7. Maeve #2
His head drops. He inhales at my throat, a long, deliberate breath, his nose against the pulse point where my blood runs close to the surface.
Whatever thread he’s chasing—sweat, venom, the copper edge of blood still healing under my skin—it tightens his jaw.
The frustration I saw earlier surfaces in the muscles of his neck, in the grip of his hands on my ribs.
“Too skinny.”
The frustration is almost anger. His palms press against the bones of my ribcage, feeling what isn’t there—the muscle, the fat, the tissue that should cushion bone from skin. His mate is bones. His cock is locked inside a body that can barely keep itself alive, let alone grow anything new.
The conflict is in his body. The rut says breed.
The rest of him says she can’t. His cock grinds against the knot’s seal in one rhythm, his hands running down my ribs in another.
Something in him wants to flood me with seed, the thing the camps warned me about, given a body at last. The other thing, the thing that fed me before it fucked me, wants to keep me alive long enough for the flooding to matter.
His cum comes.
The heat comes before the understanding. Deep. Sudden. Flooding. His cock pulses inside me, flexing in sequence, a wave of contractions that rolls from tip to base. The tip presses hard against the front wall as the first surge hits my body.
Hot. Thick. More than I can hold—except the knot is sealed and I have to hold it because there’s nowhere for it to go.
The smell of him thickens around us both, salt and heat and that same dark musk that soaked into the ground where he found me, except now it’s under my own skin instead of just in the air.
The heat spreads. Through my abdomen. My pelvis. Radiating outward from the place where his cock is pumping into me. The warmth is different from the venom—not the numbness, not the pain-killing fog. Something more direct. The heat of it soaking into tissue that has been cold for months.
My body responds, not consciously, not with any decision I make, deeper than thought. Something in me reaches for what he’s giving, absorbing it, the way cracked earth drinks rain. I don’t understand it. My body is taking what it needs without me.
He comes for a long time.
“What are you doing to me?” I don’t mean to say it. The words come out thick, half-lost in the furs, aimed at no one because the thing locked inside me doesn’t speak in sentences. But the question is real. It’s been building since the first piece of food touched my lips.
Saying it out loud cracks something. My eyes go hot and blurred at the edges, no tears, just the burn and the thick feeling in my throat that comes before crying if crying were still a thing I knew how to do. I don’t know if I’m asking him or asking myself.
He doesn’t answer. His cock pulses. His hand stays on my belly.
I lie under him. Knotted. Filled. His cock pulsing in rhythmic surges. Each surge soaks a little deeper into tissue that needs it. My body clenches around him, contractions that pull his cum deeper, that I didn’t ask for and can’t stop. I don’t fight them. My body is doing this on its own.
The vibration continues through the lock.
Low. Constant. The hum buzzing through the knot into my walls, encouraging the clenching, the absorption.
His tail tip stays on my clit—lighter now, not the focused pressure of before.
A warmth that keeps the whole system lit.
Every few seconds, a slow press that makes my walls flutter and pull another surge of his cum deeper.
He’s still inside me, deep, locked, vibrating, when his tail reaches behind him.
His tail stretches toward the clay pot beside the sleeping hollow.
Cooked meat, the same he fed me before. The tapered end wraps around a piece, pulls it from the pot, brings it forward.
Past his hip. Past my thigh. To his hand, which takes it without looking.
His hand holds the food to my mouth.
Fed from both ends. The thought arrives and I have nowhere to put it.
I take the meat with my teeth. I chew on the good side.
I swallow. The swallow moves under his gold-black eyes, tracked the same way it was before, the same settling in his body when the food goes down.
Inside me, his cock pulses again—another surge of heat and fullness. His hand offers the next piece.
I am being fed and fucked at the same time. His feral brain makes no distinction.
“Why?” The word is muffled. Barely a sound. What I’m asking, I couldn’t say. Why the food. Why the knot. Why his palm resting low on my stomach. Why any of it, when the camps told me this would be teeth and claws and screaming.
His thumb strokes my lower lip. Wiping a trace of juice from the meat. The touch is so precise, so deliberate, that my breath catches around it.
His mouth is on the crown of my head—the only place he can reach without curving down. The difference in our size turning a kiss into a placement. Not gentle. Present. His breath in my hair while his hand feeds me and his cock fills me.
I eat because starving people eat. I take the food from his fingers because the fingers are there and the food is there, and the alternative is refusing food while knotted to a monster.
But something else is happening. His cum warm inside me. Food warm in my stomach. His palm steady on my ribs. The tail on my clit, not pushing for the orgasm that couldn’t crest. Just there. A point of warmth that connects to the warmth inside me.
I am warm. I am full. I am held against nine feet of crimson muscle, silver hair, gold-dark eyes, the last of the light through the roof opening gone thin and copper above us. It is inside me. Around me. Feeding me.
He’s going to hurt me. He hasn’t hurt me. He fed me. Yes. He’s inside me. Yes. He fed me while he’s inside me. Yes. This is—
I can’t finish the thought. I keep reaching for what to call the thing that fucks you and feeds you at the same time, with the same hands, the same focus, the same flat golden intensity that says eat and stay and good like a vocabulary stripped to the only words that matter.
I keep reaching and there’s nothing there.
No word. No category. Just the furs, his hand, the warmth, the not-knowing.
His palm settles low on my stomach. The flat of it, the crimson warmth, pressing gently against the space below my navel.
He presses. Not hard. Feeling. His fingers spread across my abdomen—spanning the space where his cum pools, the place where my body is full of him.
The touch is two things at once: a claim—mine—and a question—is it enough.
It’s not enough. It’s a start.
His palm stays where it is, low on my stomach. The knot holds. The vibration hums.
His cock is inside me and it is going to stay there. I understand this now—somewhere below thought, the way I understood the camp fences were permanent on the first night behind them. The understanding arrives not as fear but as the strangest kind of relief.
Nothing is coming for me. No guard to drag me back to the work line. No hands to pull me from the barracks before dawn. No shove, no impact. There is a locked knot, a warm body, his palm low on my stomach, food finally in it.
My eyes fall shut, the locked knot the last thing that reaches me before the dark takes me. His cum is warm inside me, spreading through tissue that hasn’t been warm in years. The furs are soft beneath me. His body is a wall above me, around me, in me.
I sleep.
The first real sleep in weeks. Deep. Heavy. The kind that pulls you under and holds you there. The sleep of a body that has been given, for the first time since the world ended, something worth resting for.
His palm doesn’t move from where it rests. His cock doesn’t leave my body. He holds me inside his nest the way he holds his territory—completely, without negotiation, with the patient and absolute certainty of something that has decided what belongs to it.
Some last thin thread of camp-brain tries to warn me before the dark takes me all the way under.
Sleeping means you’re not watching. Sleeping means whatever happens next, happens to you.
I hear it. I let it go anyway. Four years of never sleeping deep enough to dream, and here, tonight, wrapped around something the camps swore would kill me, I choose to let go of the watching.
I sleep, and I dream of nothing, and nothing is the kindest dream I’ve had in four years.