6. Maeve
MAEVE
His hands on my body are not what the camps prepared me for.
The camp prepared me for grabbing—the closed-fist grip on an arm or a wrist or a fistful of hair, touch that moves a body from one place to another without considering that the body has opinions about it.
Four years of hands that pulled me to my feet for the work detail, hands that shoved me back into the barracks at night, hands that landed on me with the blunt indifference of tools being used on a surface.
His hands are on my body. They are not grabbing.
My whole body waits for the grab anyway. It’s the only shape touch has ever had. When it doesn’t come, something in my chest stutters, off-balance, like a foot reaching for a stair that isn’t there. I don’t know how to hold still for gentle.
His fingers find the hem of my shirt, what’s left of it, the camp-issue fabric rotted thin from weeks of canopy weather.
He doesn’t tear it. His claws, black at the tips of those crimson fingers, each one longer than my thumb, slip under the fabric and lift.
Easing it up my body the way you peel bark from a branch, following the grain instead of fighting it.
The air hits my skin. I’m not cold. I should be—there’s no fat left to insulate, the ribs he’s looking at are a map of how a body fails. But the venom has made me warm from the inside, and his heat fills the space between us.
His gold-black eyes move down my body. I watch his jaw tighten. Something crosses his face that is not hunger, not the blown-pupil drive of the rut, but something closer to frustration—the frustration of something confronting a problem worse than it expected.
He’s seeing what the camps did. Past the scars, the bruises, down to the underneath.
The bones showing through skin where muscle used to be.
The ribs he can count without touching them.
The collarbones jutting like blades. My breasts, barely there, the nipples dark against skin gone ashen. My hips, the bones sharp enough to cut.
Heat climbs my neck, my face, ugly and unwanted.
Nobody has looked at what’s left of me this closely since the guards used to line us up for inspection, counting ribs the way you’d count damaged stock.
This isn’t that. I know it isn’t that. My body doesn’t know the difference yet, and the wanting to cover myself rises up anyway with nowhere to go and no strength left to act on it.
His hand lands on my ribs. Not grabbing.
Learning. His crimson palm spreads across the left side of my ribcage, his fingers spanning from my sternum to my back, and he feels.
The cracked ribs—he finds them. His fingertips trace the line of the fracture with a care that makes my breath catch.
Not because it hurts. The venom has that covered.
Because no one has ever touched my damage with the intention of understanding it.
“Bones bad.”
Two words. Same guttural tone as eat. His fingers press gently on the fracture site.
His head drops and he inhales at my ribs, his nose inches from my skin, breathing in the smell of broken bone and infection.
Reading me the way a predator reads prey.
Except predators read prey to find the weakness. He’s reading me to find the injury.
His hand moves to my shoulder. The bad one. His fingers close around the joint, so large they engulf it entirely, and he tests it—a slow, careful rotation. The joint grinds. I hiss through my teeth.
He stops. His tail tip finds the shoulder and presses—another pulse of targeted venom, the warmth blooming into the damaged joint, the grinding easing into something bearable.
He holds the venom there until the pain goes quiet.
Then he tests the rotation again. Slower.
The joint moves through a range it hasn’t attempted in eight months.
“A guard did that.” The words come out flat. Camp-voice. “Eight months ago. Wrenched it out and nobody put it back.”
His jaw tightens. His grip on the joint doesn’t change. But something crosses his face—a tightening behind the eyes, the look of a thing that has already decided who did this.
Nobody has ever looked like that on my account.
Not Gretchen, who could only ever offer her hands after the fact.
Not Lisa, who spat her anger at the ground because spitting it anywhere else got you written up.
This is different, a whole male built like a wall going rigid with something on my behalf, and it lands strange in my chest, too big for the space I have to put it in.
I stare at the root-beam ceiling of his warren. A nine-foot feral predator is testing my shoulder joint while his cock strains hard against my thigh.
The rut is in his body. The tension of his muscles. The heat pouring off his skin. The way his cock jerks against me every time his nose catches my scent, thick, the hot underside dragging across my thigh. But his hands are on my shoulder, on my ribs, on the damage.
He moves down my body. My hips meet his palms next, the bones sharp under them. My thighs, thin, the muscle wasted, skin stretched over what’s left.
He’s learning me. Finding every place my body has failed, the way the camp overseers checked the women every morning—except Shayla wrote the damage down and adjusted workloads.
He’s keeping track of it somewhere inside his feral brain.
Whatever he’s planning, it’s not about how much labor I can still produce.
His touch moves lower next, not rough, not sudden, his fingers trailing down from my hip, across the hollow below my navel, to the place I’ve been bracing for since he first touched me. His fingers part me with the focused patience of a thing checking the last item on a list.
I’m wet. The venom, the rut, whatever his scent does to a mate’s body—I’m wet despite the starvation, despite the fact that my body has no business producing anything when it can barely keep my heart beating.
