Page 23 of Dark Mate

The furs are cool where my body has gone still and warm everywhere he touches me. A draft comes from somewhere above, carrying wet leaves, damp earth, the deep smell of bark that’s held the rain longer than I’ve been alive. None of it has a name I was given. The Cage didn’t stock these smells.

His body is behind me. Curved around mine the way the walls curve, like I’m something the place was dug out to hold. His arm crosses my ribs. His chest rises and falls, and I’ve been breathing to it without deciding to.

He’s still inside me.

My heart slams once, hard enough to hurt, and the breath I reach for snags high in my chest and won’t come all the way down. I’m full of him—still, even now, even soft—and the stretch of it is the loudest thing my body knows.

The knot holds, smaller than it was, but the seal is there, a fullness locking him in me, a low murmur running constant against the place that aches. I’ve been coming in my sleep. I know it from the aftershocks still moving through my thighs, small and helpless, nothing I chose.

I can move my arms. The nectar that stole my muscles has worn off, or his bites burned through it, or both. I make fists and release them. Everything aches with the thorough soreness of a body used past what it knew it could hold.

I reach out. Furs, then the cool curve of polished wood—the wall, smoothed by claws that worked it in the dark. I follow it up as far as my arm goes and it doesn’t end. The nest is carved deep into the wood, not built up. I’m inside the body of the tree itself.

Yesterday I woke in a bed with my name on the cup. Light crossing the floor, the fountain running, Mora’s tray at the door—the whole ordered world of thirteen years, the only one I have. It’s gone. Every pale soft wall of it, gone, and in its place there’s this: black earth, his body curled around mine, the deep ache of what was done to me while I slept with no say in any of it. The size of what I’ve lost won’t fit inside my chest. It presses there, too big, with nowhere to go. I want to cry and I can’t even find the way to it. The dark took that too.

I can’t find the way out. I don’t know which way is up.

The panic comes quiet, not screaming, a fist closing in my chest, the air thinning, the dark pressing in from everywhere at once. The Cage had windows. The Cage had light that crossed the floor and told me what hour it was. This dark has no walls I can see. I could be anywhere. I could be?—

And for half a breath I am eight years old, under a table, holding my own knees in a different dark while the whole house shakes and my mother’s voice says a word I can’t keep. The smell of a candle just blown out. Her hand finding my ankle.

Then it’s gone, whatever it was. The drug buried it years ago. The dark just turned it up for a second, then let it slip—the way a fish breaks the surface and is gone before you’re sure you saw it.

His tail tightens on my thigh.

Once. Twice. A pulse that saysherein a language my body reads before my mind agrees. The tip strokes up the curve ofmy waist—not seeking, steadying, the way you’d lay a hand on a startled animal.

I am not a startled animal. I am a woman stolen from the only home she remembers by a thing she has never seen.

My breathing steadies anyway. I hate that, too.

“What are you?” My voice comes out cracked, barely a voice at all—the first thing I’ve said out loud since the wall came down. I don’t expect an answer. I don’t get one. Just his breath stirring my hair, and the low murmur where his body’s locked into mine.

“Okay,” I tell the dark, because somebody has to say something and there’s only me. “Okay.”

The surge takes him without warning.

One moment his breath is deep and slow against my back. The next it shortens, catches at the top, and a wire pulls taut through his whole body from skull to spine. The shaft that was a warm constant inside me goes to iron in the time it takes my breath to catch. The fullness doubles. And then it moves on its own, the prehensile length of him flexing and curling inside me, the head seeking up my front wall, pressing and dragging, restless with the surge climbing through him. A growl rolls up out of his chest. “Grrrnn.”

His hands find my hips and flip me—one motion, my cheek in the pelts, my knees sliding apart. His weight settles over me. Not all of it; all of it would break me. Enough that I feel the mass of him along the whole length of my back, his breath harsh at the crown of my head.

He drives deep. Hard, the feral switch making him relentless, no fumbling, no searching. The first thrust shoves me into the furs. The second drags me back by the hips, my body weighing nothing in his hands. The third hits a place so deep that white bursts behind my eyes in all that black.

The drives punch the air clean out of me. It hurts, real pain, the burn of being opened too far, too fast, no breath left to braceagainst it. The pain and the size and the dark fold into one single fact, and there’s no part of me it isn’t happening to.

The scream rips out of me into the furs. “Aah! Aahh!”

He doesn’t stop. The rhythm finds itself, and the nest fills with the wet, obscene sound of it, the wood walls throwing it back at me until I’m buried inside the noise of my own body opening for him. My pussy clenches without my say and the grip pulls a groan out of his chest. “Hrrgh.” It rolls through his ribs and into my spine. I feel it in my teeth.

He shifts the angle a fraction and the next thrust hits higher and I make a sound my vocal cords were never taught. “Ahhn!” He finds that spot and goes back to it, again, again, with the single-mindedness of something that has located what it wants.

My heart’s going so fast it blurs into one long note. Every nerve I own fires at once, and not one of them answers to me anymore.

“Please—I can’t—it’s?—”

A grunt forces through his teeth. “Hnngh.” The sound of pure taking.

The knot pushes in, wider than before, and my entrance stretches around a ring of fire that whites out everything for one blind second. The seal closes. He’s buried to the root, locked, the murmur surging straight into my skull. Then the knot kicks into its hum, a deep buzz pressed hard where I’m most undone, no mercy in it at all.