Page 20 of Dark Mate

Up. Further up. The forest floor’s far below us now—a memory of dark, out of reach. We’re deep inside the woven canopy, where huge branches and trunks have grown into each other over decades and fused into walls, into corridors, into rooms. I can feel the shape of it through his body, the turns he takes, the way the space opens and tightens, the moment we slip through a gap his shoulders barely fit, the hard wood scraping his horns above me so I feel it in my teeth.

He sets me on furs.

The softness hits my back like falling into water. Layered pelts, warm from the closed-in air, deep enough that my body sinks. Animal hides—soft on one side, rougher on the other where the stitching holds them together. The fur on my bare calves is thick, dense, the hairs long enough to push between my toes.

My arms still don’t work. The nectar holds.

I can feel the edges of the nest: curved walls, smooth heartwood his claws have polished over months or years, the furs deep and layered, the space small enough that the walls sit close and the ceiling sits low. A cocoon. A burrow. Something built for two bodies and no light, carved out of the heartwood from the inside.

He did this. He took the wall apart stone by stone, night after night. He carved this space out of living wood, lined it with pelts, and waited for the right moment to come through the gap and carry me here. The planning of it is in the walls. In the furs. In the smooth worn surface of the heartwood where his claws have rubbed the rough bark clean away.

It smells like him. Concentrated. The musk, the woodsmoke, the metallic edge, all of it thicker, older, the smell of a thing that’s lived in this space long enough to soak into the wood. Under it, the mineral smell of earth, of stone, of the deep ground where roots meet the water. It should turn my stomach. The musk is animal. The metal edge is danger. But the scent fills the hollow place in my chest the way his coming filled the gap in the wall—exactly, all the way, like the hollow was shaped to take it.

There’s no light.

Not low light. Not filtered light. No light at all. The dark is total, the kind that doesn’t ease up as your eyes adjust, because there’s nothing to adjust to.

The Cage’s amber lanterns, the morning light through the bars, the way the sun crossed my floor—all of it gone. The world’s shrunk to the space my body takes up and the space his body takes up and the dark between them. I can hear my own breathing. I can hear his. The two are still falling together from the climb down, in for in, out for out, though his lungs hold more and each breath of his takes longer to finish.

His weight shifts over me.

9

ELLIE

Ifeel him before anything else.

The air shifting, the heat coming off skin that’s close, not touching yet, just hovering, the warmth falling on my face and chest like heat off an open oven. The furs pressing down beside my head, where his hands—huge, each one wider than both of mine together—set down, boxing me in. The smell sharpens. Closer. The metal edge under the musk is stronger now, hotter, a scent that coats the back of my throat and sets my pulse hammering.

Want. His want has a smell. My body knows it without being told, the way my body knew the tea was wrong—not through thought but through the place under thought where the real knowing lives. My hips shift against the furs. Not a choice. An answer.

The tea. The thing they’ve poured down my throat for thirteen years. Three days ago I was dulled enough that a new dress was the most interesting thing in my morning. Tonight, one evening dose skipped and the morning dose thinning and fear burning through what’s left of it, the dulling’s wearing through. Not gone. I can feel its fingerprints on me, the softedges it’s left on my fear, the way the terror keeps melting into something warmer. But thinning. Enough that when his mouth finds my throat, I feel it at full volume.

His lips part against my pulse.

There’s no fumbling in the dark, no hunting for it. He knows where my heartbeat lives. His mouth is hot, the skin of his lips rougher than a man’s, catching against the thin skin of my throat. He breathes against me, and the breath is warm and slow, and I feel it in every nerve from my jaw to my collarbone.

His fangs sink in.

Fire. All at once, blooming out of where his teeth meet my pulse—not pain. The venom rewrites that somewhere between the wound and my head, turns what should be agony into a heat that opens outward through my whole body like something going off.

Thirteen years of the tea did not get me ready for this. Nothing could have. This is every nerve in me catching at once, a wave of fire that starts at my throat and pours down—through my chest, my belly, between my hips.

I’m wet before the venom even reaches my thighs. Soaked before he pulls his fangs free.

My back arches off the furs.

The nectar’s wearing off—or the venom’s overriding it, demanding my body answer with more than stillness. My muscles flood back. My hands fly to his chest—the first time I’ve touched him—and the skin is warm, hard, enormous under my palms. Muscle like stone under it. Scars I can’t see, raised seams and hollows my fingers trace without deciding to. My hands climb. The chest keeps going. He’s so much bigger than me that my arms are all the way out before I reach his collarbones. I can’t get anywhere near his face.

The size of him lands in the dark the way it couldn’t in the moonlit gap, not through seeing but through touch, througheverything my arms can’t cover, through the long stretch from his chest to his throat, through the way my whole body fits against his torso with room left over. I’m a small thing in the hands of something vast.

His hips settle between my thighs. I feel it—the weight pressing my legs apart, the shift of his body into the cradle of mine. His hands slide under my shift. The cloth tears, not ripped, parted, his claws following the seam like he knows exactly where cotton gives and skin begins. The shift falls open. The air touches my bare skin and I gasp. Cold and warm at once, the nest’s heat, his body’s heat, the cool air from somewhere above all mixing on my exposed breasts, my stomach, the inside of my thighs.

His tail wraps my left thigh. Spreads me wider. The muscle coils and holds, each loop a careful pressure that opens me by inches, sure-handed in the dark. His other hand spans my hip, thumb in the crease where thigh meets pelvis, fingers curving the bone, his grip firm enough that I couldn’t close my legs if I tried.

I try. The tail holds. His hand holds. My body holds, caught between the three points of his grip, spread open in the dark.

Then I feel him. The blunt head of his cock drags up the inside of my thigh, slow and searching, hot and impossibly thick, thicker than anything I have a measure for. It nudges where I’m soft and slick and already aching. He parts me with it. The broad head drags through my folds, spreading them wide, dragging my own wet up the length of me, and the size of it lights up every nerve it touches. A whimper climbs out of me before I can stop it. “Ohh…”