Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The church school let out when the sun hit the top of the bell tower, same as every day, and same as every day Alshera stood at the gate with her hands folded and her back straight and her ears turning toward every footstep on the cobblestones behind her. The dress was Hearthlands cotton, cream-colored, high-necked, bought from a seamstress who'd charged her double and smiled while doing it. It fit well enough. It covered what it needed to cover. It did not, no matter how she adjusted the shoulders or cinched the waist, disguise what she was underneath it. The fabric pulled across her chest when she breathed. It caught on the curve of her hips when she walked. A ranger's body in a housewife's dress, and every man on the street could see the seams.

"Mama!"

Terrena hit her at the knees, arms wrapped tight, face buried in the cotton. Alvan followed three steps behind, walking with his hands in his pockets and his chin up, ten years old and already carrying himself like he owned the road. Like his father. Green Mother, exactly like his father.

"How was the lesson?" Alshera asked, her voice dropping into that other register, the soft one, the one that didn't exist anywhere else in her life.

"Brother Aldous said I read the best," Terrena said into her skirt.

"Brother Aldous smells like onions," Alvan said.

"He does," Alshera agreed. She took Terrena's hand, settled her other palm on the back of Alvan's neck, and steered them toward the market road.

The town of Cresswall sat on the edge of the Hearthlands where the farmland started thinning toward hill country. Not large enough for a proper Guild hall, not small enough to ignore. Stone buildings, thatched roofs, a market square with a fountain that hadn't worked in years. The kind of place that tolerated adventurers because they spent coin and killed the things that ate livestock, and resented them for the same reasons.

They made it half a block.

"Ashara's tits, look at the size of those."

Two men outside the farrier's shop. One leaning on a post, arms crossed. The other sitting on an upturned barrel with a mug in his hand. Both staring. The one on the barrel didn't even lower his voice.

"Bet catfolk women purr when you squeeze 'em."

Alshera's ears flattened against her skull. Her hand tightened on Terrena's. She kept walking.

"Mama, what did he say?" Terrena asked.

"Nothing worth hearing, soft paws."

The market road was worse. Busier. More eyes. A carter hauling grain slowed his horse to look. A group of young men outside the tavern tracked her with the lazy focus of dogs watching a bone walk past. One of them, barely old enough to shave, elbowed his friend and said something about fur-chasers that made the group bark with laughter.

"Oi, sweetheart. You looking for a man or you already got one dumb enough?"

She didn't turn. Her tail, hidden under the skirt's hem, curled tight against her thigh.

"That ass, though. Throne above."

"Bet she's wild. They're all wild. Heard catfolk go into heat like animals."

Alvan's hand found hers. Small fingers, warm, gripping hard. He was looking up at her with his jaw set, Dortan's jaw on a child's face, and his amber eyes were bright and furious.

"Mama, why are they talking about you?"

"Because they're sand-blind," she said, quiet and even. "And we don't stop for sand-blind men."

A woman in a blue shawl came out of the baker's shop with a girl about Terrena's age. The girl stared at Alshera's ears, at Terrena's soft golden fuzz along her forearms, at Alvan's eyes. The woman grabbed her daughter's wrist and pulled her to the other side of the street without a word. The girl stumbled. The woman didn't look back.

Terrena pressed closer to Alshera's leg.

"Mama, why did she..."

"Some people are afraid of what they don't know." The words came out smooth, rehearsed. She'd said them before. She'd say them again. They tasted like sand every time. "It's not about you, little one. It's never about you."

They turned onto the lane that led to their rented rooms above the chandler's shop. Quieter here. Fewer people. The cobblestones gave way to packed dirt and the noise of the market faded behind them. Alshera's shoulders loosened a fraction of an inch.

Alvan was still holding her hand. He hadn't let go since the tavern.

She looked down at him. The jaw. That stubborn, squared-off jaw that had no business being on a child's face, that would broaden and harden as he grew until he looked like a man she'd spent years trying to forget and failing. His hair was dark, darker than hers, and it fell across his forehead the same way.

Then Terrena, looking up with a question still forming on her lips. Her eyes. Green Mother's grace, her eyes. The gold of Alshera's irises shot through with veins of cold blue, winter-sky blue, deep-water blue. Dortan's blue. The two colors didn't blend so much as argue, gold and blue fighting for territory in a little girl's face, and neither winning, and the result was startling and beautiful and it split Alshera open every time she looked too long.

Terrena's mouth. Her own mouth. Full lower lip, the hint of small fangs just visible behind it.

But the eyes were his.

Ten years. The number hit her between the ribs. Ten years since a tavern in Miravar, since cheap wine and cheaper excuses, since a man with cold blue eyes looked at her mouth instead of her chest and she'd known, right then, standing at the bar with her bow still strapped across her back and road dust in her fur, she'd known he was going to be a problem.

The dirt lane, the chandler's shop, the children's hands in hers. All of it thinned, went distant, like looking through water.

Ten years back.

The smell of grave dirt. That's what brought it back. Alvan's shoes, caked with mud from the lane, and the sweet-rot undertone of turned earth, and then the lane was gone and the children were gone and she was twenty years old with undead ichor drying on her leathers and two gold crowns heavy in her belt pouch.

Miravar stank of fish and lamp oil and the sea, and under all of it, tonight, the lingering sweetness of corpse rot that no amount of scrubbing had gotten out of her hair. The bounty had been good. Forty crowns split five ways for clearing a crypt full of walking dead that the local lord had let fester for three seasons because he was too cheap to post a proper contract. By the time Heaven's Lance arrived, the horde had spilled out of the crypt and into the surrounding farmland, and what should have been a copper-rank clear had turned into six hours of hacking through bodies that wouldn't stay down.

The others had gone to bed. Sensible people. People who didn't have a human swordsman following three steps behind them like a dog that had caught a scent.

"You've got bone dust on your ass," Dortan said.

"You've been staring at my ass long enough to catalogue what's on it?"

"Kitten, I could write a book about your ass. Illustrated. Chapters."

She walked faster. The cobblestones were slick with evening rain, the street lamps throwing orange puddles of light between long stretches of dark. The inn was two blocks ahead. Two blocks.

