives in the gap between almost died and didn't.