Page 42 of Dark Mate

I watch his stomach work, the muscle bunching with every thrust. I watch the knot start to swell at the base, fatter each time, catching harder at my entrance.

I watch his face.

The jaw locks. The amber goes dark, the gold drowning in black as the rut climbs up over him. The patience burns off and the animal surfaces, and I get to see the exact moment the mind goes under and there’s nothing left but a body buried in mine, taking what it needs.

And I do the thing I’ve only ever done in the dark. I tilt my hips up, the small ask that meansthere,the one he’s answereda hundred times by feel—and this time I watch it land. I watch it cross his face. The amber catches it, his jaw shifts, the next drive comes in exactly where I asked, and I get toseehim hear me. A whole language we built blind, and here it is in the light, working—his enormous body bending itself around one small signal from mine. I rake my nails down his chest,harder,and watch that one land too, watch the growl move through him a half-second before I feel it. Something in me cracks wide open at the sight of ten feet of predator reading me off my own skin and giving me every single thing I name.

His wings spread huge behind him, lit through, amber pouring down the membrane and over us both. I should be afraid of all that size strung over me. I’m not. I’m greedy for it, taking the sight the way my body’s taking the rest of him.

The knot seats. The stretch goes white-bright, the vibration kicks against my clit, and I come with my eyes wide open. “Aaah!” His face is the last thing in them before the light blows everything out. And I chose it. Nobody made me. I looked because I wanted to know what he looks like when he loses himself in me.

His cum pulses into me a breath later, sealed and locked, his roar going up into the canopy. “RRRAAAH!” His wings snap wider at the crest of it before they start to come down.

The wings fold shut. The dark drops back down, soft and total, and takes the green, the gold, and his face with it.

I hold the picture behind my eyes like the last of the light.

He’s beautiful.

The word comes up out of somewhere old, somewhere the tea never reached, the same place the yellow kitchen lives, the eight-year-old who watched the sun move across a floor and thoughtthat’s beautifulbefore anyone got around to telling her what she was allowed to find beautiful. Nobody approved this one either.It’s just true. The thing that took me out of my cage is beautiful, and I saw it, and I’m glad I did.

In the dark after, I reach up and find his face with my hands. I lay the seeing over the feeling, jaw here, the heavy shelf of his brow, the place the horn pushes up out of the skull, the wide hard shape of his mouth. Two versions of the same face, set one on top of the other. Whole now.

“You’re—” I start.

And stop. Because I don’t have the word. Or I’ve got too many and not one of them is big enough, and the Cage’s words are all wrong, and the new ones aren’t built yet.

His throat moves under my hand. He’s trying too. I can feel the mouth working to shape something back at me, and with his face still burning behind my eyes I can see the effort even in the dark. What comes out is low and cracked, not a word. We’re both reaching for the same too-big thing, and neither of us can lift it.

His thumb comes up and traces my mouth. Slow. Like he’s telling me it’s all right, I don’t have to find it tonight. The hum starts under my hands, warm and chosen, and I let the word go and keep the face instead.

I know it now. In the dark and in the light, both. I don’t think there’s any way left to unknow it.

22

ELLIE

Somewhere in here, the venom and I came to terms.

The raw, scraped-open feeling of those first days without the tea has gone into something else. Not dulled—never dulled again—but level. Sharp and clear.

I run hot and steady now, and I’ve gotten so good at reading him that I can feel a peak coming before his body’s even committed to it: the shift in his scent, the catch at the top of his breath, the way his hands change their mind on me.

Add it to the list of things the Cage never saw coming. Small talk. Swearing. Reading the weather off a monster.

We don’t talk during it. We don’t need to, which is lucky, because between the two of us we’ve got maybe five words and three of them are growls.

We built something better than words anyway, down here where words were never on offer. My hips tilt up and he knows it meansthere.My nails drag down his side and he knows it meansharder.My mouth finds the middle of his chest and he knows it means I want the hum, and the hum comes, every time, like he was only ever waiting to be asked.

And the newest one, the one I’m proudest of. I flatten my palm on his chest and push, a slow steady press that meansslower,and he gears all the way down, ten feet of rut-driven predator easing the drive to a long grind because my hand asked him to. That’s the one that still gets me. I can take a thing built to drive blind, and tell it to savor me, and it will.

A whole language, and not one word of it out loud.

A peak gathers while I’m still lying here thinking about it.

I feel it start in him, the scent going sharp and metallic, the catch at the top of his breath, and I’m already moving, already lifting back against him, my body answering before the thought even finishes. He folds over me from behind, his weight pressing me down into the furs. He drives in on one long stroke. I’m wet and open and ready for it, because I felt it coming and met it on the way.

No bracing against him now. No fighting the stretch. I just open and take him to the root, all that thick heat of his cock filling me, and the sound I make is nothing but want.