His hand landed on her right cheek. Not a brush. A full, open-palmed grab, fingers sinking into the curve of her through the leather.

She smacked it away without breaking stride. "Touch me again and I'll break your fingers, whoreson."

"You say that every time." His hand came back. Same cheek. Harder squeeze.

She spun and caught his wrist, claws pricking through the skin. A bead of blood welled up under her thumb. His grin didn't falter. If anything it widened, wolfish, his eyes tracking down to where her claws dimpled his flesh.

"Every time," she said, low, "you test whether I mean it."

"And every time," he said, "you don't break them."

She dropped his wrist. Turned. Kept walking.

He laughed behind her. The sound was warm and infuriating, bouncing off the wet stone buildings, and she hated that she could pick his laugh out of a crowd of a thousand. Hated that it sat in her chest and hummed there.

The inn was called the Salt Widow. Low ceilings, dark wood, a fire that had burned down to coals. The common room was half empty, the remaining drinkers hunched over their cups with the dedicated focus of men who intended to be carried to bed. Alshera took a table in the corner, back to the wall, because she was a ranger and corners were where you survived. Dortan dropped into the chair across from her, legs spread wide, taking up space the way he took up every room he entered.

"Two," he told the barmaid without looking at her. "Whatever's strong."

"I didn't invite you to sit," Alshera said.

"Didn't need an invitation. It's a public table."

The drinks arrived. Dark ale, thick, the kind that tasted like bread and regret. She drank because her mouth was dry and her muscles ached and the alternative was going upstairs to her room alone where she'd lie awake smelling grave dirt in her hair and thinking about his hand on her ass. The ale was the lesser poison.

"Forty crowns," Dortan said, lifting his mug. "Iron and blood."

She didn't toast. She drank.

"You're welcome, by the way," he said.

"For what?"

"That wight that flanked you in the second chamber. The one you didn't see."

Her ears flattened. "I saw it."

"You saw it after my sword was through its neck."

"I saw it before your sword was through its neck. I was lining up the shot."

"From two feet away? With a bow?" He leaned back, the chair creaking under him. "You were going to shoot a wight at two feet."

"I've made harder shots."

"On what? A barn?"

"On your ego. Bigger target."

He grinned. Drank. The firelight caught the scar on his collarbone where his shirt hung open, and her eyes went there before she could stop them. He tracked where she looked. He always tracked where she looked.

"See something you like?"

"I see a man who can't button his shirt."

"Buttons are for people with things to hide." He leaned forward, elbows on the table, the mug cradled loose in both hands. "I don't hide anything, kitten. You know that."

"I know you talk more than any three men and say less than one."

The inn was emptying. A pair of sailors paid their tab and stumbled toward the door. The barmaid wiped down the counter with the slow, circular patience of a woman counting the minutes until she could lock up. The fire popped. A log settled, sending a scatter of sparks up the chimney.

Dortan signaled for two more.

"You don't need another," Alshera said.

"Neither do you. And yet."

She drank. The ale was hitting her now, loosening the knots in her shoulders, softening the edges of the room. Dangerous. Alcohol made her warm and warmth made her careless and carelessness around Dortan Trevon was how women ended up underneath him. She'd watched it happen. Barmaids, merchants' daughters, a sellsword woman in Valdren who should have known better. They all started with a drink and ended with that stupid, satisfied look on their faces the next morning.

"You're staring," he said.

"I'm assessing a threat."

"Am I a threat?"

"You're a nuisance. Threats require competence."

His grin sharpened. "Funny. That wight thought I was competent enough."

"The wight was dead. Low standards."

Another table emptied. An old man with a cane. A woman in a merchant's coat who'd been nursing the same cup for an hour. The common room was down to them and two men playing cards by the window who weren't listening to anything but their own bets.

Dortan's boot found her ankle under the table. Not a kick. A press. The side of his foot against hers, casual, warm through the leather.

She pulled her foot back.

His boot followed.

"Dortan."

"Alshera."

Her full name in his mouth. He so rarely used it. Usually it was kitten, that word she wanted to claw off his tongue. But her name, said low like that, with the firelight making his eyes look less cold and more like deep water you could fall into... that was worse.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"Right now?"

"Right now."

He set his mug down. The performance dimmed. His voice dropped, the drawl thickening, the jokes draining out of it like water from a cracked cup. "Right now I want to take you upstairs, put you on your hands and knees, and fuck you until you forget every insult you've thrown at me tonight." A pause. "Then I want to hear you throw more. You're meaner when you're wet."

The two words her body said: yes and now. The word her mouth said: nothing. Her tail went still under the table. Her pupils blew wide, the gold shrinking, and she swallowed and his eyes dropped to her throat and tracked the movement.

"You're disgusting," she said. Her voice had gone lower than she meant it to.

"That's not a no."

"It's not a yes."

"Your tail stopped moving."

"My tail is none of your concern."

"Your tail," he said, leaning closer, close enough that she could smell the ale on his breath and the clean-sweat smell underneath and the iron-and-leather scent that was just him, "is the most honest part of you. And right now it's saying what your mouth won't."

The card players stood up. Coins scraped across wood. Chairs pushed back. Footsteps toward the stairs, heavy and uneven. A door opened and closed above them.

The common room was empty.

The barmaid had disappeared into the kitchen. The fire was coals and ash. The lamp on their table guttered, throwing his face into sharp relief: the broken nose, the jaw, those eyes that never stopped working.

Alshera grabbed him by the shirt.

Both fists, bunched in the linen, yanking him forward across the table. Mugs scraped. Ale sloshed. She kissed him with her mouth open and her fangs grazing his lower lip and a sound in her throat that was closer to a snarl than anything human.

He tasted like dark ale and salt and the copper edge of blood where her fang caught skin. His hand came up, gripped the back of her neck, thumb pressing into the hinge of her jaw, and his mouth opened against hers and he kissed her back like he'd been waiting for it, like he'd been waiting all night, all week, all year.

She bit his lip. Hard.

He groaned into her mouth. Then he laughed, the bastard, a low rumble against her teeth, and pulled back just far enough to speak.

