33. Maeve
MAEVE
His hand is on my belly when he asks.
We’re in the sleeping hollow. The fire is low, embers, not flame, the orange glow painting the root walls in shifting copper, the shadows long and soft where the light doesn’t reach.
The smell of banked coals hangs warm and dry in the air, mixed with the animal smell of him this close.
I’m on my side, curled into the warm wall of him, his arm draped over me with his palm flat against the swell.
The twins are active tonight. Little rolls and nudges, the strange underwater gymnastics of bodies that don’t know yet that the world outside is broken.
His thumb traces a slow circle, feeling the movement under the skin.
“Billy,” he says.
Not a question. Not exactly. The word hangs in the amber light between us, carried on the careful rhythm of a man who is still learning how to say the things that matter.
I wait.
“Sam.” Quieter. His thumb stills. “Dickie.”
Three dead boys. I already know them. He gave them to me in the firelight days ago, pulled them out of thirteen years of feral silence and laid them on the furs between us like offerings.
Billy, eight. Sam, almost reading. Dickie, too little.
The tremor that came with each name, the grief pouring out of a body that held it too long.
His hand presses gently against my belly. The twin on the left kicks, a sharp, definite thump against his palm. He makes a low sound, wordless, the sound a male makes when something inside him cracks open.
“I want—” He stops. His jaw works. The frustration of a man with more thought than language, the gap between what he means and what his mouth can do with it. He tries again. “The names. I want to—give them.”
I turn in his arm. Face him. His gold eyes are close, inches away, the firelight caught in them, the steady warmth that replaced the feral flatness. His silver hair falls across his forehead. I push it back. My fingers against his scalp, the hair thick and cool between them.
“Which ones?” I ask.
He blinks. Like he expected a different response. Resistance, maybe. Or the camp-silence I still fall into when something lands too heavy.
“Billy,” he says. “And Sam.”
Billy and Sam. The oldest and the middle. Not Dickie—Dickie was four, too little to have settled into his name. I can hear that in the way he says them. Billy is solid in his mouth. Sam is tender. Dickie is a wound he hasn’t found the bottom of yet.
“Billy was the reader,” I say.
His eyes close. A nod. Small. The grief still comes in waves, not the tidal crash of the first night, but the slow swells that rise without warning. A word, a memory, the kick of an unborn child hitting the spot where a dead child used to rest.
“And the climber,” he says. He opens his eyes. “Everything. Trees. Fences. My—” A pause. The ghost of something that might be a smile if his face remembered how. “My desk. In class. I’d turn around and—there he was. Standing on it. Grinning.”
I laugh. Short, surprised. The sound startles both of us.
Laughter is so rare in this warren that it echoes off the root walls like something foreign.
His eyes widen slightly. Then the corner of his mouth moves.
The almost-smile I’ve seen once before—wrong on the crimson features, right on the man underneath.
“Climbed your desk,” I repeat.
“Every day.” His voice is rough but the words come easier when he’s remembering them.
The teacher’s voice surfacing through the rubble.
“Sam never would. Sam sat in the corner after school and drew on the backs of my papers, quiet as a held breath. But he watched Billy up there like he was watching the sun come up.”
The twins shift inside me. A roll, a nudge, the two of them rearranging themselves the way they do at night when my body is still and warm and they have room to move.
His hand follows the motion, his palm tracking the movement like he’s reading a sentence—left to right, the twin on the left pushing, the twin on the right responding.
“Billy and Sam,” I say.
His eyes come to mine. Searching. Waiting.
“Yes.”
One word. He hears it the way he heard the change in me during the rut—the moment I stopped fighting the furs and started answering him instead.
This “Yes” is different. Quieter. But it carries the same weight.
I’m giving him something he can’t take. The names are his to offer. The decision to accept them is mine.
My chest goes tight taking them. Two dead boys’ names, sliding onto two living ones like a coat handed down before it’s even been worn.
I don’t know if it’s right, giving unborn children the names of children who climbed desks and read early and died before they got the chance to grow past eight.
But it feels like the only right thing in a room full of things that aren’t simple, and I say yes anyway.
