Page 39 of Dark Mate

Full voice. Everything I’ve got. Because the storm’s so loud it swallows the sound before it can even leave the wings, and for the first time since I was a child I don’t have to be quiet. The Cage made quiet a virtue. Quiet was the tea and the soft voiceand the serene face they kept smooth. Down here, inside the storm, inside him, I am as loud as the thing tearing me open, and nobody is going to come and smooth me down for it. The sound rips up out of the bottom of me and the thunder takes it and nobody will ever know but him.

His cum jets into me, sealed, the knot locking us, his roar going up into the storm where it belongs. “RRRAAAH!” And then the knot comes alive against me, relentless, and the first peak rolls into a second, a third, my body coming apart around the fullness while he pumps me full, each wave breaking before the last one’s done, until I lose count somewhere in the thunder.

The storm isn’t done with us, though.

It comes back harder, a second wall of it slamming down on the canopy, and somewhere close a branch goes with a crack like the world splitting, the crash rolling through the wood and throwing me against his chest. His arms lock. His wings seal tight, doubled over me. And the sound that rolls out of him then isn’t the hum and isn’t the rut, it’s lower, all teeth, the sound of a thing that has already decided what it would spend itself on.

I feel the size of him the way the lulls never make me feel it. He’s wrapped around me the way the wood wraps the nest—total, structural. If the canopy came down on us right now, the first thing it would hit is his wings. Then his back. Then the folded bulk of him, curled over me like a fist around a coin.

And the fear that comes isn’t for me.

That’s the thing that stops my breath—more than the branch, more than the storm. The branch didn’t hit us; the nest’s too deep, he saw to that months before he had me to put in it. But the thought arrives anyway, cold and sudden and entirely my own:what if it had? What if something came through, and he was the thing between it and me?

My hands fist against his chest. Hard. And I don’t have a word for what I’m feeling, because the Cage never once let mehave anything I’d be afraid to lose, that’s how a place like that holds you, hollowing you out so gently you never notice there’s nothing left worth keeping.

There’s something worth keeping now. He’s curled all the way around it, holding the storm off it with his own body, and the having and the fear arrived in me in the very same breath.

After, we lie in the cocoon and listen to the weather wear itself out.

I think about my yellow kitchen. Then I think about him, the snapped horn, the cut throat, whatever place did that to him—and the question that’s been sitting in me since the lull finally works its way loose.

“Were you something? Before?”

The storm fills the space where his answer should go. A long time. Long enough that I figure it’s not coming—that the words aren’t in him, or the wanting isn’t.

Then his hand comes up out of the dark and finds my face. His thumb traces my jaw, slow, one side to the other, reading me the way I’ve been reading him. And from somewhere deep, dragged up rough and broken through a throat that’s barely shaped a word in days, he says it.

“Words.”

Just that. One word, and I feel what it costs him—the effort moving through his whole chest to push it out.

I don’t understand it. Not yet.Words.What does that even mean—words? But I hold it the way I held the yellow curtains. Careful. Because I can tell it’s a piece of him he’s never handed to anyone, and someday I’ll know what shape it is.

“Okay,” I whisper. I press my mouth to his jaw, where the bone goes hard under the skin. “Words. I’ve got it. I’ll keep it till you can tell me the rest.”

The hum comes back. It wraps around us both, low and warm and chosen, and the storm moves off east, and I go under withone hand still caught in his tail and a yellow kitchen lit up behind my eyes.

20

ELLIE

I’ve stopped counting in hours. There aren’t any down here.

I count in cycles now—peak, lull, peak, lull, the tide of him going out and coming back. Somewhere in the second turn of it the last of the agitation burned off, the itch that lived under the muscle, the withdrawal finally done.

What’s left is clean. The venom, warm and gold. His body. The dark. Me. That’s the whole world, and I’ve stopped pretending I want out of it.

There’s a hunger in me now that doesn’t quit. It lives where the tea used to keep everything quiet—a coal in the middle of my chest that won’t dim. It puts my hands on him in the lulls, makes my fingers grip his ribs and hold on. It putsmorein my mouth when his hips slow,againwhen the vibration fades.

The Cage girl would’ve waited to be told she was allowed to want a thing. This one doesn’t wait for anything. Most hours now, she’s the one running my body, and I’ve stopped fighting her for the wheel.

The lull goes long this time. The knot eases—not enough to let him go, the seal still holds, but the hard fullness loosens, softens. He’s still in me. He’s been in me since the night the wallcame open, and I’ve gotten so used to the fact of him that the absence of it would feel like a missing limb.

And it hits me that I’ve never once faced him.

Not that I’d see anything if I did—the dark’s the dark. But the whole time, I’ve been against his chest, his front to my back, his arms around me from behind. Held, and turned away. Like there’s still a wall between us, just a warmer one now.

I want to turn around.