Page 88 of Dead Drop

His cock is hard. I can see it through the loincloth, straining against the leather, seeking. His tail is rigid behind him, the territorial tension running through his body like current.

His jaw is tight. His breathing is raw.

He wants me. Not the rut. Not the venom.

Because he watched me fight, and whatever lives inside him that decided her when he read my name on an Ordained list is very awake, very alive.

I cross the clearing to him.

I don't make him ask. My hand goes flat on his chest, over his heartbeat. The muscle underneath is hot, slick with sweat and Stained blood.

I push. He lets me push him back against a tree—lets me, because nothing my hands do could actually move him. The tree creaks. He doesn't.

I unbuckle the loincloth myself. His cock springs free, curving toward me, thick, flushed dark as wine, the head swollen and gleaming with pre-come. I wrap my hand around him.

He makes a sound I haven't heard before—not the rut's guttural drives, not the lull's low groans. Something raw. Surprised. His actual voice underneath all the mutation.

His tail wraps my thigh. Tight. The tip finds the inside of my knee and holds.

I stroke him once. Slowly. Watching his face while my hand moves over him.

His amber eyes are wide, the pupils blown so large they swallow the gold, the brow ridge creased in a way that looks almost like pain but isn't. His breathing gets faster. The muscles in his neck cord tight.

He's looking at me like he's seeing something he'd accounted for but never confirmed. Like I'm a piece of tactical information that just resolved.

"Keep going," he says. His voice is wrong—lower, rough, the kind of rough that comes from the creature inside him pushing at the surface.

I stroke him again. This time his hips jerk forward into my hand, short and hard. His tail tightens on my thigh.

A third stroke and he makes a sound that's almost a growl, his head dropping back against the tree bark.

"Let me," I say.

He drops his hand. Lets me work.

I turn around. Brace my hands against the tree. Look at him over my shoulder.

"Come on," he says. Not a question.

He fucks me from behind in the clearing, surrounded by the dead, with the fight still running hot through both of us. Standing, the way we always do, my small body dwarfed by the curve of him. His wings flare to full span—blocking out the light, blocking out the world.

His tail finds my clit unerringly, the firm circling pressure that undoes me every time, the tip deft and deliberate in a waythat speaks to intent. His hands grip my hips so hard the marks bloom instantly, dark as thunderclouds.

I want them to last a week. I want to carry the evidence of this moment written on my skin.

The sensation of him inside me from behind hits different—deeper, the angle pressing forward against the wall of me that makes my vision go white. I come fast, gripping the bark with both hands, my back arced hard against his chest, my walls clenching around him in waves. My voice comes out raw: his name, not his title, not the Apex.

"Corvin."

He groans. The sound is animal, territorial, the vocalization of something claiming. His cock drives deeper, holds, and I feel him come inside me—the heat, the thick pulse of it flooding me slow and intense.

His mouth finds the crown of my head and holds there, his breathing harsh against my hair, his cock still flexing inside me as the last pulses work through him.

"Good," he says. Low. The word from the rut, but it's different now.

It doesn't mean compliance. It means recognition.

We walk back. He doesn't carry me this time. We walk side by side through the territory, and it matters that we're walking.