Page 25 of Dark Mate

She’s so small.

My hand covers her back, shoulder to hip. One hand. Her spine a string of beads under my palm I could snap by closing my fingers. I spread them instead. A roof. Not a fist.

My cock is still in her. Soft-knotted, the seal loose in the lull, sunk in her heat where it’s stayed since I took her. Even resting I want to move. The want sits low and red and full. My hips want to drive up. My body wants to wake her the only way it knows,open her, fill her, again, again, until she’s so full of me she forgets she was ever anything else.

I hold still.

Too small. Too soft for what I want to do to her. All curves and no strength. That’s how they kept her, fed and groomed and drugged quiet, a body that’s never once had to hold its own against anything. Take her the way the rut wants—hard, now, asleep—and I break her. A broken thing keeps bad. So I lock my hips. My jaw aches. My tail cracks the furs, once. That’s where the want goes, since it can’t go into her yet.

The drug’s still on her.

I taste it in every breath I drag off her skin. Flat sweet over the green of her. The wrong-smell. The not-alive thing they poured into her until she went quiet.

I know that quiet.

It comes up out of the dark at me, the way it does when the rut loosens its fist. Chain, the weight of my own arm. A hand that fed me and called the feeding kindness. A blade laid to my throat and drawn slow, so I’d wear the line and know whose line it was. My horn against stone, healed crooked, nothing there to set it.

One word came out of that place with me when the rest burned off.

Kept.

They thinkcagedis the cruel word. No.Keptis the cruel word.Keptis what they do to her in their ceramic cups and their smiling.

I dug this nest deeper into the wood than any I’ve made, and higher—up where the canopy goes black and thick and nothing climbs by luck. Told myself it was for cold. For quiet. Lie. I dug it so that when I finally had a thing worth keeping, no hand could reach in and take it the way hands reached for me.

I won’t keep her like I was kept. I won’t give her back either. Both true. They don’t have to fit. Nothing has to fit in the dark.

Her hand moves in her sleep.

Up my chest. Small. Blind. Walking me the way it walked the wall the first night. It finds the furrow over my ribs. Stops. Climbs. Finds the line at my throat.

I go still. All of me. The sound stutters and I drag it back before it wakes her.

Her fingers rest on the mark. The worst of me. Nothing living has touched it since the thing that made it. She doesn’t wake. Doesn’t know whose throat she’s holding, or what it cost. Her breath stays slow.

Something pulls tight in my chest. The rut has no name for it. I reach for one. It’s not there. Gone with the rest of my words. My throat works anyway, tries to shape the thing she is to me, and what climbs out is a low broken sound, more growl than word. “Hrn.” I swallow it before it wakes her. I stop reaching. I let her hand stay.

She’ll read all of me soon. Her hands miss nothing, even asleep. She’ll come to the throat awake. She’ll ask. Let her. I’ve waited longer than she knows.

I lift my head off the furs.

The nest is sealed, my wings half over us, but the root-ways breathe. They bring the canopy down to me in threads and I read it without trying. Wet leaf. The stream. A small thing denning in the wall.

Under it—far, wrong.

Smoke that isn’t storm. The sour stink of the soft ones. The robed shapes, the made-wrong men who tend her cage and smell of nothing that should walk. More of them than the walls usually hold. Out past the stone now. On my tree-line. Torches. That flat dead reek. Calling into a dark that doesn’t answer them.

Her bed’s empty. They’ve found it.

The growl is in my chest before I know it. “Grrrr.” Low under her sleeping ear, deep enough the wood floor drinks it. My lippulls off my teeth in the dark. They’re on my line. On my ground. A thing that comes to the edge once comes back, and when it comes back I’ll open it throat to belly and leave it for the canopy.

North. A little east. I put the place in my body where the kill-want lives, and I bank it there.

Not now. The rut won’t let me off her. I won’t get off her. My knot’s already waking against her heat, my body climbing back to the only work it knows. Later, when the dark is mine again, when she can stand an hour empty. I go north and east and remind the trees whose ground they grow on.

Now there’s only this. Her weight. Her hand on my throat. The seal tightening. My length thickening in her. The red coming up fast and full.

She wakes with me already hard, already moving—the lull burned off, my hips driving up into her before I can gentle it.