Chapter 37 #2
But her eyes are the same—bright, quick, the alertness I trained into her over two years of dawn drills.
The Cages didn't break her. They dented her. Dents repair.
She moves slowly. There's something wrong with her left leg—I see it immediately, the way her weight shifts slightly off it. An old break, maybe. Or torture damage that's settled into her bones.
She looks at my belly first. I can see the moment she understands—the slight widening of her eyes, the way she processes the curve beneath the jacket. The understanding. The implications.
Then she looks at my face. At my hair—the long brown braid running down my back, thick and tightly wound, the way I've worn it since the wall.
At my hands, uncallused compared to how she remembers them.
At the fur-lined collar of the jacket and whatever she reads in my posture that tells her I'm not the same anymore.
She doesn't ask if I'm okay. She knows me better than that. "Is he good to you?"
I almost laugh. The question is enormous. It contains the entire three weeks, the rut, the knotting, the venom that rewired everything from the inside out. The answer should be simple. It isn't.
"He hurt me," I say. Petra's face goes still.
"Not the way you're thinking. Not cruelty.
Not punishment. He was in rut—the mating drive that hits when a Shade finds his match.
Three weeks. He couldn't stop it any more than I could stop breathing.
" Her expression shifts. "He didn't choose to force me.
The mutation chose for both of us. He was as trapped in it as I was. "
"That's a hell of a way to dress up what you're describing."
"I know how it sounds." I lean against the wall beside her.
"But I've had weeks on the other side of it to watch who he is when the drive isn't controlling him.
He builds me climbing hooks because my hands are too small for the branches.
He adjusts his patrol routes based on my observations.
He listens when I tell him something matters.
" I pause. "The male he is now—mated, clear-headed—he wouldn't force me. "
My mouth twists. I can't help it. "He wouldn't have to."
Petra stares at me. I watch her assemble the meaning of that—the wry admission underneath it, the wanting I'm not bothering to hide. Her eyes widen slightly.
"I feel safe with him," I say, and it surprises me how steady my voice is.
"I can't tell you he'd never hurt me, because he has.
But it was never without end. Never as himself.
Never of his own choosing." I press my hand against my belly.
"When I was small—before the asteroid, before any of this—my mother used to tell stories about how love was supposed to feel.
All-consuming. Immeasurable. Something you'd burn the world down for.
" I shrug. "I barely remember. But I think this might be what she meant. Not the clean version. The real one."
Petra is quiet for a long time. Her breathing whistles faintly—the Cage damage, the ribs that never set right.
"You're telling me you love a Nethershade."
"I'm telling you I have a drive to be with him that I've decided can't be too different from what the old world called love. He protects me. He chose me before the rut—read my name on an Ordained list and decided. The rut just made him unable to wait."
She's quiet for a while. Then she shifts her weight off the bad leg, and the motion reminds me of what the Cages cost her.
"I spent six weeks in the dark," she says.
"No light. No company. Twice a day they'd bring food and water and check to see if I was still alive.
I had nothing to do but think." She looks at me.
"I thought about you. About how you walked on that wall like you owned it.
How you made us believe we could hold it. "
"I jumped off a building, Petra."
"And then you came back. You're here, carrying a monster's child, telling me you chose it." Her mouth quirks—not a smile, but something close. Something complicated. "The child inside you—that's a choice?"
"Some of it," I admit. "Some of it is instinct. Some of it is the fact that I'm here, and the child is here, and getting rid of it would require me to be someone other than who I am."
"So you're keeping her."
"Yes."
Petra reaches out and takes my hand. Her palm is warm. There are calluses on her fingers I don't remember—new scars from the Cages, the proof of what her hands have been through. "Then you're okay."
"I'm not okay. I'm choosing. That's different."
"That's what I was hoping you'd say." She squeezes my hand once and lets it go.
The ribs that don't sit right. The thin whistle of her breathing, the sound of something that healed crooked and will stay that way.
