Page 71 of Dark Mate

His carving stops. The amber lifts off the wood.

“The Cage spent thirteen years building a woman.” I look at the fire. “Sweet. Compliant. Beautiful. Patient. Warm. Everything the Sisters praised me for. Everything the score measured. Everything the Ordained wanted.” I’ve been turning this over for days, between network visits, between foraging lessons, in the long quiet of a life I never picked and am somehow learning to live. “And I built the whole network out of exactly that. I sat with Brin and I was patient. I sat with the fourth woman and I was warm. I reached every one of them by being the exact kind of woman the Cage made me—soft, easy, good at making frightened people feel safe.”

The fire crackles.

“So which parts are me? The sweetness—did I grow that, or did they pour it in with the tea? The patience—is that mine, or just thirteen years of being told to sit still and like it?” The question has teeth. I feel them in my chest. “I’m furious, too. I can read a territory map and find the supply routes and move women across five nests. Maybe those are the real parts. And thesoft things—maybe those are just residue. The shape the mold left when the Cage cracked open.”

He’s quiet a long moment. His breathing slow and deep, the rhythm of a body that fills half the hollow even sitting still.

When he speaks, his voice comes from lower down—not softer, weighted. The place he keeps for the things he needs to get exactly right.

“The tea didn’t make you kind.” A pause, his jaw working. “The tea made you manageable. Those are not the same.”

I look at him. The fire catches the hard planes of his face, the broken horn, the scar along his jaw, a male who’s spent years thinking about the difference between what you are and what something else made of you.

“I lost three languages,” he says. “The change took the words. The syntax. The sounds.” He opens his hand, the broad scarred palm. “It didn’t take the need to say things. The need was mine. The languages were only tools. When the tools were gone, the need was still there. That’s why I rebuilt. Because the need was real.”

His eyes hold mine.

“Your kindness survived the Cage. If the tea made it, it would have gone when the tea went. You’ve been clear for weeks.” A beat. “You’re still kind.”

And that cracks something open in my chest, not gently, with the exact force of a true thing said by the one person who understands the question from the inside. He lost his tools and kept his need. I lost my say and kept my warmth. The warmth was always mine. The Cage just made sure I never got to aim it.

I cry. Not the silent bath-tears. Two hard sobs that tear out before I can stop them, my hands over my face. The grief isn’t for the lost years. It’s for the girl who was kind at eight years old and spent thirteen of them sure the kindness was a side effect of a drug.

He doesn’t cross the fire. He waits, steady, still, giving me the room. The most patient thing I’ve ever known.

When I can breathe again I lower my hands and wipe my face.

“Come here,” I say.

He rises, ten feet unfolding in a space that barely holds him, wings brushing the walls, horns grazing the ceiling—and crosses the fire in two strides to stand over me. I’m sitting in the furs. His hips are at my eye level, his chest a dark wall going up into the shadow of the ceiling, his face somewhere far above, haloed by the broken horns.

I pull the tie of his loincloth loose.

His cock hangs free—heavy, soft, the muscle giving one slow flex at the air hitting it. Even soft, the size of him is its own statement. My face is level with it. My mouth is level with it, and my breath goes short.

He goes dead still. The stillness of a male who understands exactly what’s being offered and won’t move a muscle until I make it real.

I take him in my hand. He’s warm, fever-warm, always, the skin smooth over a dense core, the pulse of him thick against my palm. He fills toward my grip before I’ve even started, thickening, the head flushing darker. I lean in and press my mouth to it.

A sound breaks out of him, low and sharp and bitten in half. “Hng.” His hand comes up behind my head and hovers there, not touching. Asking.

I open my mouth and take him in.

The heat of him hits my tongue first—dense, salt and musk, all that banked warmth that lives under his skin. The head fills my mouth. The width of him stretches my jaw to the edge of what it’ll do. I can’t take much; he’s built for a body five feet taller than mine, and most of him never gets near my lips. Butwhat I take, I take on purpose. I work the soft place just under the head with my tongue, slow, and the muscle jumps against it.

His hand lands in my hair. Light. The blunt tips of his claws against my scalp, threading in, holding on, not steering, just holding, the way you hold something when the feeling’s too big to take standing up.

I stroke what my mouth can’t reach. Both hands, and they still don’t close around him; they never have. I grip what I can and I set the rhythm, slow, deliberate, every pull of my mouth matched by my hands, every stroke dragging another wrecked sound down out of the dark above me.

He’s fully hard now, rigid in my hands, the head swollen against my tongue. His breathing’s come apart into short pulls through his teeth. “Hh. Hh.” His thighs shake on either side of my head with the work of holding still, of not driving, of letting me run it when every instinct he’s got wants to take.

“Ellie.” My name from up there, rough, almost a growl. “I’m going to?—”

I don’t pull back. I take what I can, and his cock throbs once, twice, and then his cum spills hot across my tongue. A ragged groan breaks apart above me. “Hrrnnaah.” Salt and heat and something underneath that’s only him. I swallow. Take more. His cum fills my mouth between swallows, spills past my lips, runs down my chin, and I don’t stop. The sounds coming out of him are stripped raw, from somewhere with no language left in it at all.

When the last pulse fades I sit back, wipe my chin with the back of my hand, and look up at the wreck of him. Composure gone. Eyes glazed. The broken horn catching the firelight at an angle that makes him look wild, half-undone—ten feet of creature a woman just took apart with her mouth.