Page 64 of Dark Mate

I come apart with my hands fisted in the muscle of his neck. “Ahh… Riven…” And he follows me a beat later, buried to the root, a groan and my name breaking apart together in his mouth. “Hrr… Ellie.” His cum spills hot inside me.

After, he looks down at me, wrecked, marked, my hair a disaster, and he smiles. A real one. Small, the scar creasing with it, gone before I can take it in. But there.

“Do that more often,” I tell him.

The smile flickers again. He lowers his mouth to the top of my head and holds it there, his arms closing around me—not the cocoon. The other thing. Same arms, different meaning.

“Two more,” I say against his chest. “Brin knows where two more women are.”

A rumble under my cheek. Not a word. The sound of a predator taking in new ground.

“Rest first,” he says.

I close my eyes, and the plan keeps building in the dark behind them. Five women. Then more. A whole network, put together out of the Cage’s own tools—warmth, patience, the trick of sitting with someone until they feel less alone.

34

ELLIE

The second woman is Tael, and she’s furious I came.

She lives in an aerie lashed high in the crown, open to the sky on two sides, higher than any nest I’ve seen. Her shade is narrow and gray, antlers branching in repeating patterns over a face that’s almost delicate; he watches from the top of the structure, deciding not to attack, not yet deciding to trust.

Tael stands at the far edge, arms crossed over a frame the rut rebuilt hard, like mine. Gray eyes. Mouth a flat line. She looks at me the way I imagine the Ordained looked at a number that wouldn’t behave on their charts.

“I didn’t ask for company.” Sharp. Clear. The voice of a woman who was never ninety-four percent anything.

I sit. Five feet off, small, patient—the Cage’s tools.

“I’m not asking you to want company,” I say. “I’m asking you to want information.”

She considers it. The hostility doesn’t go anywhere, it’s load-bearing, the wall she built to survive being alone, and she’s not tearing it down for a woman who showed up on somebody else’sshade. But her eyes narrow with something that isn’t a no. She’s smart enough to know useful when she hears it.

I tell her about the files. The compliance scores. The forty-one names. Brin, pregnant and alone. The map Riven drew, the five women in reach, the dozens past that.

Tael’s arms uncross. She drops to the bark in one sharp motion—efficiency, not friendliness. But she sits.

“How long were you in a Cage?”

“Thirteen years. Since I was eight.”

Something shifts in her face and she covers it fast, but I catch it. Noticing faces is the one kind of seeing the tea never dimmed.

“Seven months,” she says. “Settlement raid. I was a builder. I built walls.” The irony could cut glass. “They put me in a Cage, and I built them inside my own head instead.”

A builder. The hostility makes sense, a woman who shaped the world with her hands, locked somewhere the only thing she was allowed to shape was her own obedience. Her fury isn’t a slow coal like mine. Hers is structural. She built herself out of anger the way she built walls out of stone, and what she made won’t fall down.

“I’m building something too,” I say. “Not walls. A network. Women who know about each other.”

“What kind of information?”

“Patrol routes. Cage locations. Supply runs. Which shades hold which ground. Where the Ordained are thin.”

The gray eyes sharpen—the builder reading a blueprint. “What do you need from me?”

“Just know you’re not alone. Know somebody’s coming back.”

She looks at me a long time. Then one nod. A builder’s nod—decided, not to be revisited.