I trained her. She held the wall when I wasn't there and she's carrying the cost of it in her chest, and I can't go back to that night, can't stand on the wall when the Ordained came. I can't unbreak what the Cage broke.
My hands want to do something. There is nothing to do.
I hold the image of her—too thin, too scarred, still bright in the eyes—and carry it with me out of the corridor.
The day's work is done. I leave through the breach.
The afternoon light is long and gold when I clear the settlement wall—the kind of light that makes the canopy look like stained glass, the leaves burning amber at the edges where the sun catches them. The fighters on the wall see me go.
And then they see him.
Corvin is at the settlement edge. Not in the canopy.
Not hidden in the mid-level branches the way he usually waits.
He's standing on the ground below the tree line, in full light, at the exact point where the settlement's cleared land meets the first canopy trees.
Nine feet of red muscle and crown horns, his wings half-spread to catch balance, his amber eyes on me.
I know the fighters on the wall are watching. I can feel it the way you feel a held breath.
I walk to him without slowing. My knife on my hip, his climbing hooks on my belt, the fur-lined collar warm at my throat. The ache of the day—the council's doubt, Petra's ribs that don't sit right, the smell of the settlement that is no longer my smell—all of it lifting with each step.
Corvin's tail uncoils from his waist and reaches for me when I'm still ten feet away.
The tip finds my wrist. Pulls me in.
He lifts me the way he always does—one arm under my thighs, my weight nothing, my face arriving at the level of his throat before I've finished the thought of reaching for him.
His scent floods me on the inhale: mineral warmth, the deep canopy green, the smell that lives under the corner of his jaw and belongs to no one else.
The wall is behind me. The settlement is behind me. Whatever they make of what they just saw—that's theirs to keep.
He carries me back to the aerie.
I don't let him set me down.
I take his mouth instead, my hands on his jaw, my weight shifting in his arms until I'm facing him—my legs around his waist, his cock stirring against me through the loincloth, his wings spreading involuntarily for balance.
He makes a sound against my mouth: low, caught off guard. Not the rut's certainty.
This is mine to direct.
I unbuckle the loincloth while he's still trying to catch up. His cock springs free beneath my hand, thick and flushed, flexing toward me before I've finished wrapping my fingers around him. His jaw tightens. His wings fold forward, instinctive, closing us in.
"Ada—"
"I know." I stroke him once. "Let me."
He lets me.
His back finds the aerie wall and I work him with my hand—slow, deliberate, watching his face the way he watches mine when he has me.
The brow ridge creasing, the pupils blown wide, the muscles in his throat cording as he fights to hold still.
He has the strength to flip me at any moment, drive into me from above, take the lead the way his body wants to.
He doesn't.
He holds still against the wall while I learn the shape of his want on my own terms.
When I'm ready I pull him into me. One hand on his chest for leverage, his cock filling me from below—the stretch of it hitting every wall, the angle I don't get on my back, my body clenching around him while I'm still adjusting to the depth. His hands find my hips. Not guiding. Just holding on.
I move.
His groan shakes through his chest and into my palms. I feel it in the bone.
His tail wraps my lower back—not controlling, just present, the warm pressure of something that can't stay uninvolved but is trying to let me lead.
I ride him until the aerie dims and my legs stop holding their rhythm and his grip on my hips turns from restraint to help—the last few strokes his, deep and certain, because I've asked everything of him and he gives it.
I come with my face in his throat, his name in my mouth, his cock driving the sound out of me in waves.
He follows. The heat of it fills me slow. His arms pull me in close and stay there—holding the weight of both of us against the aerie wall, his heartbeat hammering against my cheek, the last pulses of him still working through us both.
After a long time, his tail traces my spine from waist to shoulder. Once. Easy.
"Good day?" he says.
A short sound escapes me. "Yes."
He carries me to the furs. We sleep before the canopy goes dark.