Page 41 of Dark Mate

I don’t know everything it carries. I know what it isn’t. It isn’tcaptive.It isn’tprize.It isn’t one of the words the Cage would’ve used for a woman handed over to a divine instrument in a white dress.Mate.Like I’m half of a thing. Like he’s the other half, and he’s telling me, with the one word he can get out, that he knows it.

I should be more scared of how much I want that to be true.

“Yeah,” I whisper into his chest. “Okay. Mate.”

The hum rises up around the both of us, and I hold onto the word in the dark the same way I’m holding onto him—with everything I’ve got.

21

ELLIE

It’s a lull when he lifts his head, and I feel him decide something.

His body goes alert under me in the way I’ve learned to read, the still, listening kind, the kind that means he’s checking the dark for things that don’t belong in it. Then the wings that have been folded around us this whole time start to open.

“Wait—” I say. I’m not sure why. They’ve never opened with me awake, and something in me braces.

The wings open and the light comes in like a blade.

Green-gold, pouring down through the canopy, and after all this dark it’s a physical blow. I throw my arm over my face. Red blooms behind my lids. It hurts, the way a sound too loud hurts, my eyes blown wide from days of black and nothing to do now but scream at all that brightness.

But I want to see.

I lower my arm a crack. Squint through the burn and the water streaming out of my eyes. And the world comes in around the edges, in pieces: green, so much green, more shades of it than I’ve got names for, leaves stacked on leaves stacked on leaves going up forever, gold light cutting through the gaps insolid-looking shafts I could almost put my hand through. It’s more color than I’ve seen in my whole life, all at once. The Cage’s light was flat and filtered and the same every hour they let me have it. This is alive. It moves. It pours.

And then there’s him.

He comes together in pieces while my eyes fight to work. Near-black skin, gone darker where the sweat sits, laced all over with pale old scars, the scars I know, every one, by touch, and seeing them is like hearing a song I’ve had in my hands the whole time finally played out loud. The horns. One sweeps back smooth. The other breaks halfway up and juts forward wrong, and the breath goes out of me, because I know that break. I held it in the dark and called it cruel. There it is, in the light, exactly the shape my fingers said.

His chest is a wall over me, broader than my arms could ever span, the slabs of muscle shifting under the skin as he holds himself up off the furs. The scars catch the light one at a time as he breathes: a long pale furrow down his ribs, a cluster of old punctures gone tight and silver at his shoulder, the whole record of a life spent surviving things I’ll never know the half of, written pale on near-black. My hands learned every one of them in the dark, weeks of them, in the order I found them. Seeing them now is like finding out a language I’d been speaking by feel had letters the whole time.

And his eyes.

Not black. I’d thought black, all this time—this huge dark thing in the dark. They’re amber. Deep, bronze-gold, lit from the side where the canopy light hits them. And there’s nothing feral in them. Nothing blind. They’re looking at me. Steady. Patient. The eyes of something that’s been waiting a long, long time for me to open mine and see it, and already knows what the seeing is going to cost us both.

I stare. He lets me. He holds still under the light and lets me look my fill, and his face doesn’t do a single one of the things the Cage swore a monster’s face would do.

I’d braced for something out of the theology paintings—all fangs and fury, a face built to scare children into being good. Instead it’s just… a face. Scarred and strange and watching me right back. “Oh,” I say, like an idiot, to the thing I’ve been wrapped around in the dark all this time. “There you are.”

I look down at myself, too, while I’ve got the light.

I’m not the soft, smooth girl they kept anymore. Still curvy, there’s plenty of me, plenty for him to hold, but there’s muscle under it now, in my arms and across my thighs, put on by days of holding onto him, riding him, meeting him. I look stronger. More here. My skin’s marked all over, too: the fading bloom of his bite at my throat, the ghost of his hands on my hips. The whole record of the dark, written where I can finally read it. I should be horrified. I look like something happened to me. I’m not horrified. I look like something happenedwithme.

And there’s a deeper thing, one the light only hints at. My body’s been changing all week in ways I feel more than see. His bite in my throat over and over, his cum sealed in me by the knot for hours at a stretch—it’s doing something. I can feel it the way you feel a fever finally turn. The little ache I’ve carried in my hip since I was a girl, the one the Cage’s healers said was just how I was made—gone. My nails have come in hard and clean where they always used to split. The skin of my hands, soft and useless from thirteen years of holding nothing heavier than a teacup, has gone tougher, like it’s finally got work to do. Even my own nerves feel turned all the way up, every touch landing at full volume, where the tea used to keep the whole of me dialed down to a hum.

The Cage built this body for one thing. Soft, pale, smooth, kept—a thing to be looked at and graded and handed off.Presentation-grade. The best face we have this year.I read that about myself once, in a file, in a careful little hand that thought of me as stock.

Whatever’s happening to me down here is unmaking every word of it. He’s feeding me something through every bite, every flood of him, and my body is taking it the way a starved thing takes food—greedy, grateful, building. Not back into what they made. Into what it wants to be. Stronger. Marked. Awake. Mine.

I run a hand down my own arm in the green-gold light, and I don’t quite recognize the woman it belongs to, and for the first time in my whole life that is the best thing I have ever felt.

The surge takes him with his wings still open.

And I keep my eyes open.

That’s the part that’s mine. Every nerve I’ve got wants to screw them shut, against the brightness, against the size of him, against the sheer too-much of watching the thing that’s taking me apart. I don’t. I look.

He drives up into me in the green-gold light and I watch all of it. His cock isn’t a thing I have to build out of the dark anymore. I can see where we’re joined, the stretch of me around him on every drive, my pale skin and his near-black, the wet shine of him each time he pulls back and feeds it home.