Page 98 of Dead Drop

It feels like what the words "come down" should mean. The landing after the fall. Safety built into how he holds me.

I wake one night to find him awake. His hand on my belly. His head tilted back, the crown horns dark against the canopy light filtering through the aerie wall, the starlight catching on the curve of the keratin.

He's listening. His whole body is oriented toward something I can't hear yet—his senses running deeper than mine, catching sounds human ears can't reach. The baby's heartbeat, maybe. The pull of its existence already forming the bonds that will hold him in this territory, in this nest, in this version of himself.

"What do you hear?" I ask.

He doesn't answer. Not with words. His hand presses fractionally firmer against the curve.

His tail draws tight around my hip. His cock stirs—not the arousal of wanting, but recognition. Something vital responding to something vital. The knowledge of bloodline running through veins.

I put my hand over his. My fingers small across the bridge of his knuckles, the claws curving above my wrist like the safety rail of something I could hold onto if I fell. His tail wraps my wrist over his hand, holds both.

My hand on his hand on our child. Three of us in the dark, listening to the canopy settle around us.

"She's real," he says. His voice low, the words careful. "I can hear her. She's real."

The certainty in his voice unmakes me a little. I've known for six weeks. My body has been telling me for six weeks.

But hearing him say it—knowing that he knows it too, that he's been lying awake feeling the proof of her existence—something in my chest opens up.

"How long?" I ask.

"Always," he says. "The moment your blood changed. I've known since the moment your blood changed."

I press my forehead back against his chin. The bone smooth under my skin. The faint ridge of scar tissue from something that happened before I knew him.

I breathe. His arms shift, gentling around me, cradling the curve of belly, of me, of the girl growing inside me. Like the most precious territory he'll ever hold. Like the thing that matters more than the territory itself.

One evening I try something different.

He's sitting on the low stone near the fire—the flat rock he shaped into a seat weeks ago, the only surface in the aerie that puts him at something approaching accessible height. His legsapart. His loincloth loose. His tail doing the idle sweep that means he's calm, settled, content.

I drop to my knees in front of him.

His whole body goes still. The tail freezes mid-sweep. His amber eyes lock onto my face with the focused intensity of something recalculating everything it thought it understood about this moment.

"Ada—"

I untie the loincloth. His cock is soft—the prehensile muscle doing its resting flex, him warm and heavy in my hands. My own braid falls forward over my shoulder, brushing his thigh. He catches it. Holds it. Wraps it once around his fist, not pulling—just holding, like he's anchoring himself.

I take him into my mouth.

He makes a low sound. Barely there. A vibration in his chest that I feel through my palms on his thighs. His cock stirs against my tongue—the prehensile tip flexing, thickening, responding to the heat and the wet and the deliberate pressure of my lips.

The scale of it is impossible, as always. My jaw aches within seconds. But I've spent four months learning what this body can do, learning the geography of him, the places that make his breathing change.

I take him deeper. My hands brace on his thighs, the crimson muscle warm and solid under my palms. His cock hardens in my mouth, pressing past my gag reflex, the taste of pre-cum salty and sweet.

His hands come to my head. Gentle, despite what his body is doing. His fingers thread through my hair—my shorter hair now, thick but practical—and he holds. Not forcing. Waiting.

I set the pace. Ruthless. Taking him deep, pulling back, taking him again. My head bobbing in the rhythm that makes his breathing go shallow, his tail wrap tight around my waist.

I smile around him. The fighter's smile. The one that says I know exactly what you want and I'm going to make you wait.

The rut-brain isn't here. The post-rut male is. The male who can feel and think at the same time, who can watch his pregnant mate on her knees with her mouth on his cock and understand what she's giving him. The amber eyes aren't black with need. They're wide. Almost bewildered.

The sound he makes when I increase the pace—low, vibrating through the aerie, shaking the furs—is a creature losing the last threads of something it didn't know it was holding.