"Kitten."

"Shut up."

"Make me."

"I'm trying." She kissed him again. Harder. His hand tightened on her neck and her body lit up from that single point of pressure, her spine going loose, her breath coming faster. She hated it. She kissed him like she hated it.

He broke the kiss. His lip was bleeding. He licked the blood off, slow, watching her watch him do it.

"You know what I'd do with you?" he said, his voice a ruin. "I'd start with that mouth. Get those fangs around my..."

"Dortan."

"...cock, and then I'd flip you over and..."

She grabbed his shirt again. Harder. Pulled him so close their noses touched. His breath was hot on her mouth. Her ears were flat against her skull, her claws out, her whole body a wire pulled tight.

"Then do it," she said. "Back up all that talk. Or shut your mouth and stop wasting my time."

He stood up. The chair hit the floor behind him. He didn't look at it. He held out his hand, palm up, and his eyes were the coldest, steadiest blue she'd ever seen on a face that hot.

"Upstairs," he said.

She didn't take his hand. She walked past him toward the stairs, and his palm landed on the small of her back, and she didn't smack it away, and they both knew what that meant.

The room was small and smelled like tallow and salt air. A bed too narrow for two, a washstand with a cracked basin, a window shuttered against the rain. They didn't make it past the door.

She shoved him against the wall. His back hit the plaster and he grunted, and then her mouth was on his, teeth and tongue and that low growl vibrating in her throat. His hands went to her hips, hauled her against him, and she could feel the hard length of his cock through his trousers, pressing into her stomach. She bit his jaw. His neck. The scar on his shoulder where her fangs had already been, years ago, and his hands tightened on her and his breath came out rough.

"Still wearing too much," he said against her ear.

"So are you."

"Ladies first."

His fingers found the buckle at her throat. The first strap of her leathers came loose, and then the second, and the speed of it made her stomach tighten because he wasn't fumbling. He knew the rigging. Every buckle, every lace point, every hook that held the ranger's armor together. He'd been watching her dress and undress at camp for months, cataloguing the order, and now his hands moved through the sequence without hesitation, peeling the leather off her shoulders, down her arms, working the fitted torso piece loose while she was still trying to get his shirt over his head.

"You bastard." She shoved at his chest. "You've been planning this."

"Kitten, I've been planning this since the crypt." The chest piece hit the floor. His hands went to the laces at her waist. "You had wight blood on your throat and your braid was coming loose and I thought, by the Wolf, I'm going to take that woman apart tonight."

The leathers split open. Cool air hit her stomach, her ribs, and then he was pushing the trousers down her hips with both hands, thumbs digging into the muscle of her thighs as he went. She kicked free of her boots. The trousers followed. Breast band, loincloth, gone, his hands stripping them away with an efficiency that left her bare and him still in his trousers and shirt and the unfairness of it burned through her like a brand.

She stood naked in the middle of a rented room in Miravar with her fur bristling and her ears flat and her claws out, and Dortan Trevon leaned back against the wall with his shirt half-open and looked at her like she was a feast and he'd been starving.

"You're still dressed," she hissed.

"I know."

"That's not..."

"Fair?" He pushed off the wall. One step. Two. Close enough to touch. "No. It's not."

She swung at him. Open palm, aimed at his chest, half shove and half slap. He caught her wrist. She swung with the other hand. He caught that too. Both wrists in his grip, her arms crossed, her body pulled against his, and the rough linen of his shirt scraped against her bare tits and her nipples went hard and a sound came out of her, a short, bitten-off "Nnh," that she would deny to her grave.

"Get your hands off me."

"No." He walked her backward. Three steps. The backs of her knees hit the bed. "Sit down."

"Rot take you, Dortan, I'm not..."

He let go of her wrists and put his hand flat on her sternum and pushed. She sat. The mattress was thin and the frame creaked and she was already reaching for him, claws hooking into his shirt, dragging him down, but he dropped to his knees between her legs instead and the shift in position, the sudden height difference, the way he was looking up at her with those cold blue eyes gone hot at the edges, stopped her hands mid-grab.

His mouth closed over her left nipple.

"Ah... fuck." Her hands went to the back of his head. Fingers in his hair, claws pricking his scalp, and she pulled him closer instead of pushing him away because her body had already made the decision and her pride was three seconds behind. He sucked hard, his tongue working the stiff peak, and the sensation shot straight down through her belly and her thighs clenched around his ribs. She was wet. She'd been wet since the table downstairs and she hated it, hated how fast he got there, hated that the scrape of his teeth made her arch into his mouth with a whimper she bit in half.

"Sensitive," he murmured against her skin, and moved to the other breast.

"I'm not... hhngh... it's just..."

"Biology?" He sucked harder. His hand came up to cup the breast his mouth had left, thumb rolling the wet nipple, and the dual sensation made her spine bow. "Sure, kitten. Biology."

"I will kill you." Her claws drew thin red lines across his scalp. He groaned against her tit, the vibration traveling through her, and his free hand slid down her stomach, over the dip of her waist, and pressed flat against her lower belly. Warm. Heavy. Possessive. His fingers spread wide, the tips brushing the top of her mound, and she jerked.

"Dortan."

He pulled off her nipple with a wet sound. Looked up at her. His mouth was red, his lips swollen, and his eyes were steady and dark and asking a question he already knew the answer to.

"Tell me to stop," he said.

Her chest heaved. The purr was building in her throat, involuntary, and she swallowed it down. "I'm not going to beg."

"Didn't ask you to beg. Asked you to tell me to stop." His hand slid lower. One inch. His fingers grazed the seam of her pussy, barely touching, and her hips rolled toward his hand before she could lock them down. "If you want me to stop."

"You're a whoreson and a bastard and I hope the Wolf takes you in your sleep."

"That's not stop either." He grinned. And then he dropped.

Both hands on her thighs, spreading them, pushing her knees apart. He pressed his mouth to the inside of her left thigh where the fur was thin and soft and the skin underneath burned, and he kissed her there, slow, open-mouthed, his tongue tracing a line toward the crease of her hip. She grabbed a fistful of his hair. Her claws sank in.

