Chapter 17
APEX
She's awake.
I know this the way I know everything about her now—through her walls, through her pulse, through the exact quality of her breathing when she's somewhere else in her head. She's awake and still and not here. Thinking about things that aren't me.
I heard the bell. Settlement bell, east-northeast, emergency register—I know the sounds at the edges of my territory the way I know the sounds of her body. I heard it clearly. She heard a maybe. I'm not going to tell her the difference.
She had a whole life before she fell out of the sky and into mine.
I know this. It bothers me the way the trespassing Shade on day two bothered me—something in my territory that doesn't belong, something with a prior claim I didn't sanction.
Her fighters. Her routes. Her settlement ringing its bell five miles east while she's sealed on my knot and can't answer.
I had a life before this too. I don't remember it.
The outline of something—a person I used to be, before the first rut, before the territory, before eight years of holding this canopy alone.
When I reach for it there's almost nothing there.
A shape. A shadow of a shape. She is everything I can see when I look now.
I don't see why she should have more of a before than I do.
My cock flexes inside her. Her walls grip me—not her deciding, just her body doing what her body does now, answering mine before she can stop it.
Good. She smells like me. She's full of me.
My cum has been working through her for days.
I'm going to fill her again, keep filling her, until there's nothing left of her that doesn't have me in it.
The bell rang.
I press my mouth to her hair. Hold still. The settlement smoke is on the horizon where it's always been. She'll want to go back to it. She can want things.
She's mine.