He makes a sound. Low. Deep. Not a word. Satisfaction—the check returned a result his feral brain needed: she’s ready enough.
His cock moves. Not his hips—his cock. It shifts against my thigh, pressing forward, the thick underside dragging across my skin with a heat that borders on burning.
It moves like a living thing, independent of the body it’s attached to, curving toward the wet, seeking the way a tongue seeks water.
The blunt, swollen tip finds the place his fingers just found.
Presses.
I go still. Every muscle. The freeze. The camp-trained shutdown that served me through every moment a body came too close—go rigid, go silent, go somewhere else.
His tail tightens on my waist. Not hard. A squeeze. His eyes find mine, gold gone to black.
“Stay.”
The word cracks at the edges, rough, nothing like the flat authority of eat and more—like it scraped the inside of his throat on the way out.
Stay.
His palm rises from between my legs and settles on my sternum. The full weight of his crimson palm between my breasts. Over my heartbeat.
Stay.
What is he asking? Stay here? Stay conscious? Stay alive? Maybe all of it.
His cock presses. My body opens.
Every warning I was ever given crowds in at once, Shayla’s voice, the whispers between bunks, this is where it kills you. My hands fist in the furs. I brace. Not for pleasure, not for pain even, just for the ending the camps promised me.
The stretch is immense.
The size of him is a fact I knew from looking. Knew it the way you know a wall is tall by standing at the base. But knowing is one country. Feeling is another.
He enters me.
The stretch goes past anything I have a reference for. Past my own fingers in the dark barracks, past Lisa’s hand in the storage shed. My hips widen. My breath locks. The girth catches at the rim of me—a drag of impossible heat, pulling open tissue that has never been opened this wide.
This is not what it feels like. This is something else. My mind keeps reaching for the ending I braced for and finding this instead, huge and strange and not the death anyone promised me.
The venom catches the pain before it arrives. I brace for it—jaw clenched, hands fisting the furs, the old script running: it will hurt, it always hurts, wait for the hurt.
The hurt doesn’t come.
The sheer size of him drags against my walls with a friction that lights up nerves I didn’t know I had—hot, stretching, the girth so wide that every inch of me is pressed open around him.
But the venom has translated the stretch into something my body has no name for.
Not pleasure. I’m too emptied out for that, and pain doesn’t fit either.
Something between. Something that has no name in a camp-built vocabulary.
He drives in deeper. My back arches off the furs, my body responding to the depth of him before my mind can weigh in.
He’s so far inside me. Places that don’t have nerve endings, or shouldn’t.
The tip of his cock presses forward—flexing, curving against the front wall, a thick blunt pressure that pushes from the inside.
Not just the blind thrust of the rut. Seeking.
The way his hands sought the fracture in my ribs.
His cock is looking for something inside me with the same focused intention.
His hands lock on my hips, his crimson fingers spanning my hipbones entirely, holding me in place with a grip that would shatter me if he squeezed.
He doesn’t squeeze. He holds. Steady. His cock finds its depth and settles there.
A pulse of heat deep in my belly. His cock flexing once, adjusting, pressing outward against my walls like it’s taking the shape of me.
I lie under the wall of him and breathe.
He fills my vision. Crimson skin. Silver hair falling around his face.
The white horns catching the filtered light from the roof.
His scent presses in with the rest of him, hot and thick, gone dark and sweet underneath like fruit left too long in the sun.
His wings have opened, the blood-red membranes framing us, closing the world down to him, me, the furs, the place where his body is inside mine.
His cock flexes. Once. A deliberate press against the front wall—the tip curving, pushing, grinding against a spot that sends a jolt straight through my pelvis.
My hips jerk. A sound comes out of me, not a word, not a moan, small and broken and surprised, at a current running through my body I have no name for.
His dark eyes watch me. His grip tightens on my hips. The rut surges in his body, the tension climbing, the hum under his skin building to a frequency that vibrates through his cock into my walls. Into my teeth.
He pulls back. The girth drags, the whole impossible width pulling back through me, the friction lighting up every nerve ending he stretched open on the way in. My walls grip him on the withdrawal. Trying to keep him inside.
My body is doing things I’m not telling it to do. Clenching. Gripping. My hips trying to follow him back. The camp-brain screams: don’t move, don’t move, moving means participating and participating means—
He drives in.
Hard. All of him in one thrust. The wet sound of it—his cock driving into slick, swollen tissue, the girth stretching every nerve on the way in, the tip finding the front wall again and pressing. The impact rocks me into the furs.
My teeth click together. My hands grip the fur hard enough that my knuckles ache. Between my legs: the obscene fullness of him seated, the cock pulsing against my walls like a second heartbeat.
He does it again. And again.
And the rhythm begins.