Page 24 of Dark Mate

I come.

My whole body seizes and holds, a note I play without permission, my walls clamping in pulses I can feel one at a time. His cum floods me, hot and sealed and endless, until the pressure behind my navel is a fist. He groans into my hair, long and possessive. “Grrah.” And the vibration doesn’t stop. It drives me up into another peak before the first has finished, and another after that, my walls milking him in waves I can’t controlwhile he pumps me full, the orgasms rolling into each other with no edges left between them, while somewhere above the canopy a bird drops two ordinary notes into the world, going about its day while my body comes apart on a cock I have never seen.

His wings fold over us.

A heavy leather whisper, the air sealing out, the heat of him trapped against my skin like bathwater. Inside the cocoon there is his breath, my breath, the murmur, the wet sound of his cock still pulsing into me. There is nothing else in the world. I can’t find the theology. I can’t find Mora’s smile or the taste of the tea. There is his body and mine and the dark—and it has swallowed everything I used to be sure of.

The lull comes the way weather changes—slow, then all at once.

His grip loosens. The iron in him softens by degrees. The knot keeps its seal but the roar eases back to a murmur. His hands change. The one at my hip slides up my ribs, counting each one with his thumb, slow, like he has nowhere else his hands need to be. His tail pulls the sweat-damp hair off my face—finds my temple, tucks the strands behind my ear with a care that should need eyes.

He’s done this in the dark his whole claimed life. His tail knows where my hair falls the way my hands know the corridors of the Cage.

Something presses to my lips. Soft, cool, the skin breaking under my teeth so sweetness bursts across my tongue and runs down my chin. A berry. His tail brought food to my mouth in total dark with the care of someone threading a needle. My stomach, which I’d forgotten I owned, clenches around it with a hunger that shocks me.

Another. Then something drier, the dense salt of cured meat, the savor hitting so hard my whole body answers.

I hate that it’s good.

The food. The care. The tail tracing a drop of juice off my lip after the last bite, so slow my breath catches. I hate that the thing keeping me knotted is the same thing feeding me. I hate that the feeding feels like tenderness, because tenderness from a cage is still a cage, and I have already spent thirteen years mistaking the one for the other.

Neve said don’t go near the east wall at night,I think.Mora will find my bed empty and my cup full on the tray.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Hours. More than hours. Time in the dark is a language I haven’t learned. I stop reaching for the number. It isn’t there to hold.

Between the peaks, I press my ear to his chest.

His heartbeat first—slow, deep, the drum that keeps all that mass alive. I count against my ear without meaning to. One. Two. Three.

Below it, something else.

A second rhythm, lower, and it doesn’t come from his heart. It rises out of his sternum, deeper in the chest, and it has nothing to do with the knot or the rut or what his body has been doing to mine. The murmur of the knot is a thing his body makes. This is different. I can feel the intention in it, a sound made on purpose, the way a person hums a tune they’ve known so long they don’t notice they’re doing it.

Warm. Deep. Steady. It sits in the range where my own chest picks it up and carries it inward, and my breathing slows to match before I tell it to. My fists uncurl against him.

I don’t have a name for it.

I don’t understand why a thing built to take would also make a sound to soothe. The Cage made me quiet by pouring nothing into me until the noise had no room left. This makes me quiet by giving me something to listen to. The quiet isn’t empty. The quiet has a floor.

It frightens me more than the teeth would. Teeth I understand. Teeth fit the story I was raised on—the divine instrument, the sacred violence, the body that resists what the soul knows is right. A sound chosen for me in the dark fits no story I was given. It’s a question with his shape, and I don’t have the first piece of an answer.

His tail wraps my wrist. The lightest hold, the tip resting on my pulse.

I should stay awake. I should be counting exits I can’t see, trying to learn a dark that won’t be learned. Instead the sound from his chest moves through my ribs. My body believes it before my mind votes. The dark stops feeling like the inside of a grave and starts feeling like the inside of a held breath.

I sleep. Not because the venom drags me down. Because the sound is the first safe thing I have heard since the wall came open, and I go to it the way the eight-year-old under the table went to a hand on her ankle.

I sleep, and the hum follows me down.

11

STALKER

Mine.

She sleeps on my chest and the word is the whole of me. Mine. The small weight of her. The breath going out of her against my skin. Mine to hold. Mine to fill. Mine to keep down here where nothing reaches.

I hold the sound for her. Low, under my heart. The one soft thing my body makes. It’s run so long my ribs ache with it. I don’t stop. Stop it and she stirs, the line comes back between her brows, the dark gets her, and I won’t have the dark getting her. So the sound stays. I don’t think about why. Thinking is mostly gone. I’m burned down to want and hold and mine.