25. Ellie
ELLIE
The rut lets go of me, and for the first time in three weeks I’m empty.
It’s the loudest thing in the world, the empty.
My body keeps reaching for something that isn’t there anymore—the fullness, the seal of his cum, the low buzz that lived where he was.
The venom’s thinning out of me with no fresh bites to feed it, and underneath it my own bare nerves are waking back up, and every one of them reports the same thing: he’s not inside me, and I don’t know how to lie still with that.
He doesn’t give me the light yet.
He could. The rut’s done; his wings could open and end the dark whenever he wants.
Instead he curls around me, his front to my back the way we started, his hand spread low on my belly over the warmth that’s still there.
He holds the hum steady and low, lets me get used to being one body again before he hands me the world.
I notice that. I notice he thought of it.
The thing that came through my wall wouldn’t have.
And then I start to talk, and I can’t stop.
It comes out of me like water through a broken wall.
“They gave it to me every morning,” I tell him.
“In a cup with my name painted on the bottom, so I’d feel special.
Sister Mora carried it in on a tray with that soft smile, and I drank it, and I thanked her.
Every morning for thirteen years. I thought the cup meant I mattered to somebody.
” My throat works. “It was a dose. I was a thing they kept level.”
His hand moves on my belly. Slow. He doesn’t say anything. He’s listening with his whole body, and I’ve never had that in my life—somebody just letting me talk.
So I do.
I tell him about Brother Cassian and the lessons, the divine union, the sacred bond, the body that fights what the soul already knows.
About the other girls—thirty-seven of us, all smooth, all serene, all so grateful.
About Lissa, who used to argue in lessons, who asked the questions nobody was supposed to ask—until one season she just stopped.
Went quiet. Smooth like the rest of us. I didn’t understand then what they’d done to her. I do now.
And I tell him about Mora. That’s the hardest one—my voice goes thin on her name.
She braided my hair every night. Sat behind me and worked her hands through it and told me stories about the old world—cities, music that came out of boxes, a time when women walked wherever they wanted.
She called me love, and here’s the thing I can’t get around: she meant it.
Her hands were warm because she cared about me.
The tablet in her robes was my dose schedule.
She cared for me while she drugged me. She braided my hair while she checked whether the compliance was holding.
She called me love while she smoothed away every part of me that might ever have said no.
“That’s the part that won’t sit right,” I tell him.
“Mora isn’t evil. Mora’s kind. She believes the tea is mercy.
She thinks the Cage is safety. She thought handing me over to a thing like you was an honor.
” The coal in my chest glows steady, not raging, just there.
“And that’s what made it work. You can fight a fist. You can see a fist coming.
How do you fight warm hands, and a cup with your name on it, and a woman who loves you while she pours the thing down your throat that takes you away from yourself? ”
I tell him about Neve. Neve who went off to her presentation and came back wrong—or right; I know now it was right—her eyes gone sharp, watching everything.
Neve who quit drinking her tea and started seeing.
Who pressed a little ceramic knife into my hand one night and told me to keep it, that I ought to have one thing in the world nobody had assigned me.
I had it in my fist the night he came through the wall—the one thing I carried out of that life into this one.
The only thing I ever owned. A dull little knife I never once thought to use, because they’d taken out the part of me that might have.
I tell him all of it, into the dark, because the dark is the only place I’ve ever been honest, and he’s the only one who’s ever just listened.
When I finally run dry, he’s quiet a while. His hand on my belly. His tail heavy over my thigh. The hum.
Then he speaks. And it isn’t single words anymore—but it doesn’t come easy, either. The rut’s loosened its grip on his throat and the words are there now, except they fight him the whole way out, every one dragged up rough with a huff of breath behind it.
“I could smell it.” A pause, his chest working. “On your skin. When I took you.” A low sound, almost a growl, like the memory’s got teeth of its own. “The drug. What they poured into you. I knew the smell of it.”
I go still.
“I knew what they were doing to you.” Each word hard-won, chosen and set down with care, and when the next one won’t come fast enough, a growl rolls out of him in its place, frustration at his own ruined throat, at a mouth that lost the trick of this somewhere in the change.
He shoves through it anyway. “And I took you anyway.”
I lie there with it.
He’s not apologizing. He’s not building a reason around it to make it sit easier.
He’s just setting the truth down between us, bare: he smelled the drug on me, knew I’d been kept docile my whole life, knew I couldn’t have been choosing anything—and he came through the wall and took me into the dark regardless.
And then he bred me. Without asking. Without one thing in me that got to say yes or no.
The anger’s there. I let it be there. I earned it. I’m not going to pour the tea over it and smooth it down.
“Would you have waited?” My voice comes out steady. “If I hadn’t been drugged. If I could’ve stood in front of you clear-eyed and chosen. Would you have waited for that?”
The silence stretches. I count his heartbeats against my back. Seven. Eight. Nine.
“No.”
Flat. No softening in it. The honest answer, and we both know it’s the honest answer.
A huff against the back of my neck—not at me. At the question, maybe. At the truth of it. His arm tightens over my ribs, his claws flexing once against my skin, the feral thing in him stirring at being made to lie still and talk instead of act.
“The rut doesn’t wait.” A pause, and then the careful reach for the next part, the part that costs him—a growl builds and breaks before he gets there. “But after.” Another pause. “After, I would have wanted you to choose.”
“After,” I say.
“Now.”
One word, and it lands in the middle of me and stays.
He can’t give me back the choice he took.
Nobody can. The first time was the rut and the dark and the drug still in my blood, and that’s done, and it will always be done.
But everything from here—every day after this one—he’s putting in my hands.
Now. Choose now. Stay or don’t. Want me or don’t.
He took the first one. He’s handing me all the rest.
It isn’t enough. It’s also more than anyone in my whole managed life ever once offered me. Both of those are true, and I’m finished pretending I have to pick only one.
I reach back and find his hand where it rests on my belly. I work my fingers up under his, my whole hand swallowed in it, his claws curling careful against my skin, warm, holding without holding too hard. I lace what I can of my fingers through what I can reach of his.
And I hold on. On purpose. Because I want to. The first thing down here I’ve chosen with my eyes open.
“Okay,” I say. My voice doesn’t shake. “Open your wings. I want to see where I am.”