Chapter 27
ADA
The withdrawal hits six hours after the knot releases.
I'm lying in the furs. Alone—not alone, because he is three feet away, crouched at the aerie's far edge cleaning the remains of a kill, but not touching me. For the first time in twenty-two days, no part of him is inside me. No vibration. No knot. No warmth sealed at my center.
My body, which has been pressed against his chest for three weeks with his cock flexing inside me and his heartbeat steady against my spine, has nothing to hold onto. The absence is physical. It has weight.
It starts in my skin.
A wrongness. Not pain—worse than pain, because pain has a source you can name and a direction you can work against. This is the absence of something I learned to need.
Every nerve ending, tuned over three weeks to his temperature, his texture, the constant hum of the knot against my clit—all of them are firing at once, searching for what isn't there.
My arms prickle. My thighs clench on nothing.
The morning air against my bare skin feels like static, cool where his warmth used to be, and the furs underneath me are soft but they are not his chest. They are not his arms. They are not the steady rise and fall of his breathing that rocked me to sleep every night for three weeks.
I curl tighter. His scent is in the pelts—deep, mineral, warm—which helps and doesn't help. The smell says here but my body says not enough, not close enough, not inside.
My hands are shaking.
I watch them shake. I'm a gate watch commander. I've held position through a twelve-hour siege, through a supply run ambush that killed three of my fighters, through the night Petra was taken. My hands don't shake.
They held a blade for four years. They held his forearms for three weeks while he drove into me, while the knot locked, while the vibration did what it wanted and my fingers dug into the muscles of his arms because his arms were the only solid thing in the world. Those hands don't shake.
They're shaking now.
The pulse comes next. My heart, which spent three weeks synchronized to the slow deep rhythm of his—sixty beats a minute, steady as stone, the metronome I slept to and woke to and came to—is racing. Ninety. A hundred.
My chest feels tight. Not panic. Something chemical, something the venom built into me that I'm only feeling now that the source has been removed.
He sets food near me. Cooked meat, a gourd of water, some of the sweet canopy fruit he brought back from a dawn hunt.
He doesn't hand it to me. Doesn't come close.
He sets it down within arm's reach and moves back to his place at the far edge, where the morning light catches the ridges of his crown horns and throws long shadows across the woven branch floor.
He knows. He can probably smell it on me—the withdrawal sweat, the hormonal spike, whatever his senses read that mine can't name.
He's giving me space I don't want, because he understands the difference between what I need and what I'm ready to ask for.
Twenty-one days of holding me and he learned that too.
I eat. The meat tastes like nothing. I take it in because I tell myself to, the way I've told myself to do a lot of things over the past four years that my body didn't want to do.
The fruit is better—the sweetness cuts through the noise in my nerves, gives me something to focus on besides the tremor in my fingers. I drink the water in long swallows. My throat is raw from the full rut's worth of sounds I didn't choose to make.
"I'm fine," I tell the furs.
He doesn't respond to that. He's spent three weeks learning the difference between what I say and what I mean. He knows what fine sounds like, and this isn't it.
The afternoon light comes in gold through the canopy gaps, falling across the aerie floor in shifting patterns that move when the breeze stirs the leaves overhead.
The white flowers on the aerie vines have started to wilt—the bloom that arrived during the last week of the rut is passing, the petals curling at the edges, dropping one by one into the pelts. A few have caught in my hair.
I watch a petal land on my forearm. White against my skin, soft, already turning brown at the tip.
Below the aerie, the canopy breathes—the distant rustle of leaves, the creak of branches adjusting under new growth, the stream running over stones somewhere far beneath us.
The world is still here. It kept going while I was gone from it.
I stand up.
My legs hold. They've been holding since yesterday, getting steadier by the hour.
The muscles are weak from the span of the rut, being carried, braced, pinned beneath him, held against him, wrapped around him—but the mechanics are there.
I can walk to the aerie edge, brace my hands on the woven branch railing, look out.
The drop is the same. The canopy below, the ruins, the distant towers with their crowns of green where the vines have reached the upper floors and kept climbing.
