"Hide from what?"
"She never said exactly. Just that there were people who would hurt us if they found out what we were." Her voice has gone soft in a way I've never heard from her. Vulnerable. "I thought she meant because I was feral. Because of what I do during heats—the blackouts, the violence. I thought that's what made us dangerous."
"Maybe it was more than that."
"Maybe." She shifts, getting comfortable against me. The knot has started to soften but I'm still inside her, still connected, reluctant to withdraw. "She died when I was sixteen. I've been on my own since then."
Eight years. Eight years of surviving alone, of heats spent in forests and caves, of a world that looked at her like a monster because they didn't understand what she was.
I know something about that.
"I'm sorry," I say, and mean it.
"Don't be. She prepared me." A pause. "For this, I think. Even though she couldn't have known—she prepared me to survive things that should have killed me."
Like me, I don't say.
Like the claiming. Like the contamination changing her blood. Like whatever she's becoming that I don't have a name for yet.
The heat rolls back in before I can spiral further into guilt.
I feel it through the bond—that wave of desperate need crashing through her, turning whatever she was about to say into a moan. Her body arches against mine, her inner wallsclenching around my softening cock, and the sensation rips a groan from my chest.
"Again," she gasps, grinding back against me. "I need?—"
"I know." I'm already hardening inside her, my body responding to her need with an urgency that has nothing to do with the curse. "I've got you."
This time when I fuck her, I pay attention to every second.
-
The heat breaks on the fourth day.
One moment I have her pinned beneath me, driving into her with savage desperation, her legs wrapped around my waist and her nails raking down my back. The next, something shifts—the fever receding from her eyes, the frantic edge softening, her body going still beneath mine instead of arching up to meet each thrust.
I feel the change through the bond before I see it on her face.
The heat-daze clearing. Awareness flooding back in—where she is, what she's doing, who's on top of her with his cock still buried inside her body.
Her expression shutters closed.
"Get off me."
The words hit like a blade between the ribs.
I pull out—we're both raw, both oversensitive, and she winces at the withdrawal—and roll off her immediately. She's already moving, scrambling to the far side of the bed, as far from me as she can get without leaving the mattress entirely.
The bond floods with her emotions. Shame. Anger. Disgust—at herself, I think, more than at me. The particular self-loathing of someone who's just done something they swore they wouldn't do.
"Kess—"
"Don't." She's reaching for the sheet, wrapping it around herself like armor. Won't look at me. "Don't say anything. Don't... just don't."
I should give her space. Should get up and leave, let her have the room to herself, let her rebuild her walls in private.
But my beast is snarling at the sudden distance, at the coldness radiating off her, at the way she's looking at the wall instead of at me.Ours, it growls.Go to her. Fix it.
I can't fix this.
