Page 99 of Dead Drop

His cock hardens all the way. The knot swells against my lips, too large to take. I work him with my mouth, my hands on the knot, squeezing in the rhythm his body taught me during the rut.

He comes. The heat floods my mouth in thick pulses, the cum salty, loaded with the venom that tingles against my throat. My body responds—nipples tight, clit pulsing, walls clenching on nothing.

I swallow. Every drop.

He pulls me up while his cock is still twitching, still pulsing. His mouth finds mine. He tastes himself on my lips and the growl that comes from his chest shakes through my teeth.

"Where," he says against my mouth, "did you learn that."

"Improvised." I wipe my chin. My voice is rough. "Tactical creativity."

His tail tightens around my waist. His hands find my belly, cupping the curve, his thumbs gentle on the stretched skin.

The look on his face is the look of someone who has been thoroughly undone and is trying to reassemble the pieces. He's not succeeding. I don't help him.

The addiction is still there. It will always be there. The withdrawal never fully resolved—it narrowed to a manageable ache that spikes when he's gone too long and settles the instant his skin touches mine.

His venom carved pathways through my nervous system, rewired my body to want him specifically. His scent carved new routes through my brain, routes that only he can trigger. The permanent rewiring of my desire, the pathways it burned into my body, the channel it tuned me to receive. I stopped pretending it's only the venom. The venom made the connection. What's running through it is mine.

The craving is different now. It's not the raw need that drove me during the rut withdrawal. It's sharper.

More dangerous. I want his hands on me in the early morning when the nausea fades. I want his mouth at the base of my neck, his scent filling my lungs, his cock hard against me even though we're not fucking—just pressed together like we're the only solid things in a world that keeps trying to shake us apart.

I want him here. Specifically him. Not the venom's pull, but the deeper choice underneath it. The thing that would remain even if the addiction burned away.

He washes me one afternoon. The heat has settled heavy over the canopy, and the nausea is worse in the warmth. He brings the gourd of stream water, cool from the stone bowl he keeps it in, and he wets the cloth and runs it over my belly, my shoulders, the back of my neck.

The coolness is immediate relief. His hands are gentle—those massive, clawed hands that kill Stained without hesitation, washing me like I'm something that might break.

"Easy," I say, because I need to say something, because his gentleness is harder to take than his violence.

"I know," he says. His mouth finds the curve where my shoulder meets my neck. "I know, Ada."

His thumb traces across my shoulder—tan skin browned in some places, freckled in others from the months in the aerie where the sunlight finds gaps in the canopy walls. The smalltouches of his thumb make a deliberate path. Not mapping. Just touching. Just the fact of me being here, marked by sun and work, marked by him. The freckles catch beneath his thumb and his eyes move to track them. The small details that make this skin mine and not someone else's.

He washes the nausea-salt from my skin. He brings me fruit. He sits with his back against the aerie wall, me between his legs, my spine against his chest.

His chin on my head. Palm flat on the curve. We don't talk. The canopy sounds flow around us—the click and call of the mid-day birds, the wind through the upper leaves, the stream rushing far below. His heartbeat is steady against my back. His cock warm and soft between me and his thigh. His tail wrapped loosely around my ankle, the tip brushing the inside of my wrist.

This is what the addiction means now. Not the burn of wanting. The ache of belonging.

The morning comes in shades of gold and green through the canopy gaps. The light hits the east wall of the aerie first, painting the bark in amber, then spreads west as the sun moves. The nausea arrives on schedule, and I'm awake before it hits, aware of the body's rhythm, the countdown.

Corvin is already awake. His tail holds my waist from behind, an anchor, and I lean over the aerie edge and breathe through it, the cool morning air against my face, his presence at my back like the whole world has learned to hold me steady.

Forty minutes.

The wave crests. The wave passes. The emptiness fades.

I wash my face in the gourd of stream water he left by the furs—always there, always fresh, always at the exact temperature that soothes. I eat the fruit he set out before dawn—the sweet canopy variety, the one that settles my stomach better than the meat. He noticed before I did. He's noticed everything. The way the nausea is worse on humid mornings. The way the fatigue hitshardest in mid-afternoon. The way I need his hand on my belly to sleep.

This is who he is now. Not the Apex. Not the mutation.

The male who learns the gravity of his mate and holds her there.

Today I'll run the southern perimeter. Check the new markers he set on the eastern ridge. Take the climbing hooks through the upper canopy where the Stained scouts have been moving, and determine whether the pattern I've been tracking holds.

The territory is still unsafe. The Ordained are still moving closer. The work doesn't stop because I'm pregnant.