Dead Drop (Nethershades #1)

Prologue Apex

I smell them before I see them.

The Eunuchs. That chemical stink—sweat and the compound they carry and the particular sour-metal tang of males whose biology has been broken and rebuilt into something that serves the Ordained's purpose. They're in the tower. Moving through it. Hunting.

I've been circling the tower for an hour.

Not hunting—waiting. The restlessness has been building for weeks.

A narrowing. Like the world is a corridor that keeps getting thinner, and everything that isn't the thing I'm looking for has been pressed flat against the walls.

My territory. My patrol. The rogue Shade on the southern boundary.

The Eunuchs running their routes through my canopy. None of it. None of it is the thing.

The wind shifts.

I bank hard, wings catching the updraft from the tower's sun-baked face, and the scent hits me from above.

Not below. Above. From the roof. Sweat and iron and blood—she's bleeding somewhere, copper-bright—and under all of it, under the human smells and the fear and the Eunuch residue on her clothes, something else.

Something that goes into my lungs and doesn't come out.

My cock goes hard.

At the scent. Before she moves. Before I see her face.

The narrowing detonates at the source—roof, four o'clock, fifty-three floors up—and my body is already committed before my wings change course.

Weeks of this. Weeks of the corridor getting thinner, the drive with nowhere to put itself, my cock hard at nothing, the need building in my chest like a sound I couldn't make.

This is what it was pointed at. I know it the way I know the inside of my own territory. The way I know my own name.

I go still.

Mid-air. Wings locked. Everything locked. The world stops being a corridor. It becomes one point, fifty-three floors up, where a woman is standing on a ledge.

She steps off.

Not pushed. Not thrown. She steps off the way someone steps through a door they've decided to use. Her body tilts forward. Her arms don't reach for anything. The building lets her go.

She falls.

I dive.

Not the wind. Something under the wind—something in the narrow place that has no patience left. My wings fold. My body drops. I am faster than gravity because gravity doesn't want her the way I do.

She's turning in the air. A half-twist—her body still working even on the way down. Soldier. The word surfaces from somewhere the narrowing hasn't swallowed yet.

Her back is to me when I catch her.

My arms close around her chest and waist. She is small.

She is so small that the shock of it goes through my hands like a current—the span of her ribcage inside my grip, the narrowness of her waist, the bird-bone weight of her.

My wings snap open. The deceleration hits us both.

She makes a sound—pain, her shoulder—and the blood-scent sharpens.

Her back hits my chest. My cock hits the small of her back.

Already hard. Hard since the scent, hard since before she fell, and now she is pressed against the full length of me and the contact is everything the weeks of narrowing were building toward.

Her heat bleeds through her clothes. The weight of my cock against her spine.

She doesn't know what's pressing into her yet. She will.

I could crack stone with these hands. I could split a boar from sternum to pelvis without slowing down. I hold her the way I hold nothing else—because she needs to reach the furs alive—but the drive underneath the hold is not gentle. It has never been gentle. It has been waiting.

She's in my arms. She's alive. She's mine.

My tail wraps her thighs in one coil and locks her legs against mine.

She fights. Elbow into my ribs—nothing. The force of it doesn't register.

She tries again, harder, and I don't adjust because there is nothing to adjust. Her skull catches my jaw on the backswing.

The pain lands the way rain lands. The spiral continues.

My wings work in long controlled strokes and she is fighting me and the fighting grinds her body against mine—every strike, every twist pressing her harder into my cock, her ass against my groin, her spine against my chest. She is trying to hurt me.

She is making it worse. Worse for her. I am past worse.

"Let me go." Her voice. Sharp. Furious. The voice of someone who chose the fall and is furious the ground didn't get there first. "Let me go right now, let me—"

She gets an arm free. Her nails open four lines along my forearm. I take the arm back.

She fights me the whole way down. Elbow.

Heel. The back of her skull against my jaw.

None of it moves me. None of it matters.

What matters is what I can feel under the fighting—her heat, her scent rising off her body in the wind.

She is warm everywhere and I am hard everywhere and the nest is below us and when my feet hit the furs I am going to ruin her.

My tail finds her neck.

The tip presses below her ear. The nectar enters her skin. I feel the change before she does—the muscles releasing in a wave from her shoulders down, the fight draining out of her. Her hands open. Her body goes slack against mine.

The weight of her settles.

