Page 95 of Dead Drop

"That wasn't the venom," he says finally. "That was recognition. I read about you before I ever met you. I read about the decisions you made. The way you moved. The soldiers you trained. The walls you held.

And I thought: that woman. That one. I would want that one."

I can't speak. The firelight makes his face seem carved from shadow. He looks like exactly what he is—something that shouldn't exist, holding out words like offerings.

"The rut didn't make me want you," he says. "The rut made me unable to wait. It erased my patience for the approach. It made it impossible not to claim you the moment you were in reach.

But the wanting—that was already there. Built into me like the horns. Like the wings. Like the mutation itself."

He pauses. The fire settles, sending a wave of heat across the space between us.

"You want to know if you've been remade for this," he continues. His voice is lower now, rough with the effort ofexplanation. "You want to know if your wanting is real. I can't answer that.

I don't have access to your neurology. I can't tell you where the venom ends and you begin. But I can tell you this: the rut made you more accessible to me. The venom made you addicted to me.

But neither of those things created the fact that you're the most dangerous tactical mind in the wasteland. Neither of those things created the fact that you survived outside the walls for four years. Neither of those things created the fact that you looked at me—this creature, this monster—and decided to stay, every single day, even when staying cost you."

He shifts. His wings unfold slightly, then settle again against his back.

"That cuts both ways," he says. "I learned to move slowly inside you because you taught me that speed was violence and you don't deserve violence. I learned to listen to your recommendations about territory and patrol because you're smarter than I am about supply routes.

I learned to want your intelligence the way I want to breathe.

That's the same thing. That's me being adjusted by you. That's me choosing to be adjusted."

My hands are on my belly. The curve warm under my palms.

Inside, the thing we made—the thing made inside captivity, inside the knot and the venom and the three weeks of his body locked into mine. Not chosen. Not asked for. Here.

And also—growing inside me of my own blood, my own body, my own choice to keep it.

"And me?" I say. "How do I know what's mine? That I'm not just a very sophisticated manufactured response, adjusted to give you exactly what you needed?"

He looks at me with something I'm only now learning to read. Patience with weight behind it. The patience of someonewho already knows the answer but understands that I need to arrive at it myself. That arriving at it is the only thing that matters.

"You jumped off a building to avoid being taken," he says. "The venom didn't make you stay. You stayed."

I don't argue. I don't agree. I sit across from the creature who caught me, the fire between us doing what fires do—giving light, giving warmth, making the dark around it darker by comparison. Making the dark outside it complete.

"You could have jumped again," he says. "Every day you could have. The ledge is always there. The venom doesn't stop you from moving. It doesn't lock your body in place.

You choose."

The doubt is real. It sits in me like a stone. There's no protocol for this—no way to know whether the warmth I feel when his tail wraps my calf is love or addiction or the bond his venom welded into me twenty-two days into captivity.

I may never know. The venom doesn't come with a before-and-after blood test. There's no clean line between what was forced and what grew.

But he's right about the ledge.

The staying is also real. Every morning I wake against his chest. Every morning the ledge is there, the open air below it, the promise of an end that doesn't involve carrying a hybrid child into the wasteland.

Every morning I turn away from it. Not because the venom tells me to—the venom doesn't care which direction I face. It would drive him mad if I jumped, would make him chase my body through the canopy, would break something in him.

But he's right. It doesn't care which way I face.

I turn away because the male behind me is someone I choose to face. Because the territory we're building together issomething I choose to build. Because the child I'm carrying is someone I choose to carry. Because his hands on me are careful.

Because he listens. Because he reaches for my intelligence the way other males reach for compliance, and I've never been compliant, and he loves the part of me that won't bend.