38. Maeve
MAEVE
On the third night, I tend his wounds.
The bruise is fading, shade healing faster than human, the dark discoloration retreating from his hip, the swelling going down in stages.
He moves easier now. Still hitches on the right side, still breathes carefully when he lifts the heavy braces for the shelters he can’t stop building even when I tell him to rest. But the worst is past. The cracked rib is knitting.
The gash on his cheek is a pink seam, new skin growing over it.
Even the wound smells different now—the raw copper edge gone, just warm skin and the faint green bite of whatever grows in his spit that closes flesh faster than it should.
Three days, and the territory has changed.
The shelters have doubled. Red builds them the way he builds everything, obsessively, carefully, with the attention of hands that know what a home is supposed to feel like.
The new ones are smaller than the warren but solid.
Root-braced frames, woven walls, raised sleeping platforms that keep the women off the damp ground.
The clearing smells like split wood now, sharp and green, sap bleeding from the fresh cuts and drying sticky in the sun.
He built the first one in silence while the women slept.
They woke to a new structure and the massive Shade already working on the second one, his injured side hitched, his tail curling and uncurling with the rhythm of work.
Lisa took over after that. She directed him, pointing to locations, specifying sizes.
“Water-catch goes there,” she told him, tapping the spot with her foot.
“Fire pit moves ten feet that way, downwind of the shelters. Latrine’s past that ridge—count it out, twenty paces, not less.
” Red followed her instructions with the patient focus of a man who recognizes a good teacher when he hears one.
Lisa’s voice carried across the clearing while a nine-foot Shade built what she described—the partnership that was never supposed to happen.
The freed women watch him. The watching has evolved.
On the first day it was from inside the shelters—eyes through the woven walls, faces turning away when he looked in their direction.
The propaganda is still louder than the evidence.
Shades will rape you to death. Shayla’s voice was in their ears, the last voice some of them heard at the barracks door.
On the second day, two of them stood at the edge of the clearing. Close enough to see him work. Far enough to run.
Now, on the third day, three of them came to the cooking surface while he was turning the meat.
The fat drips and hisses on the hot stone, and the smell of it—rich, charred at the edges, better than anything the barracks ever fed us—pulls them closer whether they mean to come or not.
They stood ten feet away and watched his hands—the massive crimson hands that can tear cattle fencing, turning a spit with the same care they use to hold bark-strips for reading lessons.
One woman, young, brown-haired, with a scar from her ear to her jaw, tilted her head, studying his hands, the gentleness of the rotation, the finger that checked the temperature of the stone, the adjustment so careful it was almost tender.
She stayed ten minutes, left, then came back five minutes later and stayed longer.
Watching her watch him lodges somewhere under my ribs, a feeling I can’t put a clean word to.
I know that ten feet exactly—the precise distance where close enough to see meets far enough to run.
I used to stand at that distance from everything.
My throat closes. It isn’t the fire smoke.
I want to call it nothing. It isn’t nothing.
It’s a girl measuring the same careful gap I used to keep, and my hands want to cross the clearing and tell her it comes out even, it comes out safe, except I don’t know that for certain either. I only know it did for me.
Marta, the older woman with the limp, sits on a stone ten feet from the fire every evening and watches Red read.
She hasn’t spoken to him. But she’s getting closer.
The distance shrinking by a foot each day, the way trust arrives in camp—not all at once, not with words.
In inches. In the slow closing of space between a body that expects violence and a body that isn’t providing it.
He’s sitting by the fire now. The bark-strip in his hands.
The reading lessons keep going through the raid, the cracked rib, the fifteen women who flinch at his shadow.
He reads every morning and every evening, his massive frame hunched by the fire, his crimson finger tracing words, his lips moving.
He reads faster now. Still slow compared to a child learning.
But the sentences come whole instead of broken.
I take the bark-strip from his hands.
He looks up. Gold eyes, firelight, the question on his face.
“I need to see the side,” I say.
