Page 63 of Dark Mate

A settlement. Taken from the outside, not born into it. The tea worked fast on her—eight months was enough to blur her edges. Not enough to wipe them.

“My compliance was sixty-one percent,” she says. It comes out like a confession. “They said I was difficult.”

“Sixty-one percent means you were thirty-nine percent still yourself,” I say, before I’ve thought about it. My ninety-four meant I was six percent real. Hers meant she held onto almost four times that.

Her face crumples, not tears yet, the thing right before tears, the look of a person who’s been holding something for months and just felt the container give.

I don’t reach for her. I sit. I wait. The way the Cage taught me to wait—present, patient, warm. The training stripped off its purpose and handed a new one.

Brin talks.

It comes in pieces, her fingers picking at a thread on the fur over her knees. “He came through the wall at night. I didn’t even hear the stone break. One second the room was sealed, the next he was just—there. Filling the gap. I couldn’t see him. Just the shape. The horns.” She touches her belly. “The rut lasted—I don’t know. Days. I stopped counting. The fear stopped on the third day and I don’t know why. Something in how he held me changed. Less like keeping me still. More like keeping me warm.”

The withdrawal was shorter than mine—eight months clearing faster than thirteen years. “Three days of shaking. Then my head went quiet, then loud, then quiet. Then I could think.”

“What did you think?”

Her mouth twists. “That I was pregnant. That I was alone. That the thing holding me couldn’t tell me what was happening, because his words—” She glances at the burgundy male. “He tries. He growls. Sometimes half a word makes it through. He said my name once. Took him an hour. Kept making the sound wrong, stopping, shaking his head, trying again. When he finally got it out—Brin—he looked at me like he’d built something.”

She cries. No sound to it, the tears just falling straight down. The crying of somebody alone long enough that even grief learned to keep quiet.

I sit with her. I don’t tell her it’s going to be all right. I don’t tell her she’s safe. I can’t promise safe, not in a world with Unmade in it and Ordained and Cages that look like gardens. I just sit with her, the way I sat with Neve, the way I sat in my own room watching light move across the floor—the only way the Cage taught me to be with another person. Present. Warm.

Except this time the warmth is mine. This time I’m choosing to give it instead of having it poured into me out of a cup with my name on the bottom.

“There are others,” I tell her when the tears slow. “Other women, out here in the canopy. Claimed, like us. I’m going to find them.”

Her eyes go wide. The wariness doesn’t leave—it’ll be there a long time, maybe always—but under it, that other thing. The thing I saw in Neve’s eyes the night she gave me the knife.Somebody’s doing something.

“I know one,” Brin says, steadier now. “She sent a marker. A strip of woven cloth tied to a boundary tree. I found it two months ago. I didn’t answer. I didn’t know if it was safe.”

A thread to pull.

“Where?”

She tells me. The boundary north, toward the higher canopy, where the trees thin and the Ordained’s managed zones start pressing in.

The flight back is quiet. Brin’s face stays with me, the wariness cracking into hope, the round belly, a child made in the dark by a male who talks in growls and held her through the worst weeks of her life. Sixty-one percent compliant. Thirty-nine percent her own. Enough to survive all of it with a broken sentence for a lullaby.

She’s stronger than me. She just doesn’t know it yet.

He sets me down in the furs. The amber watches me with that look again—the quiet surprise, the male who keeps underestimating what his mate will do.

I reach for him. Not the rut’s drive, not the withdrawal’s clawing hunger. Something quieter, the place where the day’s weight settles and the only thing that’ll hold it is the body of someone who knows what it cost.

I pull his face down. He folds, ten feet of him curling, his spine bending, his wings shifting to bring his mouth to where mine can reach it. It should look awkward. It looks like devotion.

I kiss him slow. “Thank you,” I whisper against his mouth. “For taking me to her.”

Something moves through his face, the words landing on a male who spent all day carrying me toward a thing he couldn’t do himself, then waiting on the bark while I did it, then carrying me home. His breath goes short. “Ellie.” My name, not a question now. A warning.

So I let him stop being patient.

He takes me on the furs with his wings spread over us like a roof.

Slow and deep and deliberate, no part of him asking permission because I gave it when I kissed him. He works into me by inches, the stretch of his cock familiar now, wanted, my body opening for him the way it learned to in the dark. A groan drags out of him against my throat. “Grnh.” His teeth rest there, a threat he never makes good on, and the hum runs low through the place where we’re joined.

Not the rut, not the desperate withdrawal-clarity. Just him, taking the day’s grief and trading it to me thrust by thrust for something that isn’t grief—Brin’s wary eyes, the round belly, the broken-sentence lullaby, all of it grinding down under the slow heavy drive of him until there’s no room left in me for anything but this.