"If you're going to do it, do it. Stop playing."

"I'm not playing." His breath on her pussy, hot and close. "I'm savoring."

"I swear on root and branch, Dortan, if you don't..."

His tongue dragged flat and slow up the length of her slit.

Her back arched off the bed. The sound that came out of her was low, guttural, half growl and half groan, and her grip in his hair tightened until her knuckles ached. He licked her again. Same pace. Root to tip, his tongue broad and firm, pressing into the slick heat of her, and then circling her clit with a pressure that made her hips buck.

"Fuck. Fuck you."

He laughed against her cunt. The vibration made her whine through her teeth. Then two fingers pushed inside her, thick and rough-skinned, curling upward, and his mouth sealed over her clit and sucked and the world narrowed to the point where his tongue met her body.

He was slow. Infuriatingly, impossibly slow. His fingers worked in and out in long, deep strokes, crooking on the pull, finding the spot that made her legs shake and pressing it with a patience that had no business existing in a man who couldn't sit still through a meal. His tongue circled her clit in tight, firm loops, never losing the rhythm, never speeding up no matter how hard she pulled his hair or how loud the sounds coming out of her got.

"Harder." The word ripped out of her. "Dortan. Harder."

He gave her harder. His fingers drove deeper, the wet sound of them obscene in the small room, and his tongue pressed flat against her clit and ground in a tight circle and her thighs clamped around his head.

"You... nnh... you absolute... hah..."

The insults were falling apart. She couldn't hold them together. Her hips rolled against his mouth, chasing the pressure, and the purr broke loose from her chest, deep and shuddering, and she couldn't stop it. His free hand gripped her hip, thumb pressing into the bone, holding her in place while his mouth worked her open. She was close. She could feel it building at the base of her spine, in her thighs, in the tightening of her cunt around his fingers.

"Don't stop. Don't you dare... don't..."

His fingers curled hard. His tongue pressed down.

She came with a sound that was closer to a roar than a scream, her whole body locking rigid, claws buried in his scalp, thighs crushing his head. The orgasm tore through her in a long, shuddering wave and she squirted against his mouth, felt the hot gush of it on his chin, his jaw, soaking his shirt collar. He didn't pull back. He kept his mouth on her, kept his fingers moving, slower now, gentler, easing her through it while her body shook and her breath came in ragged, broken gasps and the purr in her chest rattled loud enough to fill the room.

When her thighs finally loosened, when her claws retracted and her hands went limp in his hair, Dortan pulled back. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His chin was slick, his lips swollen, his hair wrecked from her claws.

He was grinning.

That grin. That insufferable, satisfied, wolfish grin, his eyes bright and his mouth wet with her and his whole face lit up with the specific joy of a man who had just proven a point he didn't need to make.

"I hate your face," she said. Her voice was wrecked. The words had no teeth in them at all.

"Yeah." He pressed his lips to the inside of her trembling thigh. "I know."

He stood up and pulled his shirt over his head in one motion, tossing it behind him. The scar across his ribs caught the lamplight, a white ridge against tanned skin. His hands went to the laces of his trousers and he worked them loose without rushing, watching her the whole time, and the patience of it made her want to claw the fabric off him herself.

The trousers dropped.

Her tail went dead still.

Long. Thick. The foreskin half-drawn back over the swollen head, a bead of slick already gathering at the tip. Heavy, curving up against his stomach with a weight that made her mouth go dry. He was hard enough that it barely moved when he stepped free of the trousers, just hung there, flushed dark, the veins standing out along the shaft.

"Blazing Hells," she breathed.

He was watching her face. Of course he was watching her face. His eyes tracked every micro-expression, the widening of her pupils, the stillness of her tail, the way her lips parted around the curse. He catalogued it all and she could see him doing it and she still couldn't look away from his cock.

"I haven't... by root and branch, Dortan, I haven't even seen a beastman hung like that."

The grin split his face wide. "Yeah?"

"Don't."

"Beastman, huh?" He wrapped his hand around the shaft, slow, one lazy stroke root to tip. "That's the best compliment you've ever given me, kitten."

"It wasn't a compliment. It was a warning to myself."

"Noted." He stepped closer. His cock bobbed with the movement, heavy, and her thighs pressed together on the bed. "I use it to tame mouthy bitches who don't know when to stop talking." His hand came up under her chin, tilting her face. "Bitchy party members who spend six months telling me they hate me and then squirt on my tongue in a rented room in Miravar."

Her claws sank into the mattress. "You're a pig, Dortan Trevon."

"Oink." He grabbed her by the hips and flipped her.

The room spun. Her stomach hit the mattress, the thin sheets bunching under her, and before she could push up his hands were on her hips, dragging them back and up, her knees sliding on the rough linen until her ass was in the air and her face was pressed into the bed. She was still wet from his mouth, from her own orgasm, slick and swollen and open, and the cool air on her cunt made her shiver.

His thumbs dug into the muscle of her hips. She could feel him behind her, the heat of his body, the blunt pressure of his cockhead nudging against her slit, sliding through the wet, finding the angle.

"Dortan, if you don't..."

He pushed in.

"FUCK!" The scream ripped out of her and she buried it in the mattress, her claws shredding the sheet, her back arching as he sank into her inch by thick inch. The stretch burned. Her cunt clamped down on him and he kept going, steady, relentless, his grip on her hips hard enough to bruise, until his balls pressed against her clit and he was buried to the root.

He groaned. Low, guttural, the one sound he couldn't leash. His fingers dented her flesh, thumbs hooked over the bones of her pelvis, and he held there, grinding deep, letting her feel every inch.

"Hah... hahh..." She panted into the mattress. Full. So full she couldn't think. The angle drove him against the spot his fingers had found earlier and the pressure was constant, unrelenting, her body clenching around him in rhythmic spasms she couldn't control.

He pulled back. Drove in hard.

The bed frame cracked against the wall. Her whole body jolted forward and she screamed again, muffled by linen and her own teeth, and then his open palm came down on her right cheek.

The slap rang through the room. Her ass bounced under the impact, the flesh rippling, and the sting bloomed hot across her skin. She snarled into the mattress.

