Page 70 of Dark Mate

And I notice what just happened. We disagreed, and nobody performed. No soft framing, no smile-and-nod, none of the careful sweetness the Cage built me to run on every time I wanted a thing. Just two people who see a risk different ways, finding the spot where we can both breathe.

I finish the braid. He finishes the carving. Neither of us brings it up again.

His tail finds my ankle under the furs. One warm loop.I’m here,without breaking the quiet.

I pull the braid tight between my hands. It holds.

The fire’s down to gold coals. The braid’s done, the carving’s done, and there’s nothing left of the day’s work—and I’mnot tired, and the thing the morning put in me hasn’t gone anywhere. The war coming. The cost of it. It just sharpens into something I can actually have tonight.

So I take it.

I set the braid aside and move into his lap, and there’s no run-up, no soft framing, no sweet little ask with my eyes down the way the Cage wrote into my spine. I go because I want to, and the wanting gets to be the whole reason now.

He goes still under me. The carving stops. “Ellie.”

“I sat in the war all morning,” I say. “I’m done sitting in it for tonight.” I take his face in both hands—it barely fits, jaw to temple—and tip it up to me. “Right now I want you. That’s the whole sentence.”

Something shifts in the amber. His tail comes up off my ankle and loops my waist, slow, and I feel the want rise in him to meet mine.

“Then take me,” he says.

So I do.

I reach between us and find his cock soft, and I work him in my hand until he’s not, the heat of it filling my palm, thickening, the blunt weight of him going eager against my fingers. No venom in me to do the wanting on my behalf. This is just mine. I lift onto my knees, bring him to me, and sink down at my own pace, the stretch of him a thing I choose inch by inch instead of one handed to me in the dark.

“Slower,” I tell him, when his hips want to push. And he stills. Lets me run it. Ten feet of predator holding under me while a woman a fraction his size sets the speed, and I feel the cost of that holding in the cords of his arms, in his tail going tight around my waist, and I take my time just because I can.

The fire throws gold up the curved walls. The night chorus works away outside. I ride him slow and watch his jaw work on sounds that aren’t words yet, and when I finally give him thepace he’s been holding for, his breath breaks on a groan, “Nngh,” his hands open wide on my back, and his tail clamps tight, my gauge, the thing that tells me he’s close before he could say it.

“There,” I tell him. “Like that. Right there.”

He gives me all of it. I come with my hands fisted on his shoulders and my voice my own, loud as I want it, not one drop of approved sweetness anywhere in it. “Ahh! Riven!” And he follows me over with a groan torn out of him, “Hrrah.” His cum spills hot, his knot swelling to lock us, smaller than the rut’s and just as sure. His cum spreads warm through me. His mouth finds the crown of my head.

We stay there, knotted by the low fire, my heartbeat coming down against his chest.

I took that. Plain as the disagreement, plain as the braid. I wanted something. I reached out. I took it. No performance, no permission asked—and the world didn’t end, and he didn’t love me less for the bluntness of it. He loves me more.

“Mine,” I say into his skin, trying his word out the other direction.

The hum starts under my cheek, low and pleased.

“Yours,” he agrees.

37

ELLIE

Night, and the fire low between us, and the curve of the baby just starting to show under the furs I wrap at my waist.

His hand finds it constantly. Not the way the Sisters would’ve touched a pregnant woman in the Cage—that flat appraising look, sizing up an asset’s progress. His palm just rests on the curve while we sit by the fire, while I eat, while I sleep. The whole of it fits under one hand, my belly small enough that his spread fingers span it hip to hip.

He doesn’t ask how I feel. He reads it, the same way he reads the canopy, by watching, by being close, by paying a kind of attention that never once blinks. He knows I’m sick in the mornings because my scent shifts. He knows my back aches because I keep adjusting how I sit. He knew the baby moved today because I pressed my hand to my belly the same second he pressed his, and something crossed his face I’d call wonder if the word weren’t too soft for a male whose eyes still carry that hard predator’s edge.

And my body’s a different thing now than the one they kept. I catch it sometimes at the stream, washing—the strange newfact of myself. The muscle the rut put on me. The strength in my arms and back. My hands gone tough and useful where the Cage kept them soft. Whatever he poured into me in the dark finished what it started, and the pale, smooth, presentation-grade girl from the file is just gone. They grew me to be looked at. I’m a thing thatdoesnow—forages, climbs, carries, wants, reaches, takes—and carries a child I chose to keep. The remaking took. There’s no putting me back in the jar.

The nest holds the night around us, woodsmoke and warm wood, the fire ticking, the canopy running its chorus somewhere up past the entrance. And I finally say the thing I’ve been carrying for days.

“I don’t know which parts of me are real.”