The place where I jumped. Twenty-two days ago I stood at a different edge and chose the fall because it was the cleanest option available.
Three options: the Ordained would take me, or the wasteland would kill me, or I could choose my own terms.
Something caught me before I reached them.
I stand at the edge and look down. The wind is cool on my face, carrying the smell of wet bark and the faint sweetness of canopy moss.
My hands are braced on the railing—the same hands that are shaking, the same hands that gripped his forearms through all of it, the hands that held a blade for four years before that.
I'm not testing the drop. I know what the drop means. I know what's at the bottom of it. I know what's behind me.
I'm standing here because I need to know which direction my body wants to go when nothing is holding it in place.
My body wants to go back to the furs. My body wants to go back to him.
Not because of the venom, not because of the withdrawal screaming through my nerves.
Because weeks of his arms were the safest place I've been since before the asteroid, and my body has decided that matters more than the principle of the thing.
I turn around.
He's watching me. Still crouched, still at the far end of the aerie, his amber eyes steady in the afternoon light.
His tail is draped behind him, motionless—the restless sweep gone still.
He hasn't moved. He hasn't come closer. He has been watching me stand at the edge of a hundred-foot drop with shaking hands, and he has not moved to stop me.
He let me choose.
I walk back. Not to him—to the pelts, to the place where his scent is deepest, where the impression of his body is pressed into them from three weeks of holding me against him. I lie down. My skin is still wrong. My pulse is still racing. The shaking hasn't stopped.
"Touch me," I say.
He doesn't make me say it twice.
His hands first. On my shoulders, sliding down my arms, the warmth of his palms against my shivering skin. The size of him—I forget, somehow, every time he's not directly against me. Every day of his body around mine and I still lose the scale of it the moment we're apart.
His hands span my shoulders completely. His fingers wrap around my arms with room to spare, the claws careful, tucked inward, touching me with just the pads of his palms. I am small against him.
Every nerve in me settles fractionally at the contact, the firing in my skin going quiet wherever his warmth lands.
His cock is soft against my thigh when he pulls me against him. Not driving. Not the rut's urgency. Just the prehensile muscle doing what it always does when he's near me—shifting, seeking, a slow idle flex that keeps me aware of it the way his heartbeat keeps me aware of his chest behind me.
His arms come around me from behind, and I'm in the place I've been for twenty-one days. His chest against my back. His warmth along every inch of my spine. The wrongness in my skin begins to quiet.
"You don't have to—" I start.
His cock flexes against me. A slow deliberate roll, the muscle pressing warm and heavy along the back of my thigh. Not accidental.
"I want to," he says. Low. Clear. More words than the rut gave him for anything except my name.
His mouth comes to the back of my neck—he has to fold that massive frame down to reach it, the curve of his spine visible above me, the effort of something nine feet tall making itself small enough to press its lips to the nape of a woman who barely clears his sternum.
His lips are warm. His breath is steady against my skin.
The soft prehensile flex becomes something else.
A press. A seeking. He slides between my thighs from behind—still soft, still that thick heavy warmth that isn't the rut's iron hardness but isn't nothing either.
The tip finds my cunt with the same knowing sureness it's had since the first week, the muscle curving to meet me where I am.
I'm wet. I've been wet since his hands landed on my shoulders.
I don't need convincing. I remember him the way my hands remember a blade—instantly, completely, without thought.
He enters me slowly. Soft first, stretching inside me in a long gentle flex, pressing against my walls with the careful attention of something relearning the space after an absence.
The warmth of him fills me. Not the knot—no swelling, no lock, no vibration.
Just him, thick and present, rolling against the places he knows because he spent three weeks learning them.
I exhale. The shaking stops. Everything in me goes still, the tremor that's been rattling through me for hours finally breaking against the fact of him inside me.
The canopy is going dark beyond the aerie walls, the evening light fading to amber through the gaps, and the world narrows to the heat of his chest against my back and the slow roll of him inside me and the quiet sound of his breathing behind my ear.