He smacked her again. Same cheek. Harder. The sound was obscene, skin on skin, and her cunt tightened around his cock so hard he swore under his breath.

"Fuck, kitten."

"Is that..." She turned her head, one amber eye glaring back at him over her shoulder, her voice ragged and wrecked and still sharp. "Korroth's teeth, Dortan, is that all you've got?"

His hips snapped forward. The thrust punched the air out of her and she gasped, claws tearing deeper into the sheet.

"More?"

"I said is that ALL?"

He gave her more. Both hands locked on her hips, hauling her back onto his cock as he drove forward, and the pace went from hard to brutal. The wet slap of his hips against her ass filled the room, each thrust bottoming out, his cock hitting deep enough to make her vision blur. The bed frame hammered the wall in a steady, punishing rhythm.

"Dortan! You... nngh... you bastard... you absolute... hah... FUCK!"

"Still talking." His voice was rough, strained, the drawl cracking at the edges. "Still running that mouth." Another thrust, savage, grinding. "Love it when you talk shit, kitten. Means I'm not deep enough yet."

Her arms shook. Her elbows buckled. Her face hit the mattress and she couldn't get back up, couldn't hold herself, her shoulders flat against the bed and her ass still high in his grip, and the angle changed and he went deeper and she screamed his name into the linen so loud the sound carried through the thin walls and out into the Miravar night.

"Dortan! Dortan, you... nnhh... fuck... FUCK!"

"There." His thumb traced the red handprint on her ass, tender and possessive, even as his hips kept their punishing pace. "That's where I want you."

His hands left her hips. For one breath she was empty of his grip and the loss registered as a jolt, her body bracing for whatever came next, and then his arms hooked under hers from behind, wrists locking at the back of her neck, and he hauled her up off the mattress.

The room tilted. Her knees left the bed, her feet scrabbling for purchase on the floorboards, and then she was standing, spine pressed against his chest, his arms cinched tight behind her skull, her body folded open. Her tits swung free, heavy, bouncing with every shift of weight, nipples stiff and dark against gold fur. She couldn't close her arms. Couldn't cover herself. Couldn't do a single thing about the way her body was laid bare, tits and stomach and the slick mess of her cunt all on display to the empty room.

"Dortan, you... let me..."

"No." His mouth against her ear. His hips rolled up and his cock drove into her from below, the angle new, deeper, grinding against the front wall of her cunt, and her head snapped back against his shoulder.

"FUCK! Ah... AHH!"

Her tits bounced with every thrust. She could see them, could see her own body jolting in the dim room, and the exposure burned through her worse than any position he'd put her in face-down because she couldn't hide in a mattress, couldn't bury the sounds, couldn't pretend this was being done to her instead of happening with her whole body screaming its cooperation.

"Look at you," he growled against her neck. "Whole inn can hear you, kitten."

"Shut... nngh... shut your..."

"Purring again." His arms tightened. His hips snapped up, hard, and the thrust punched a scream out of her that rattled the shutters. "Louder than the bed frame. You know that?"

The purr. That traitorous, deep-chested vibration rolling through her ribs, louder with every thrust, broadcasting her pleasure in a frequency she couldn't fake or suppress. Her cunt clenched around him in rhythm with it, involuntary, the muscles squeezing his cock on every upstroke, and she could hear the wet sound of it, could hear herself, could hear everything because there was nowhere to put her face and no way to muffle the noises pouring out of her.

"I... hahh... I hate... FUCK!"

"You hate it." Another thrust. Her feet left the floor. "Your pussy's telling me different. Squeezing me so tight I can barely move." His voice was fraying, the drawl cracking, breath hot and harsh against her ear. "Who's this for, kitten? Who's making you this wet?"

She screamed. Not an answer. Not a word. A sound ripped from her chest, high and ragged, her whole body arching in his grip while her tits bounced and her tail lashed against his thigh and the purr roared through her loud enough that she could feel it in her teeth.

"AHHH! Dortan! Dortan, you... nnhh... you bastard... you absolute... FUCK!"

He drove up into her, relentless, his balls slapping wet against her clit with every stroke. Her legs shook. Her claws were out, raking at nothing, her arms pinned useless behind her neck, and she was so loud, so obscenely, helplessly loud, screaming his name and cursing him and making sounds that weren't words at all, just broken animal noise.

Then he pulled out.

The emptiness hit her like a slap and she snarled, furious, but he was already moving, already turning her, his hands on her shoulders shoving her back onto the bed. Her spine hit the mattress. Before she could twist or fight or do anything but gasp, his hands caught the backs of her thighs and folded her in half.

Knees by her ears. His full weight bearing down. The bed groaned under them both and his cock found her again, slid through the slick and sank home in one long stroke that bottomed out so deep her vision whited at the edges.

"Dor... Dortan... I can't... it's too..."

"You can." His forehead pressed against hers. His hips ground down, slow, crushing, his cock buried to the root with nowhere left to go. "You will."

She couldn't close her legs. Couldn't turn her face. Couldn't do anything but look up at him with her knees pinned beside her own ears and his weight holding her open and his cock so deep inside her she could feel her heartbeat around it. His eyes were right there. Blue. Burning. The performance gone, the grin gone, nothing left on his face but need so naked it split her open worse than his cock did.

He started to move. Short, grinding thrusts, his hips rolling with his whole body behind them, every stroke pressing his pelvis against her clit. The friction was constant, inescapable, his cock dragging against the swollen spot inside her with a pressure that made her vision blur and her mouth fall open and her hands, finally free, grab his shoulders hard enough to draw blood.

"There... there, don't... Dortan, don't stop, don't you dare stop, don't..."

"Not stopping." His voice was a ruin. Barely words. "Fuck... kitten... so tight... fuck..."

The orgasm built like a wave breaking from the bottom of the ocean. Her cunt locked down on him, rhythmic, clenching so hard her whole body shook with it, and the purr turned into a keen, high and broken, the sound cracking in her throat as her back tried to arch and couldn't because his weight held her flat. She squirted around his cock, the gush of it hot and sudden, soaking his stomach, the sheets, running down her own ass, and she screamed, a raw, shattered sound that had his name in it and nothing else.