He lifts his arm. The obedience of a man who has learned that arguing with me about his own injuries is a fight he won’t win.
I run my fingers along the bruise. Pressing gently.
Testing. The swelling has reduced by half.
The muscle underneath is looser, the rigid guarding giving way to the slow uncoil of tissue that’s healing.
“Better,” I say.
“Told you.”
“You told me you were fine three days ago when you could barely breathe. Your opinion on your own body is not trusted.”
The almost-smile again, the corner of his mouth moving, the expression that looks wrong on the crimson face and exactly right on the man underneath.
It’s happening more often now, the man’s face learning to do what the feral’s face couldn’t—the small movements of humor, of warmth, of the quiet pleasure of being argued with by someone who cares enough to argue.
I dip the cloth in warm water. Wring it.
The water carries the smell of the herbs Lisa boiled into it, bitter and green, cutting through the woodsmoke that’s soaked into everything at this fire.
Press it against the bruise—the heat spreading into the tissue, the slow seep that helps muscle relax.
He exhales. His eyes close. The tension in his shoulders easing, the guard dropping for the first time in three days.
He guards all day. He guards all night. He lets me tend him like this, by the fire, when the women are in the shelters and Lisa is running the perimeter check and it’s just us.
I’ve been guarding too. I didn’t clock it until right now, my shoulders coming down an inch under my own hands as I move the cloth, the ache in them that’s been there so long I stopped counting it as pain.
Camp-brain says vigilance is just how a body stays alive, nothing to make a fuss over.
But sitting here with his heartbeat under my palm and no fence in sight, some coiled thing in my spine finally, finally lets go, and it comes loose so suddenly it almost hurts worse than holding it did.
“The women,” he says. Eyes still closed.
“Lisa has them. Lisa always has them.”
“Three of them came—to the cooking surface today. While I was—” He opens his eyes. “They didn’t run.”
“They’re learning.” I move the cloth higher. Along his ribs, the broad curve of a chest built to hold a body three times my size. The skin smooth under the cloth, the heat of him radiating through the wet fabric. “Marta sat closer today. Did you notice?”
“I noticed.”
“Give them time.”
He nods. His eyes close again. The fire pops, the canopy shifts outside, and the sounds of women drift up from the shelters—murmuring, the occasional laugh that startles everyone who hears it.
Gretchen hums—the tuneless sound she makes when she’s braiding, her scarred hands already working again.
She started on the second day, her palms still raw, the blisters still healing, but her fingers finding hair the way Red’s hands find wood, the compulsion to tend, the thing the camps couldn’t break.
I set the cloth down.
This isn’t tending, or cleaning, not anymore. I settle my palms flat against his chest, the crimson skin warm under them, the heartbeat steady beneath, the muscle that held an Unmade and tore a fence apart and carried Gretchen through miles of canopy with a cracked rib.
His eyes open.
“Maeve.”
“I want you,” I say. The same three words as the first chosen night. But quieter now. Slower. Deeper. I almost lost him three days ago. I need to feel him alive under my hands.
The memory of it comes up fast and ugly for a second, the sound the Unmade’s blow made when it landed, the way he went down, the way my whole chest turned to stone before I’d even decided to be scared.
The blood smell from that night comes back with it, sudden and metallic on my tongue like it’s happening again.
I shove it back down. It doesn’t want to stay down.
It never fully does. But his skin is warm under my palms and his heart is beating steady and stupid and alive, and I hold onto that instead.
He reaches for me. Slow. The injured side limiting him—the right arm moving carefully, the ribs protesting the twist. His hand cups the back of my neck. Draws me forward. Our foreheads touching. The horns framing my face. His breath on my mouth.
“Careful,” I say. “Your ribs.”
“My ribs are fine.”
“Your ribs are cracked and you’re a terrible liar.”
He kisses me. The answer to the argument—his mouth on mine, the pressure careful but sure, the taste of smoked meat and the mineral tang underneath that is just him. His tongue against my lower lip. I open for him. The kiss deepening, his good hand pulling me closer, the injured side be damned.
