Page 94 of Dead Drop

"The worst part," I say quietly, "is that it doesn't matter now. The venom is in me. The wanting is in me. You're in me."

There's no clean separation between what's me and what's the rut. No before-and-after moment where I can point and say, 'That's the venom talking' and 'That's me.'

"I may have been marked in a way that makes it impossible to ever unmark. And I'm choosing to stay anyway. Which means either I'm in love with you, or I'm a good soldier following the only map available to me."

I look up at him. His face is still. His eyes are fixed on the fire.

"Do you understand what I'm asking?" I continue. "I'm asking whether I'm capable of wanting something for its own sake anymore, or whether every want in me is filtered through the venom."

I breathe. "I'm asking whether the child I'm carrying is a child I chose or a child my body chose for me."

"I'm asking whether the way I come on your cock is genuine pleasure or a learned trick—your body tuned perfectly to mine, because you've spent weeks learning exactly what pressure, what angle, what rhythm makes me respond."

The wind moves through the canopy above us, stronger now, carrying branches rubbing against each other—friction, movement, the small violence of trees learning to exist around each other.

"I spent four years commanding a wall," I say. "Four years making decisions. Tactical decisions. Life and death decisions.

I was confident in those decisions because I could separate the data from the emotion. I could see the shape of the problem and solve it. Now I can't see anything clearly. Now every decision is compromised.

Now I don't know if I'm here because I want to be here or because my body has decided it wants to be here, and my brain is just the interpreter writing meaning over top of what are really just the rut pulling through me."

I stop, breathing harder than the words require.

"So my question stands," I say. "How do you know I'm not just reshaped for this? That I'm not a perfect fit because I've been sanded down into the shape that fits you?"

I wait. "That I'm not a soldier who learned to call a cage a home because that's what survival required?"

Silence. The kind that has weight. The kind that sits between us like a third person, listening.

"It's real," he says finally.

"How do you know?"

He takes a long time. I watch him reach for the words—the male inside the monster, the officer inside the creature, working to build a sentence precise enough for what he means.

His tail tightens fractionally on my calf. His jaw shifts. The firelight catches the ridges of his horns—and the dark red hair that cascades past his shoulders, the thick waves catching the firelight like banked coals. His features carved from the glow of the fire.

"Because I chose you before the rut." His voice is low. Steady. The full sentences still cost him something—I can hear the effort, the way each word is pulled from a place the mutation tried to bury.

"Before the venom. Before the instinct. Before any of it."

He pauses. The fire crackles.

"I read a name on a list," he continues. "A name the Ordained were tracking. A woman who survived outside the walls for four years. Who trained an entire gate watch. Who fought our extraction teams to a standstill.

Over and over, the same woman, the same name, appearing in reports. Ada. Not a rank. Not a title. A woman with a name."

His eyes come to me now.

"I thought: her."

The word lands in my chest like a stone dropped from a great height. Not gently. Not softly.

Her. Before the aerie. Before the rut. Before my blood changed and my body became a receiver for his venom and my whole self rewired itself around the pressure of him.

He leans back slightly, his massive frame settling. His tail uncurls from my calf, shifts position.

He's thinking. Reaching for words that don't exist yet in the mutation's language.