"Alshera." Once. Her name. No kitten. No performance. Just her name, ground out through his teeth like it cost him his last breath.

His hips slammed forward and held. His cock pulsed inside her, thick, heavy, the first rope of cum hitting deep enough that she gasped, and then another, and another, hot and copious, filling her in long surges while his whole body shuddered above her. His grip on her thighs turned bruising. A groan tore out of his chest, low, shaking, and his hips stuttered, grinding, pumping more into her, cum leaking out around his shaft and running down the crack of her ass because there was too much, there was always too much with him, and her cunt was still clenching, still milking him through aftershocks that made her whimper and dig her claws into his shoulders and keen that broken sound into the crook of his neck.

His weight settled on her, heavy, crushing in a way that should have been suffocating and wasn't. His cock softened inside her by a fraction, still thick, still stretching her, and his cum was leaking out around the shaft in a slow, warm trickle that ran down between her cheeks and pooled on the ruined sheet beneath them. Her cunt clenched around him in lazy aftershocks, each one pushing more of the mess out of her, and the wet sound of it was obscene in the quiet room.

She grabbed his jaw and hauled his mouth to hers.

The kiss was graceless, all teeth and tongue and the copper taste of his bitten lip. She bit him again, same spot, and he grunted against her mouth and his hips ground forward, pushing his cum deeper, and she growled into the kiss and raked her claws down his back.

"Bastard," she said against his lips.

"Mmhm." He kissed her harder. His hand found her left breast, squeezed, thumb grinding the nipple, and her spine curved up into the pressure. "My kitty slut."

She bit his tongue. He laughed, the sound vibrating against her teeth.

"Call me that again and I'll geld you."

"You won't." Another squeeze, rougher, his palm full of her tit, kneading it while his mouth moved to her jaw, her throat, the spot below her ear that made her purr. "You like this cock too much."

"Don't be cocky, human, just because you've got a cock like a mace." She shoved at his chest, half-hearted, her claws leaving pink lines on his skin. "Any brute with a battering ram can knock down a door."

"Yeah, but not every brute can make you scream his name while he does it." His teeth closed on her earlobe. "You screamed, kitten. The whole inn heard."

"I was cursing you."

"Same thing." His mouth came back to hers, softer this time, the kiss deep and slow and wet, and her hands went to his hair and pulled him closer and she hated herself for it, hated the way her body arched into his, hated the purr building in her chest again.

She broke the kiss. Pushed him onto his back. He went, sprawling on the narrow bed with his arms behind his head and that grin on his face, his cock lying heavy against his stomach, slick with her and with his own cum, still half-hard. Still thick. Still too much.

She moved down his body. Her mouth on his chest, his ribs, the scar she traced with her tongue because she wanted to and because it made his stomach tighten. Lower. Her hands on his hips, thumbs pressing into the grooves of muscle, and then she wrapped her fingers around his cock and pulled it to her mouth.

The taste hit her tongue and her eyes closed. Salt and musk and the thick, bitter weight of his cum mixed with the slick of her own pussy, layered together, and the purr broke loose before she could stop it, rumbling through her chest and into his shaft. She licked the head clean, slow, her tongue working under the foreskin, pushing it back to get at the sensitive ridge beneath, and his hips jerked.

"Fuck," he breathed.

She sucked the tip into her mouth. Slow. Her tongue circled the head, gathering every trace, and she swallowed and purred louder, the vibration running through her jaw and into his cock. He tasted like the inside of her body and she should have been disgusted and she wasn't. She was hungry. She sucked deeper, taking more of him, her tongue flat against the underside of his shaft, and the wet sounds of her mouth were the only noise in the room besides the purr.

"Alshera."

Her name. Not kitten. She looked up at him with his cock in her mouth and his eyes were half-closed, his jaw loose, the performance stripped away. His hand came to the back of her head. Not pushing. Not guiding. Just resting there, his fingers in her hair, his palm warm against her skull.

She pulled off with a slow, wet drag that made him groan. Kissed the shaft. Licked a line down to his balls.

"These," she murmured against the heavy sac, and then she took the left one into her mouth, gentle, her tongue rolling it, sucking soft. He swore above her, his fingers tightening in her hair. She let it go with a kiss. Took the other. "All that cum." Her voice was low, thick, her lips brushing his skin between words. "Thick enough to drown in. You filthy human."

"Hah... that's... fuck, kitten, your mouth..."

"Shut up and let me work." She sucked harder, her hand stroking his shaft in long, lazy pulls, and his cock thickened in her grip, the blood rushing back, the flesh going rigid between her fingers. She purred against his balls and the vibration made his thigh jump.

By the time she pulled back, his cock was hard again. Fully hard. Standing up from her fist, flushed dark, the head swollen and wet with her spit.

"Korroth's teeth," she whispered. "Already?"

"Your fault." His hand tightened in her hair. Pulled. Not hard. Just enough. "Come here."

She didn't.

He pulled harder.

She went.

The hours blurred.

He took her on her stomach with his hand on the back of her neck, grinding her face into the pillow while his cock split her open from behind and she screamed into the linen until her throat went hoarse. He took her on the washstand, the basin crashing to the floor, her claws gouging the wood while he fucked her from behind with one hand fisted in her braid and the other cracking across her ass hard enough to leave welts. He put her on her knees and fed his cock into her mouth until she gagged, spit running down her chin, and then pulled out and shoved her flat and buried himself in her cunt again and she squirted on the second stroke, the gush of it soaking his thighs.

"FUCK! DORTAN! FUCK!"

"Louder."

"I... AHH! I can't... NNGH!"

"Louder, kitten."

She roared. The sound shook the shutters.

He flipped her, folded her, held her open and ground into her so deep her vision went white and her claws tore the headboard and the bed frame cracked and neither of them stopped. Her ass, red and hot from his hands, bounced against his hips with every thrust. His cock, slick with her cum and his, drove into her pussy until she was loose and swollen and still clenching, still squeezing, still screaming his name like a curse and a prayer in the same breath.

