Page 97 of Dead Drop

I stay like that—cradled against him, surrounded by his wings, held in the small pocket of heat he creates just by existing. My hand on his chest, feeling the rise and fall of it. His hand on my back, the claws tucked safe.

His tail wrapped around my thigh. The two of us, sealed in the dark, choosing this again and again, one breath at a time.

The fire is out. The wasteland is quiet. Somewhere in the canopy, the nightbird sings a sound like a knife drawn slow, and then nothing but wind and the patient water below.

We sleep like that. Folded into each other. Doubt, choice, venom, staying—all wrapped together in the dark.

Making something that looks like shelter. Making something that looks like home. Making something that might, against all probability, be true.

39

ADA

Six weeks since the rut took hold. The pregnancy is visible now.

Not large. A low firm curve beneath the jacket, noticeable only if you know to look. I know to look.

I spend a full minute each morning standing at the aerie edge, the early light falling across my body, my hand on the new geography of my abdomen. Tracking the changes with the same attention I give to territory. The skin is still mine, but the contours belong to something else. Something growing inside. Something his.

The nausea hits at dawn. Every morning, reliable as the sun, it starts in the back of my throat—a thick, oily sensation like I've swallowed something rotten. The roll hits my stomach in waves, a tightening, a surge.

I lean over the aerie edge and breathe through it, my hand braced on the bark rail, my body locked in that posture of endurance. Not vomiting. The wave crests and drops back, leaving my mouth tasting like copper and my skin filmed with cold sweat. Forty minutes, always forty minutes, and then it passes. The combatant in me needs to count even the thingsshe can't control. Counting is how I maintain order over the uncontrollable.

The fatigue is different. It doesn't announce itself. I'll be fine—running a weapons inventory, planning the perimeter check—and then something in me just stops.

Not gradual. A wall. My legs go heavy, the kind of heavy that makes sitting down mandatory, and I'll find myself on the furs while Corvin brings me food, watching with the focused attention he usually reserves for tracking Stained movement. It's the exhaustion of a body diverting itself to a project I didn't commission, every system running secondary to the singular purpose of growing what's inside me. My bones feel thin with the effort of it.

But my muscles are stronger than they've been in months. My lungs are deeper, my wind better. The scars on my knuckles have faded to silver.

My hair is thicker, the dry ends gone smooth. The venom is changing me at my center, reshaping what I am to serve this purpose, making me healthier than I've been since before the asteroid. It didn't just make me want him—it started rebuilding me. Making me into something stronger, something that can hold what he put inside me.

The white lines on my tan skin—the scars that mapped my years on the wall, the ones his cum used to heal in the moments after the rut's peak—are almost gone now. The thin white marks that I could trace on my shoulders, my arms, the place where a Stained's claw caught me during the first attack. They're fading like they were written in disappearing ink, like the venom is slowly erasing the record of my survival, writing over the damage with new skin that's smooth and unmarked.

The irony isn't subtle.

My center of gravity has shifted. Not much—maybe half an inch forward. Enough that the draw of a blade changes the line of it.

Enough that a controlled pivot becomes something different. The weight distribution is off. The muscle memory I've spent thirteen years building doesn't work anymore because the frame it was built on is no longer the frame I inhabit.

I spend an hour each morning retraining. The aerie edge, the early light, the cool air before the heat settles. I pull the blade from the sheath a hundred times, working the draw until it's clean again.

I practice the slash patterns—diagonal, horizontal, the upward thrust—and my arm feels wrong. The weight sits forward now. The balance point has shifted an inch, maybe less. I adjust. The third series flows better. The fourth series becomes something new: faster, tighter, sharper decisions with less margin for error. Not the same knife-work. Something different. Something better. The pregnancy strips away redundant movement. It teaches efficiency through constraint.

I've always adapted. The wall, the wasteland, the rut, the withdrawal. My body finds the new balance the way it's found every other one: through repetition, through discipline, through the refusal to let any transformation make me less capable.

The pregnancy is just another form of remaking. I'll master it the way I've mastered everything else.

Corvin watches these morning drills from across the aerie, his tail doing its idle movement, and he doesn't say anything. He's learned that I need to do this on my own. But his eyes track every movement, and when I'm done, something in his stance shifts.

A settling. The recognition that I'm still myself, still capable, still the thing he chose.

His response to the pregnancy is physical and constant. His hands find the curve of my belly without thinking. At the fire, while I'm eating the fruit he brought in.

During meals, his palm drifting to rest against the low swell while he's making a point about the northern perimeter, as if the weight of what's growing there anchors his thoughts, keeps him centered. His fingers splay across the firmness, and I can see the slight tremor in them—not fear. Awe. The physical manifestation of certainty running through him like current.

His tail curls around my waist lower now, cradling the curve when we walk through the canopy passages. The prehensile tip rests against the bump with the same sureness he uses to kill. When I sleep, he wraps himself around me from behind—the massive body making a fortress of warmth, his palm flat on my abdomen, his cock pressed against my lower back in the slow idle flex that means he's calm.

The restlessness that lived in him during the rut, that constant coiled tension of something waiting for the next peak, has settled into something quieter. His breathing shifts to match mine. His heartbeat steadies against my back. His cock stays soft, present, protective.