10. Ada
ADA
It hits again at midday.
I know it's midday because the light in the aerie has shifted from the slanted gold of morning to the flat white of the sun directly overhead, falling through the canopy gaps in bright coins that move across the furs as the leaves shift.
The heat has climbed with the light. The aerie is an oven—his body temperature, the furs, the closed canopy walls trapping everything.
A beetle the color of wet copper crawls along the woven branches above us, pausing at a gap where the light comes through.
It cleans its antennae with one leg, utterly indifferent to what's happening in the nest below.
I envy the beetle.
The canopy crown stretches in every direction from the aerie edge—visible from this height as a surface, not a ceiling.
From the wall I watched it from below, a solid mass of growth that ate the old city and kept on growing.
From here it has texture. The tops of the old towers break through at irregular intervals—not rubble, not ruins the way I knew ruins.
Islands. The kind of distance the wall never allowed.
Sweat is running between my breasts. His chest against my back is slick with it.
The furs beneath us are damp. The air tastes like salt, like the green of canopy sap, like something underneath both—his scent.
Mineral and warm, like sun-heated stone.
It's in the furs now. In my hair. In my skin.
I'll smell like him for days. The thought should bother me more than it does.
This time is different from the claiming. The claiming was a detonation. This is a tide.
His breathing changes first. The slow, steady rhythm shifts—shorter inhales, longer exhales that press warm against the crown of my head.
His hands tighten on my hips. Not rough.
Certain. The grip of something that knows what's coming.
His cock hardens further inside me—it hasn't been soft since the claiming, the prehensile muscle always moving, always engaged, but there's a difference between the idle flex and this. This is the density of intention.
His tail uncoils from my thighs.
The movement is controlled—each loop unwinding with deliberate care, the tip dragging across my skin as it goes.
Then it wraps back. Not the same configuration.
This time the coils go wider, separating my thighs, pulling them apart.
The warm muscle locks around each thigh in a single loop and holds.
Spread open in his lap. My back against his chest. The canopy overhead.
A breeze moves through the aerie—cooler than the trapped air, carrying the scent of wet bark from somewhere below—and my nipples tighten in the sudden cold.
His thumb brushes one. Not deliberate. Just the placement of his hand, the size of it, the fact that my breast fits inside his palm like something made to be held there.
I close my eyes. Open them. Closing them makes everything louder—the vibration, his breathing, the wet sound of his cock shifting inside me.
He starts to move.
Not the hard driving of the claiming—this is something else.
Long, rolling thrusts that use his entire core, his hips pressing up into me from below.
Each thrust fills me completely—all of him pressing deep, the muscle stroking my front wall on the way in, the knot shifting against my cunt on the pullback.
Each withdrawal is only partial—the knot prevents more—but the inches he can move create a friction that builds on the vibration already running, amplifying it, turning the constant hum into something that climbs with each stroke.
The sounds are obscene. The wet rhythm of his cock inside me, the slick noise of every thrust, my own breathing gone ragged and broken.
In the barracks, sex was quiet—quick hands under blankets, bitten-off sounds, the constant awareness that the next cot was six feet away.
This is not quiet. This fills the aerie the way his body fills the nest. There is no room for silence in what he's doing to me.
I lean my head back against him—his sternum, which is as high as I reach. He curves down, chin dropping to my hair. His grunts land against my skull from above—low, rhythmic, something large and focused working toward what it needs.
Then his arms shift. His tail tightens. His wings extend—
He flips me.
Mid-stroke, without withdrawing, the full coordination of his body working in concert—his arms rotating me, his tail supporting my weight, his wings spreading for balance—and I go from facing the canopy to facing him.
Chest to chest. The rotation pivots on the knot, his cock never leaving me, the angle of him inside me changing completely as I come around.
The breath leaves me.
He's looking at me.
For the first time, I'm looking at him face to face.
The scale of him hits differently from this angle.
I am pressed against the wall of his torso—my hands barely span the width of his chest, my fingers splayed across muscle that feels like warm stone beneath the smooth red skin.
His shoulders are a landscape above me. The crown horns arc from his temples, each one wider than my arm is long, curving back and up with a symmetry that would be beautiful if everything else about this situation weren't what it is.
His face is not monstrous.
That's the worst part. I was prepared for monstrous.
I was briefed on the physiology—the brow ridge, the expanded jaw structure, the amber eyes that track like something built to hunt.
What the briefings didn't cover is that underneath the alien architecture there is a face that is looking at me with something that has focus in it.
Attention. Not mindlessness. Not just the rut driving blind. Something present.
His eyes are amber. Solid amber, no pupil visible, the color of something burning behind glass.
They hold mine while he thrusts up into me.
I realize what he's looking at—not my mouth, not the line of my jaw, but my eyes.
Blue eyes. I remember they were my father's, before the asteroid.
They're mine now, and he's watching them closely, tracking the way the amber light from the canopy touches them, the way they blur when his cock finds the spot.
The face has a jaw that could have been carved from dark stone—sharp, clean, no softness anywhere.
His cheekbones catch the canopy light. The deep red of his skin, which I've only felt until now, has a different quality seen head-on: smooth, almost luminous, darker in the hollows beneath his eyes, lighter across the bridge of his nose.
Black hair falls forward when he hunches down to me, thick curls that frame his face, and I see it properly for the first time—the way it catches the light, the way it curls around the base of his crown horns.
His lips are fuller than the rest of the brutality suggests.
Something almost human about his mouth, which makes the rest of him worse by contrast.
He is not human. But the thing looking at me through those amber eyes has a mind in it, and the mind is watching me with the focused and complete attention of something that cares about what it sees.
I stare at him while he fucks me. The intimacy of it is worse than the penetration.
Worse than the knot. Worse than the vibration that won't stop climbing.
His cock drives into me and I watch him do it—watch the focus in his jaw, the way his amber eyes track my expression for the exact moment each thrust lands where he wants it to.
With the women in the barracks, we kept our eyes closed.
Or looked away. Or buried our faces in each other's necks and pretended the sounds we made were for someone who wasn't there.
Eye contact meant something none of us could afford.
It meant you were present. It meant you were choosing this, not just enduring it.
He has to hunch his massive frame to get his mouth near mine.
The effort of him folding—the curl of his spine, the way his shoulders round forward, the muscles in his back bunching as he works to hold this position while thrusting.
The rut doesn't care about the difference between nine feet and five-foot-four.
The rut drives. The fact that he folds himself to reach me—that's not the rut.
That's the mind underneath it, the one that wanted my name, choosing to close the distance.
His grunts land against my forehead. My temple. The top of my head when he straightens to breathe. His breath is warm and rhythmic on my skin. Each exhale moves my hair. Each grunt vibrates through my skull into my teeth.
His cock presses forward from inside—the prehensile flex, finding the spot, holding it—and I can watch his expression while it happens.
The focus. The way his jaw locks when he drives deep.
His wings twitch with every thrust—a small involuntary flare at the tips, the membrane catching the light, and I realize: the wings give him away.
Every time he hits the right angle they flex outward, half an inch, before he pulls them back.
His tail coils around my thigh. Restless. Stroking. The tip traces along my hip in time with his thrusts, a secondary rhythm that my body tracks separately from the main one.
"Enjoy that?" Low. Almost conversational, if something nine feet tall and buried inside you could be conversational. His hips don't stop.
I don't answer. My face answers for me—the way my mouth drops open, the way my eyes lose focus when his cock finds the spot again.
I come looking at his face.