Through the thin walls of the Salt Widow, the sounds carried: the rhythmic slam of the bed frame, the wet slap of flesh on flesh, a woman's voice breaking on a man's name, sharp cracks of palm on skin followed by howls that could have been pain or pleasure or both. A man's voice, lower, rougher, words too muffled to make out but the tone unmistakable. Commands. Then silence. Then a scream so loud the drinkers in the room below looked up at the ceiling and shook their heads and ordered another round.

Dawn came slow through the shuttered window, gray light bleeding through the slats in thin bars that striped the wrecked bed. The sheets were on the floor. The headboard had a crack running through the center plank. The washstand lay on its side, the basin in pieces.

Alshera opened her eyes.

Her body was a map of the night. Soreness in her thighs, her hips, her jaw. A deep, satisfied ache between her legs where her pussy was swollen and tender and still leaking cum, thick and warm, smeared across the insides of her thighs. More on her tits, dried to a glaze on the fur, streaked across her nipples. On her face, her chin, the corner of her mouth where she'd licked it off hours ago and he'd groaned and called her a name she should have killed him for and instead she'd opened her mouth wider and let him paint her tongue.

The purr was still going. Faint. A low hum in her ribs that she couldn't shut off.

She was sore in the best way. Every muscle spent, every nerve wrung out, her body heavy and warm and so thoroughly used that moving required a negotiation with her own limbs. She stretched. Her spine popped. Her tail curled, lazy, content.

The bed was cold beside her.

She turned her head. The pillow still held the dent of his skull. The sheet where he'd lain was cool. Not recently warm. Not warm at all.

No shirt draped over the chair. No boots by the door. No sword propped against the wall.

No note on the washstand. No coin on the pillow. No word scratched into the dust on the windowsill.

Nothing.

She lay there for a long time, staring at the empty side of the bed, the purr dying in her chest one vibration at a time until the room was silent. The dawn light crept across the floor. The sounds of Miravar waking drifted up through the window: carts on cobblestones, gulls screaming over the harbor, a fishmonger's bell.

She got up. She washed with cold water from the pitcher because the basin was shattered. She dressed in her leathers, fingers moving through the buckles and straps in the right order, and if her hands shook on the third buckle she tightened them until they stopped. She braided her hair. She checked her bow. She walked out of the Salt Widow and did not look back at the room.

Two months later, in a village south of the Hearthlands with autumn turning the fields to gold, she knelt behind an apothecary's shop and vomited into a ditch and the old woman who ran the shop looked at her with kind, tired eyes and told her what she already knew.

Twins. A boy and a girl. Half-breed. The boy had his father's jaw. The girl had his eyes.

She raised them alone.

"Mama, are we having stew tonight?"

Terrena's voice pulled her back. The dirt lane under her feet, the chandler's shop ahead, the warm weight of small hands in hers. Alshera blinked. The Miravar salt air faded. The grave-dirt smell was just Alvan's shoes.

"We're having stew," she said. "With the carrots you picked."

"Alvan ate one of the carrots."

"It was small," Alvan said.

"It was mine."

"It was in the ground. Ground carrots belong to everyone."

"That's not how carrots work, Alvan."

"It's how my carrots work."

Alshera's mouth twitched. She squeezed both their hands and kept walking, and the lane narrowed where it passed between the tanner's shed and the old stone wall that marked the edge of the chandler's property. Thirty paces to the back stairs. Twenty.

Three men stepped out of the gap between the buildings.

The first was tall, lean, with a knife on his belt and the red-veined eyes of a man who'd been drinking since noon. The second was shorter, broader, arms folded across a chest that strained his shirt. The third hung back, younger, fidgeting, his hand on a cudgel that looked too new to have been used.

The tall one smiled. It didn't reach his eyes.

"Well now. The catfolk bitch from the market."

Alshera stopped. Her hands tightened on the children's. Terrena pressed into her right leg. Alvan pressed into her left, his small fingers squeezing hard.

"Move," Alshera said.

"In a minute." The tall one took a step forward. His eyes dropped from her face to her chest, lingered, then lower. "Heard catfolk carry coin. Adventurer types. Silver rank, yeah? That's good money."

"You heard wrong. Move."

The broad one uncrossed his arms. "Don't think so, sweetheart. Think you're going to empty that purse for us, and then maybe we'll talk about what else you've got to offer."

Her bow was upstairs. Her hunting knife was in the kitchen. She had her claws, her teeth, her body that could kill any one of these men in under four seconds. But Terrena's face was buried in her skirt and Alvan's hand was shaking in hers and if she let go of them, if she moved, if she fought, they would see it. They would see their mother with blood on her claws and fear in their eyes and she would not do that to them. She would not.

"Mama." Alvan's voice, small and tight. "Mama, I don't like them."

"Close your eyes, soft paws." She said it to both of them. "Close your eyes and hold on to me."

The tall one laughed. "Ain't that sweet. Teaching the kittens to..."

Steel cleared a scabbard behind them.

The sound was clean, sharp, a single bright note that cut the air like a bell. The tall man's head turned. The broad man's arms dropped. The young one with the cudgel took a step back.

A boot hit the dirt. Then another. Unhurried.

The tall man opened his mouth.

The sword took him across the jaw. Not the edge. The flat, swung hard, and the crack of steel on bone snapped his head sideways and dropped him to one knee. Before the broad man could move, the swordsman was inside his guard, pommel driving into his solar plexus, folding him in half. A boot to the back of his knee. The broad man hit the dirt face-first. The young one swung the cudgel. The swordsman stepped inside the arc, caught the boy's wrist, twisted, and the cudgel clattered to the ground. A short, vicious headbutt. The young one's nose broke with a wet crunch and he sat down hard, blood sheeting over his mouth.

Four seconds. Maybe five.

The tall man was trying to stand. The sword point touched his throat.

"Walk." One word. Low. The drawl thicker than she remembered, rougher, but the same voice. The same voice that had said her name in a dark room in Miravar ten years ago. "Walk, and keep walking, and if I see any of you on this street again I'll take fingers. Understand?"

The tall man scrambled up. The broad man crawled. The young one staggered, hand clamped over his nose, blood running between his fingers. They went. They went fast.

