Page 47 of Dark Mate

And he’s different against me now. Still huge. Still everywhere. But the blind drive’s burned down to something hotter and more deliberate.

His hands move on my belly with a purpose the rut never let them have, slow circles, his thumb tracing the same line hip to hip, over and over, like he’s learning the shape of what’s under it. His tail comes around my thigh and cradles instead of pinning, the tip resting light against the inside of my knee.

His cock pulses inside me, idle and thick, in no hurry at all—there because he wants to be, not because the rut’s making him.

He touches me like he’s thinking about me. Like somebody came back online behind the amber the second his body finished what it came down into the dark to do.

It should be a relief, the mind coming back. It isn’t, quite. The monster who only wanted to claim me was the simpler thing.

This one is going to want things. This one’s going to be terrifying in a brand-new way—because now he gets to be terrifying on purpose.

The knot softens.

Slowly, over what feels like another hour, the seal easing by degrees, all that fullness finally letting go of me. He slips his cock free, careful even now, a last thick drag against my walls on the way out, a goodbye in the only language he’s got down there—and then nothing.

The absence is its own event. Every nerve I own reports it at once: empty, after so long full.

My body makes a sound I don’t choose, thin and lost. “Nn…” His cum slides hot down the inside of my thigh and I clench around nothing, chasing what isn’t there anymore, grieving the loss of him like a pulled tooth.

I was whole, and now I’m not.I don’t know when whole started meaning full of him. Somewhere in the dark it just did.

His arms come around me before the sound’s even finished—both of them, the full circle, his tail winding my waist.

The hum starts, not from the knot now but from his chest, chosen, offered up to fill the space his body just left. It doesn’t replace what’s gone. Nothing could. But it pours into the hollow anyway, warm and steady, and I grip his forearms and hold on.

And lying there in the after, I understand that it’s over.

Not wound down. Not paused. Finished. The rut got the thing it came for, and it’s gone now, and what’s left in its place is him—quiet, enormous, present in a way he wasn’t before.

His hand stays on my belly. His tail trembles where it’s wrapped around me, the lightest hold, like he’s gone afraid of his own strength now that there’s something new to be careful with.

He pushes a few words out against the top of my head, rough as broken stone—more than he’s managed all at once in three weeks. “Here.” His hand spreads wider on my belly. “Both.” A breath, and the last one costs him the most. “Stay.”

Like I could go anywhere. Like, after all of it, I’d want to.

25

ELLIE

The rut lets go of me, and for the first time in three weeks I’m empty.

It’s the loudest thing in the world, the empty. My body keeps reaching for something that isn’t there anymore—the fullness, the seal of his cum, the low buzz that lived where he was. The venom’s thinning out of me with no fresh bites to feed it, and underneath it my own bare nerves are waking back up, and every one of them reports the same thing: he’s not inside me, and I don’t know how to lie still with that.

He doesn’t give me the light yet.

He could. The rut’s done; his wings could open and end the dark whenever he wants. Instead he curls around me, his front to my back the way we started, his hand spread low on my belly over the warmth that’s still there. He holds the hum steady and low, lets me get used to being one body again before he hands me the world. I notice that. I notice hethoughtof it. The thing that came through my wall wouldn’t have.

And then I start to talk, and I can’t stop.

It comes out of me like water through a broken wall.

“They gave it to me every morning,” I tell him. “In a cup with my name painted on the bottom, so I’d feel special. Sister Mora carried it in on a tray with that soft smile, and I drank it, and I thanked her. Every morning for thirteen years. I thought the cup meant I mattered to somebody.” My throat works. “It was a dose. I was a thing they kept level.”

His hand moves on my belly. Slow. He doesn’t say anything. He’s listening with his whole body, and I’ve never had that in my life—somebody just letting me talk.

So I do.

I tell him about Brother Cassian and the lessons, the divine union, the sacred bond, the body that fights what the soul already knows. About the other girls—thirty-seven of us, all smooth, all serene, all so grateful. About Lissa, who used to argue in lessons, who asked the questions nobody was supposed to ask—until one season she just stopped. Went quiet. Smooth like the rest of us. I didn’t understand then what they’d done to her. I do now.