Page 45 of Dark Mate

And then it collapses.

Whatever he was reaching for shatters halfway out of him. The sentence comes apart into a snarl of pure frustration, his hips driving forward hard, the rut slamming back down over the fragile thing trying to climb up his throat. He fucks me through his own fury, deep, rough, graceless, and I come around him with my fingers clawed into his chest while the broken pieces of whatever he tried to say scatter into the dark.

After, I lie there shaking, putting it together.

Made words fit.Whatever he was, before the change took his language and left him digging each word out of the riverbed one at a time—he was something that worked with words. Built them. Fit them to things, for a living, maybe. A man with a voice and three tongues in it, and the world took all of it and left him a mouth that can only growl. And tonight he spent two of his hardest-won words on me: the word for what they did to me, and?—

“Ellie.”

I stop breathing.

My name. Rough, half-shaped, barely more than gravel and breath. But it’s mine, unmistakable, said in that ruined voice like something hauled up from the bottom of a deep well.

I never told him my name.

I turn it over in the dark and it won’t land anywhere simple. He had my name before I gave it to him. From where—the Cage? The long months he spent out at my wall before he came through it? I don’t know, and the not-knowing should scare me more than it does.

But the way he says it is nothing like the way the Ordained did—a line on a chart, a reading, a girl to be placed. He saysElliethe way he gives the hum. Like he chose it. Like out of every word he’s clawed back up out of the dark, mine is one of the few worth the work.

And my eyes are wet. I don’t know when that started. Not fear, not pain, just the sound of my own name in a mouth that had to fight a scarred throat to make it, after thirteen years of being a number on the bottom of a cup. He learned my name. He spent one of his hardest-won words on it, just to tell me I’m a person and not a thing.

“Yeah.” My hand finds his jaw in the black. “That’s me. That’s my name.” My voice cracks straight down the middle. “Took you long enough.”

The rumble under his breath might almost be a laugh.

24

ELLIE

Iknow the shape of a peak by now. I could call one before it comes, his breath shortening, the wire pulling tight through him, the knot building, the flood, the lull, and around again.

Three weeks of the same tide. My body knows the sequence the way it knows how to breathe.

This one starts the same.

And then it doesn’t.

The first drive is slower. Deeper. Not the blind slam the early rut ran on, a long, grinding push that sinks his cock to the root and pins me to the furs under the whole weight of him, like he’s got all the time in the world and means to use every second of it.

His hands settle on my hips. The grip’s changed too. Not pinning me down—holding me in place. The claws out just enough to dimple the skin, the pads pressing hard into the cradle of my pelvis.

Anchoring me. Lining me up for something.

I gasp into the furs. My body knows it’s different a beat before I do.

He builds, but not toward speed—toward depth. Every stroke reaches a little further than the last. Draws back slow, the thickdrag of him pulling at my walls, then comes home to the same devastating bottom, the head of him grinding over the spot inside me he’s spent three weeks learning by heart.

He’s not chasing his own peak. He’s working mine open. Aiming for something.

My hands fist in the furs till my knuckles ache. My spine curves on its own to give him the angle he keeps coming back to, my whole body opening to take him deeper than I should be able to.

Then the knot starts to swell.

Wider than it’s ever gone. I feel it the second it begins, the base of him thickening, the stretch at my entrance pushing past anything the rut’s asked of me before, past the edge my body learned to open to, into a place that whites the world out and tears a scream up out of me before I can catch it. “Aaahh!”

“I can’t—it’s too?—”

His hands leave my hips. Both of them come around to my belly and spread there, wide and hot, the claws tucked so only the pads press, his palms covering me hip bone to hip bone.