Without the fighting I feel all of her. The full press of her hips against my cock.

Her ass against my groin, no resistance, her body's weight sinking back into mine.

Every breath she takes moves her against me.

I am so hard it has stopped being an ache and become a demand.

Her scent comes off her in waves now—and underneath the fear, underneath the fury still locked in the rigid set of her jaw, her cunt.

Warm and unmistakable. Her body already ahead of her mind, already doing what the bond demands.

She is wet. The scent of it goes into my lungs and joins everything else that is staying there.

"You bastard," she says. Flat. No force behind it.

My fangs find her throat.

The nectar was warmth going quiet. This goes deeper—into the nerves, into the places the nectar can't reach. I feel it leave my body and enter hers. The bond's permanent mark. The thing that makes her mine in a way no territory marker could.

Her breath changes. I feel it in her chest against my arm.

We are still spiraling down. The aerie is below. I am not waiting.

My claws find her collar. One pull—the jacket splits down her spine, fabric peeling away, cold air flooding in.

Her voice comes back sharp through the nectar's hold: "Don't you dare—" Still furious.

Still aimed. The voice of a soldier who chose the drop and is furious every choice is being taken from her.

I take her shirt. Collar to hem, one motion.

"—I swear to god, I'll—"

She won't. Her hands are open at her sides. They don't close. I don't listen because the rut has no use for her threats, only for her scent, and her scent says everything her words won't.

My claws split the waistband. Her trousers go. The canopy wind takes them.

My tail repositions—one loop around each thigh from below, pulling them apart, holding her spread open in the spiraling air above my nest. My loincloth shifts aside.

My cock finds the slick heat of her—not inside, not yet, just the tip dragging forward, finding everything the venom and the bond and the weeks of narrowing were always aimed at.

She is soaked. The evidence of it is on my cock now, that slick wet trail, and the knowledge of it goes through me like something breaking loose from the last of its restraints.

Her hips push back.

Yes.

That's all. That's everything. Her body rolling back into my cock in the spiraling air—the full unmistakable press of her cunt toward me, slick and warm, wanting this even as her mouth is still forming threats she can't carry out.

Thirteen years of this body. Thirteen years of the rut coming and going with nowhere to go.

Her hips push back and the last of the corridor collapses.

My feet hit the furs.

I drive in.

All of me. All at once. Her face goes into the nest and my cock seats inside her before she finishes falling—her cunt opening around me, the stretch immense, the slick heat of her flooding every nerve the mutation built and rebuilt and kept raw for thirteen years of waiting.

She whimpers. That sound. Her walls clench around my cock in one hot shocked pulse and I groan against the back of her neck—long, wrecked, nothing human in it, the sound of something that has just found the only thing it will ever want again.

She's tight. So tight and slick and hot all the way down my cock, every inch of her gripping me, her cunt pressing back against the thrust like her body is trying to pull me deeper even as her hands scrabble uselessly at the furs.

She can't move me. Nothing moves me. I'm twice her size and buried inside her and the rut has nowhere to go except deeper.

I grip her hips. Her waist. The span of her impossibly small—I could hold all of her in one hand.

This whole small body, mine. My cock inside it.

My knot swelling at the base, thickening against her entrance with every thrust, the stretch widening, the wet sound of it filling the aerie.

My balls heavy. Full. Thirteen years of rut with nowhere to go, and now they're pressed against her cunt and they know exactly where they're going.

Weeks.

She's mine for weeks. Her small body. Her slick cunt gripping my cock, the sound of it obscene and perfect every time I pull back.

The whimper she makes when I push deep—I want that sound, I want every version of that sound, I want to hear it every hour for as long as the rut runs and the rut runs until she's bred.

She'll never be more than arm's reach from my cock. She can try. She's already failed.

Her cunt pushes back on the next thrust. Involuntary. Her body answering what her mouth won't.

I groan. Long and rough. My chest against her spine, my mouth at the crown of her head, groaning into her hair because she is slick and hot and clenching and this is the only thing that has ever mattered. Not the territory. Not the years. This. Her. My cock buried in my mate.

My wings slam open. Full span. The aerie shudders.

"Mine," I say.

Not a question. A fact already written—written when the scent hit me fifty-three floors above, written permanent when I drove into her, written in the bond and the venom and every inch of my cock seated inside my mate.

I move.

The long dark begins.