Page 58 of Dark Mate

I climb into his lap, my knees barely making it around his hips. I free him from the loincloth, half-hard already, thick and hot in a hand that can’t close around him, guide him in, and sink down slow. Because he’s not all the way hard yet it’s heat and give, no burn. Then his cock stiffens inside me, filling me by degrees while I feel every bit of it.

He lets me set the pace. His hands find my hips, an anchor, not a leash. I ride him slow by the fire, my mouth on the salt of his throat. A rough breath catches in his chest every time I sink down. “Hh. Hh.” Then his hum starts and runs straight through both of us, into my clit, my belly, the walls gripping him. Not the rut’s frequency. His. Chosen.

“Riven,” I breathe against his skin, and his whole body answers to it.

He comes first, a groan torn out of him, rough and helpless. “Hrrnn… Ellie.” My name breaks out of him with it. His cumfloods me in surges, his hands holding on like the pleasure’s something he might fall through if he doesn’t anchor to me. His face goes open. Undone. Ten feet of predator stripped down to something raw, and the sight of him like that, his face a thing I can read with no translation, tips me over after him.

It rolls through me slow and wide, not the rut’s tearing peak, a tide instead of a wave. “Ohh…” I grip him through it, my hands fisted in the muscle where his neck meets his shoulder, his hum running through every bone I’ve got.

He holds me after. Both arms, his chin curled down to the top of my head. And then I feel him soften inside me—still buried, going gentle—and that wrecks me worse than the sex did. In the rut he never softened; the rut needed him hard. This is a thing he’s never done before. It says:I don’t have to hold on. I can let go inside you and nothing breaks.

“The sentence,” I murmur into his chest. “The one you were translating when it hit. Gift, or obligation.”

A breath under my cheek.

“Gift,” he says. “I’d decided on gift.”

Not debt. The last thing the man he used to be did with his words was build a bridge that leaned toward kindness.

I press my face into his neck and hold the story the way I hold the comb, the file, the vials. One more thing that’s mine. One more piece of the pile I’m building in a life that started three weeks ago in the dark.

The fire dies. His arms hold. The hum holds.

31

ELLIE

He takes me up.

Through the branch-lattice, the passages I’m starting to know, the narrow one where I turn sideways, the wet corridor where the stream cuts through, the steep climb where the fused boughs make a staircase and each step puts me higher than I’ve been since the Cage’s second-floor windows. He goes ahead. His hand or his tail is always near. Never touching, never pulling. Just there, between me and the drop.

I’ve never climbed anything in my life.

The Cage had stairs—smooth stone, polished by women in approved shoes on approved floors. My legs were built for flat. The rut put muscle on me I never had, but strength without skill is just force pointed nowhere, and I climb like somebody handed a body and never given the manual. My feet slip on wet bark. I grab a root and it comes off in my hand, soft with rot, and my weight lurches?—

His tail’s around my waist before I finish the thought. One coil, fast and tight, like he was waiting for exactly that. He steadies me without stopping, without turning, without onesound that could be mistaken forI told you so.Then it loosens, the tip brushing my hip.Here.And it’s gone.

We climb. The light changes layer by layer, dim and green-brown down in the deep wood, then soft green shadow in the mid-levels where the moss glows and the wet bark shines. Then I haul myself onto a branch wider than my whole body, and look out, and?—

The canopy.

I thought I knew. Standing at the nest entrance I saw the layers. But standing at a door isn’t the same as walking through it. The green iseverything, every direction, above and below and out to a horizon I can’t find because the trees curve away with the earth. Each one its own world. Trunks like columns, bark in spirals and deep cracks and pale peeled patches the color of bone. And the trees are fighting, every crown shoving at its neighbors for the light coming down in shafts so solid you’d think you could climb them. Territorial. I know that look from somewhere closer to home.

The size of it makes my head swim. Not the height—theamount.The Cage was a finite thing; I knew every wall of it. The whole world it held could fit inside one of these trees, and there are thousands of them, and my mind keeps reaching for the edges and the edges keep not being there.

Here’s the thing the Cage gave me that turned out to actually be mine: noticing.

They trained it into me—color, fabric, the grain of wood, the beauty of their sacred halls. Noticing was the one kind of thinking the tea allowed, because beauty was safe, beauty was approved, beauty didn’t ask questions. They meant for me to notice how lovely the program was.

Up here I notice everythingoutsideit. A red trumpet-flower growing out of the crook of a branch. The way moss holds a drop of water and splits the light into colors too small to namewithout squinting. The flash of something like oil-on-water at the joint of his wing, there and gone when the angle shifts. The wings in daylight, thin enough to show the veins, the leading edge a harder line catching the light different from the rest of him. Built for killing. Built to fly a body that was never meant to. Beautiful anyway.

I’m keeping the noticing. They can’t have it back.

A bird crosses the open air—wingspan wider than my arms, dark at the body, pale at the tips, painted-looking. Another follows, and they spiral around each other in a slow climb toward the crown.

“What are they?” I ask.

“I don’t have a name.” No embarrassment in it—just an honest account of what he knows and doesn’t. “They nest in the upper crown. They mate for life. The male is larger.”