I straddle his lap, gentle, careful of the bruised side.
This close, he smells like woodsmoke and warm stone and something under both of those that’s only him, the same smell that used to mean danger and now just means safe.
I settle onto his thighs, my knees wide, my hands on his shoulders.
The belly between us—bigger now, the twins growing.
His hands span my hips. The thumbs at the crease of my thighs, the fingers wrapping around to the small of my back.
Holding me like I’m the thing he built the territory for.
His cock is already hard against my inner thigh, the heat of it, the tip curling toward me—the idle seeking that his body does when I’m close, the slow flex that finds the warmth.
I reach down. Take him in my hand. He exhales—a shudder, the sound of a man who has been in pain for three days and is about to feel something else.
I guide him in. Slow. Inch by inch. Sinking down on him while his hands grip my hips and his breath goes ragged and the stretch—the endless, impossible stretch of him—fills me from the inside out.
I take him to the base. Hold. Both of us breathing.
His forehead against mine. The fire crackling.
The warren warm and close around us. The world outside—the women, the camp, the twenty-five we left behind—held at bay by the membrane of his wings and the rasp of his breath above me.
I move. Barely. A roll of my hips, the grind that seats him deep and holds him there—no thrusting, no riding, just the slow, circular press that moves him inside me without jarring his ribs.
He fills me at a different angle with each roll, the living curl of his cock finding new places inside me, the tip pressing forward and then easing, the constant subtle adjustment that means his body is listening to mine.
His hands flex on my hips. The groan building in his chest, the sub-vocal rumble low in my spine, warmer than the rut’s desperate vibration, slower.
“Maeve—” His voice breaks, wrecked with feeling.
I press my mouth to the healing gash on his cheek. My lips on the new skin, the tender line where the Unmade’s claw split him open. I kiss it. Soft. The same tending he gave me—the mouth on the wound, the breath on the skin, the message that says I see where you’re broken and I’m here.
His arms come around me. Both of them—even the right side, even with the rib, the pain overridden by the need to hold me. My whole body pressed against his. The belly between us, the twins still, the cock deep inside me, his arms tight around me, the firelight warm on our skin.
The orgasm builds like sunrise, a slow warmth spreading through my hips, the pulse of it steady, the feeling of being full of him in every way a body can be full.
His mouth in my hair. His hands on my back.
His cock pulsing inside me, the knot swelling gently, not the rut’s vise, just a holding, the body’s way of saying stay.
I come with my arms around his neck. Quiet.
The orgasm rolling through me in long, slow waves that tighten around him.
He comes after—his hips pressing up once, the controlled thrust of a man managing a cracked rib, and the groan buried in my hair.
The warmth spreading inside me. The knot holding.
The two of us locked together in the firelight.
I don’t move. He doesn’t let me. His arms tight. His knot pulsing. His mouth at the crown of my head, breathing into my hair.
“Two more days,” I say. “Then we go back.”
He nods against my hair.
Two more days. The cracked rib will be healed enough. He’ll be strong enough to fight what’s waiting.
I don’t know yet what’s waiting. I don’t know that Shayla has spent these same three days building something worse than a barracks door. I don’t know that the camp we left behind has changed.
What I do know, lying here with him soft and heavy inside me and his arms locked around my ribs like he’s afraid I’ll evaporate, is that this is too good.
Camp-brain has a rule about that. Good things get taken.
Good things are how they get you—you let your guard down for a full meal, a kind word, a night without a beating, and then the ground opens up.
I don’t want to think it. I think it anyway, the small mean voice that’s kept me alive since I was fourteen, and I hate that even here, even now, my shoulders are already bracing for the bill to come due.
I just hold him. His heartbeat under my palm. His cock softening inside me, the warmth of his cum settling into the place where the twins are growing. The fire crackles. The canopy shifts. The women’s breathing from the shelters below rises through the floor of the warren.
I count the days. I count them the old way, the camp way, like counting is the only thing standing between me and whatever’s coming.