He presses his forehead against mine. The horns frame my face, white bone curving past my temples. His breath on my lips. The size of him curled around me, the massive crimson body shaped into a question mark with me at the center, his hand on my belly where Billy and Sam are turning in the dark.
“Thank you.” Rough. Broken in the middle.
My palm settles over his, barely covering his knuckles, dark brown skin on crimson. The fire pops. The twins kick.
Later. The fire has rebuilt to flame, the chill pushed back, the light climbing brighter up the root walls and throwing his shadow huge and horned across the ceiling.
He’s sitting up against the wall of the sleeping hollow, and I’m between his legs, my back against his chest, his arms loose around me, his jaw settled against my temple, his heartbeat steady against my spine.
“Tell me about the warren,” I say.
He’s quiet for a moment. Then his hand lifts, gestures at the walls. The smooth root surfaces, the reinforced joints where the ceiling braces meet.
“Was a den first. A hole in the roots.” His hand drops.
“The rest—after she died.” The pause. He doesn’t say her name because he doesn’t know it.
“The feral—the feral built. Couldn’t stop.
” His hand opens and closes. The motion of a man describing his own hands working without permission.
“Walls. Floor. Cooking. The—fire surface.” He means the raised stone platform he cooks on.
The one designed to hold heat, to radiate it into the warren long after the flames die.
“All of this? By yourself?”
“Thirteen years.” Flat. The fact of it landing between us. “Hands kept building. Mind was—gone. Hands didn’t stop.”
The warren looks different now, seen through eyes that know what built it.
The utensils hang from bone hooks, shaped by hand, pale and yellowed where his fingers have worn the grain smooth over thirteen years.
The sleeping hollows are multiple—the main one deeper and wider, the secondary one against the far wall, smaller, shallower, built for a body that never came back.
“The second hollow,” I say. “That was for her.”
“For—a family.” He corrects me carefully. The words costing him effort but coming. “Not just her. Children. The feral wanted—the feral built for children that didn’t exist.”
The twins kick. Both of them. A simultaneous double-thump that makes my belly visibly jump. His arms tighten around me.
“They exist now,” I say.
His chin presses harder against my crown. His chest expands, a deep breath, the kind you take when something lands and you need a second before you can hold it.
“I need to—make it bigger.” He sounds like he’s talking to himself. Planning. “The sleeping space. Room for—they’ll grow. They’ll need—” He stops. Swallows. “Space to climb. Billy climbed everything.”
The name slipping out like that—present tense, the dead son and the unborn son sharing a name and a verb—makes my throat close. I press my hand against his forearm. The massive crimson arm around me, the muscle warm under my palm.
“We have time,” I say.
He nods against my head. His hand moves on my belly. Slow circles. Feeling.
“The women,” I say.
He goes still, the quiet of a man who has been waiting for this.
“The camp,” I say. “Where I was.”
His arms stay loose around me, present, the way the teacher listens—body open, attention full, waiting for the speaker to find the end of the thought.
“Gretchen braided my hair. Every morning. Five years of mornings, her hands quick and sure in the grey barracks light, working three strands into rows tight against my scalp—she braided my hair and told me I was still beautiful. She’s the reason I—” My throat closes again.
I push through it. Camp-muscle. You swallow the feeling and you keep talking.
“Lisa hid my blood when I bled through my clothes. Stole rags from the supply tent. If the Eunuchs knew I was bleeding they’d put me on lighter duty and Shayla would dock the rations for the whole barracks. ”
His growl is low. Not directed at me. The sound a predator makes when it learns something hurt what belongs to it.
My breath goes out of me hearing it, some old-held breath I didn’t know I was still holding since the day it happened. Nobody ever growled on my behalf before. Nobody ever had the size to make it matter.
“There are more,” I say. “Women. In the camp. Behind the cattle fences. Being told—” I stop. Breathe. “Being told you’d kill me. Being told the canopy is death. Being told to stay behind the fences because the world outside is worse than the world inside.”
“It’s not.”
Two words. Said with the flat certainty of a man who has seen both worlds.
“I know it’s not. They don’t.”
