I could survive this.
The sounds continued through the night. That patient grinding and shifting, bone being moved and placed and fitted together. He wasn't chasing me. He wasn't hunting, not the way the orientation materials had described. He was building something.
I didn't know what that meant. But I knew it changed the calculations.
I didn't sleep. Couldn't. Every sound from outside triggered another wave of arousal that left me gasping and grinding against the bone floor. The scent never faded, kept my body in a constant state of readiness that I couldn't switch off.
Twice I found myself on hands and knees without deciding to move, back arched, pussy exposed to empty air, presenting myself to no one. The humiliation of it burned almost as much as the need.
I tried to masturbate again around midnight. Failed again. Screamed again. Spent an hour sobbing into my folded arms while my traitorous cunt clenched and wept for something it couldn't have.
When the sky began to lighten, I was exhausted. Hollowed out. My inner thighs were raw from rubbing together. The bone beneath me was wet with fluid my body had produced through the night, a puddle of desperate wanting that served no one.
My legs shook when I tried to stand. Not just from arousal but from genuine fatigue. The tonic was consuming resources my body needed for basic function, redirecting everything toward reproduction, toward him.
But I was still here. Still thinking. Still planning.
He knew where I was. He knew what the tonic was doing to me. And he was patient enough to spend the night constructing something instead of dragging me out of my hiding spot.
That patience was worse than aggression. That was calculation.
I understood calculation.
I just didn't know yet what he was calculating toward.
I pulled on my ruined pants because being naked in hostile territory was stupid, even if the fabric against my swollen flesh was its own kind of torture. Carved another set of three lines into the bone near where I'd slept.
Proof I'd made it through the night.
Proof I could make it through another one.
Twenty-nine days left.
My pussy clenched at the thought of twenty-nine more nights like this one, and I had to brace myself against the wall until the wave passed.
One day at a time. One hour at a time. One minute at a time.
I could survive this.
I had to.
KERRIS
The path I'd come from was gone.
I stood at the entrance of my vertebra shelter, staring at a wall that hadn't existed eight hours ago. Bone. Interlocking femurs, perfectly balanced vertebrae, the kind of construction that would have taken a team of engineers days to plan and weeks to execute.
He'd done it in one night. In silence. In the dark.
I walked to the wall and ran my hand along the join, trying to focus on structure instead of the wet ache between my legs that had only worsened with the few hours of fitful sleep I'd managed. The angles were precise, the weight distributed to prevent toppling. No mortar. No binding agent. Just bone fitted against bone so perfectly that the structure held by geometry alone.
Admiration and fear tangled in my chest, threaded through with a spike of arousal so sharp it made me press my hand against my belly. My pussy clenched at the thought of those massive hands, the ones that had shaped these bones while I lay fifty feet away, soaking the floor with arousal and failing to make myself come.
He was a builder. Like me. Except better.
I pressed my forehead against the cool bone surface until my body settled into its baseline throb. The baseline had shifted overnight. What had been disruptive was becoming constant. What had been waves was becoming tide.
Day two.
