Page 31 of Dark Mate

Something moves in the wood over my head.

Small claws finding the wood, a soft scrabble, a pause, then it carries on its way. It’s got somewhere to be. It isn’t interested in me.

The canopy’s full of things that haven’t been managed, Mora used to say.Things that’ll hurt you.

She wasn’t lying, exactly. She was just half-right. She never said most of the things out here would be small and busy and headed somewhere with no thought to spare for me. She made it sound like one big mouth waiting in the dark. It’s not. It’s a thousand little lives running their own errands, and almost none of them know I exist.

I lie there in the warm and listen to a beetle, or whatever it is, click its way off through the wall, and I feel something I don’t have a word for yet. Something like being let in on a secret. The world’s so much bigger than the version they sold me, and the bigness isn’t a threat. It’s just true.

In the lull I put my hands on my own face.

I do it the way I’ve been doing him—slow, learning. My forehead. My eyebrows, thinner than I remember; the Cage kept them neat. My cheekbones. My jaw, clenched tight. My mouth, swollen, sore from days of sounds I never made before.

Who is this.

The girl in the Cage had a face she saw in the mirror every morning. Pale, soft, arranged into something Mora calledserene.The grooming kept it smooth. The tea kept it calm. The mirror handed back exactly what they put in.

I don’t have a mirror down here. I’ve got my fingers and a face I can’t see, and it doesn’t feel serene. The jaw’s locked. The skin around my eyes is tight. This isn’t the face they built.

So who’s wearing it.

“They drugged me,” I say.

Out loud. To him. Notpleaseormore—the words his body’s been pulling out of me. A whole sentence, handed to the dark on purpose.

“Every morning. In a cup with my name on the bottom.” My voice is shaking and it isn’t from the venom. “Mora’s hands. Her little smile. I thought the cup meant I mattered. It was a dose.Thirteen years of doses, and I drank every one, and I thanked her.”

His arm goes tight across my ribs. The hum drops—down into something lower and darker, not soft now. And I feel it land in him, the way my words don’t surprise him at all. The way his body’s already braced around the thing I just figured out.

“You knew.” It’s not a question. “You could smell it on me. You took me with it still in my blood and you knew exactly what it was.”

A sound rolls up out of his chest. Low. Rough. It isn’tsorryand it isn’t a promise. It’s justyes.He knew. He took me anyway, and he’s not going to pretend he didn’t.

His hand slides up my chest and covers my throat. Not a grip, a cover, his palm spread warm over the pulse there, over the exact place they poured it into me morning after morning. A growl moves under his hand. Low. Aimed past me, out at the dark, at something he’d open from throat to belly if it ever came down here.

I should be angrier at him for that. I will be, probably. But the anger that’s actually rising in me isn’t pointed at the thing in the dark that took me.

It’s pointed back the way I came.

The coal in my chest catches and goes from an ember to a real heat. Mora’s warm hands and her labeled cup. Cassian’s steady voice telling thirty-seven of us that our bodies fight what our souls already know. All those women in their soft clothes, smiling, congratulating me for being next, every one of them dosed, every one of them holding still inside a quiet somebody poured into them.

The coal turns into a fire I could warm my hands at.

I don’t know what to do with it yet. The Cage never taught me anger; the tea dissolved it before it could stand up. But it’s standing up now. It’s mine. It’s the first thing I’ve been sure wasmine since Neve put a little ceramic knife in my hand and told me I should have one thing that nobody assigned me.

“Okay,” I whisper. To myself. To the fire. “Okay.”

Behind me, his chest moves. A word drops out of him, rough as gravel. “Good.”

Not the Cage’sgood.Notgood girl, sit still, drink it down.Something else—like the anger is the first thing about me he’s ever wanted me to keep.

His hips shift behind me. He’s hardening again, the rut climbing back up, his tail already moving to my clit.

When he takes me this time, I meet him. I push back into it. My hands fist in the furs and the sounds I make aren’t the pretty, grateful ones the Cage taught me to make. They’re raw, and they’re loud, and they’re mine.

15

ELLIE