The fire crackles. The canopy shifts outside, the rustling of mutated vegetation, the alive sound of a world that grew over the old one. His hand has stopped moving on my belly. Still. The weight of it resting on the swell, his thumb pressed against the spot where Billy or Sam just kicked.
I don’t say the rest. Not yet. The thought is still forming, its edges sharp and dangerous. I need to hold it a little longer, figure out what going back means when going back means walking into the worst place I’ve ever been.
But the seed is planted. It grows the way the twins grow, slowly, steadily, pushing against the walls of what I thought was possible.
His arms tighten, protective, the arms of a male who has heard his mate describe harm and whose body is already moving to protect.
“They’re wrong about you,” I say. Quiet. My head against his chest, his heartbeat under my ear. “I was wrong about you.”
He doesn’t answer. He presses his mouth to the crown of my head. His breath warm in my hair. The 4c coils cushioning his lips, the healthy thickness of what grew back after the camps broke it.
The anger comes.
Not at him. At the fences. At Shayla’s voice in my head, the voice that told me this would kill me—this, the warm arm, the reading lessons, the man whose hand rests on the belly where his sons are growing.
The anger makes my skin hot. Makes my body tighten around the absence of him because he pulled out an hour ago and the phantom ache is still there, the walls still reaching for what isn’t inside them.
I turn in his arms. Shove his chest. He goes back against the wall, letting me push him, not because I’m strong enough to move nine feet of muscle but because he’s learned that when I push, I need him flat.
I straddle him. Reach down. His cock is already thickening.
He reads my body faster than I read my own, the scent of my arousal hitting him before I’ve registered the wanting.
I take him in my hand. He’s not fully hard yet.
The tip curls against my fingers, flexing, seeking.
I don’t wait. I guide him to the opening and sink down.
The stretch on a half-hard cock is different.
The girth building inside me as he stiffens, the impossible widening of my walls as he goes from thick to iron while he’s already inside.
My breath stutters. My hands flatten on his chest. The crimson skin under my palms, the hard muscle, the scars from whatever he fought to claim this territory.
He finishes hardening inside me, full, rigid, pulsing, pressing against every wall I have.
I grind down.
The anger drives my hips. The cattle fences.
The rations. Shayla’s voice telling me the canopy would kill me.
The years of sleeping on hard ground, of cracked ribs, of teeth knocked out.
The years of believing the thing under me was a monster.
I grind down on his cock with the fury of a woman remembering what was done to her while sitting on the proof of what was done for her.
He grips my hips. His hands spanning my waist, the crimson fingers pressing into the flesh that wasn’t there three months ago. He doesn’t thrust up. He holds me. Lets me take what I need. His gold eyes watching my face with the steady, burning attention that makes my skin feel transparent.
I come snarling. My nails in his chest. My teeth bared.
The orgasm ripping through me with the anger still hot behind it, the grief and the fury tangling in my hips.
He comes after me, his hips finally driving up, the restraint breaking, the full upward thrust that lifts me and slams me back down and he roars against my throat.
His teeth on my neck. The blunt ones, not the fangs.
The pressure fierce enough to echo in my spine.
I collapse against his chest. His cock softening slowly inside me. His arms wrap around my back, fingers finding my hair, cradling my head against the space between his pectorals where my head fits, the smell of sweat and smoke and him settling thick around both of us like the fire’s pulled closer.
The twins move.
His palm finds the curve of me. Rests there. Billy and Sam turn in the dark, alive and growing, while their mother lies on their father’s chest, planning the thing she hasn’t said yet.
Underneath the resolve there’s a smaller, colder thing that doesn’t want to go anywhere near those fences again.
That would rather stay in this warren with the fire and the reading lessons and never smell the camp’s chemical stink for the rest of my life.
I let it sit there next to the resolve without pretending it isn’t real.
I’m not going to lie to myself about which one is louder some nights.
I’m going back.
I’m going back and I’m taking him with me and I’m opening every cage Shayla ever built.
But not tonight. Tonight I lie here. Tonight I breathe against his skin and feel his heart and hold the names of two boys—one dead, one coming—in my mouth.
Billy. Sam.
The fire burns. The canopy shifts. Red’s arms hold me and the anger cools to something harder. Something with edges. Something that will cut a fence open.