The swordsman sheathed his blade and turned around.

Alshera's whole body locked. Spine, shoulders, jaw, tail; everything went rigid at once, a single contraction from skull to heel that rooted her to the dirt lane. Her hands on the children were the only part of her that stayed soft, and that took every scrap of discipline she had left.

Dortan Trevon stood ten feet away.

Older. The lines around his eyes had deepened, cut by sun and years and whatever roads he'd walked since Miravar. A new scar ran from his left temple into his hairline, pink and recent, no more than a season old. His hair was longer, tied back, and there was gray at the temples that hadn't been there before. He was leaner. Harder in the shoulders, stripped of the easy bulk she remembered, the muscle compacted and close to the bone.

The same blue eyes. Cold blue. Winter-sky blue. The same eyes that were looking at her right now with an expression she couldn't read because her own vision was blurring and she would not, she would not, do this in front of her children.

"Mama?" Terrena's face emerged from her skirt. She was looking at the man. At the sword on his hip, the blood on his knuckles, the way he stood. "Mama, who is that?"

Alshera's throat closed. She swallowed. Her ears pressed flat against her skull and she angled her head so her hair fell over them.

"That is your father."

The words came out level. Flat. Stripped of everything, the way she spoke when the lie was too big for inflection. Four words and her ears were hidden and her face was stone and the only thing that betrayed her was her tail, rigid and still beneath her skirt, broadcasting a frequency only she and Dortan could read.

Terrena stared. Alvan stared. Two small faces tilted up at a man they'd never met, gold-and-blue eyes on one, amber eyes and Dortan's jaw on the other, and the silence stretched until the lane felt too narrow to hold it.

Dortan's sword hand dropped to his side. His left hand, the one that drifted to his hilt when he was lying, hung loose. He wasn't lying. He wasn't performing. The grin was gone. The drawl was gone. The entire architecture of the man she'd known was stripped back to the frame and what was underneath was a face she'd never seen him wear, not in six years of adventuring, not in a night that wrecked a bed and a basin and her life.

He knelt.

One knee in the dirt, then both. Eye level with the twins. His sword hilt clanked against the ground and he didn't adjust it. His hands hung open at his sides, palms up, and they were shaking. Shaking. Dortan Trevon, whose hands never shook, whose grip was iron on a hilt and on her hips and on every part of her he'd ever touched, was kneeling in a dirt lane with his hands trembling like a copper-rank recruit before his first dungeon.

Terrena looked up at Alshera. Alvan looked up at Alshera.

She said nothing. She loosened her grip on their hands.

Terrena took a step forward. Then another. She stopped in front of Dortan and studied his face with the frank, unblinking assessment of a child who had not yet learned to look away from hard things. Her gold-and-blue eyes moved across his features. The broken nose. The scars. The jaw that matched her brother's.

"You have blue eyes," Terrena said. "Like mine."

Dortan's throat worked. "Yeah." The word came out rough, cracked at the center. "Like yours."

Alvan hadn't moved. He stood at Alshera's leg with his fists balled and his chin up and his father's jaw set in a hard line.

"Where were you?" Alvan asked.

The question hit the lane like a stone into still water. Dortan's shaking hands curled, then opened again. He looked at his son. At the dark hair falling across the small forehead, the amber eyes, the squared-off jaw that was his own face thrown back at him twenty-five years younger and furious.

"Away," Dortan said. "Too long."

"Mama cried once," Alvan said. "She didn't know I was awake."

Alshera's claws bit into her own palms. She kept her face still.

Dortan closed his eyes. Opened them. The blue was bright and wet and he didn't wipe them and he didn't look away from his son.

"I know," he said.

Terrena reached out and touched the scar on his temple. Her small fingers traced the raised line, careful, the way Alshera touched the children's ears when they slept.

"Does it hurt?" Terrena asked.

"Not anymore."

Terrena looked at him for a long moment. Then she stepped into his chest and wrapped her arms around his neck.

Dortan's arms came up. They closed around her, one hand cupping the back of her head, the other spread wide across her small back, and his face dropped into her hair and his shoulders shook. No sound. His mouth pressed tight, his jaw locked, his whole body fighting the noise, but his arms were shaking and his fingers were buried in his daughter's dark hair and he held her the way he held his sword: like letting go was not an option.

Alvan stood rigid at Alshera's side. His fists were still balled. His chin was still up. Ten years old, too young and too old at the same time, watching his father hold his sister with eyes that burned.

He walked forward. Stiff. Angry. Small boots kicking up dust.

He stopped in front of Dortan. Dortan lifted his face from Terrena's hair. His eyes were red. His cheeks were wet. He didn't hide it.

Alvan punched him in the shoulder. A child's fist, small and hard and furious.

Then he grabbed Dortan's shirt and pressed his face into his chest and his shoulders hitched once, twice, and Dortan's arm came around him and pulled him in and held both of them, kneeling in the dirt with his children against his chest and his face buried in their hair and his arms wrapped tight and trembling.

Alshera stood three feet away.

Her hands hung empty at her sides. Her claws were out, pricking her own thighs through the cotton dress. Her ears were flat. Her tail was still. Her face was a mask carved from the same stone as the buildings around her, and behind it the detonation was already building, filing itself behind her ribs where it would sit and rot and detonate later because she had no delivery system for this. Not for the way his arms shook. Not for the way Terrena's small hand curled in his collar. Not for the way Alvan's shoulders hitched against his father's chest. Not for any of it.

She said nothing.

There was nothing safe to say.

He fixed the fence on the first day.

She came downstairs with the children to find him shirtless in the yard, sweat cutting lines through the dust on his back, a borrowed hammer in one hand and a mouthful of nails. The fence had been leaning since spring. She'd braced it with rope and a prayer to the Green Mother and told herself she'd hire someone when the contract money came in. Dortan had it straight by noon. New posts sunk deep, the crossbeams level, the gate rehung so it swung clean on its hinges for the first time since she'd rented the place.

"I didn't ask you to do that," she said from the doorway.

"Didn't ask you to watch me do it, either." He spat the last nail into his palm. "And yet."

Terrena brought him water. He drank it, wiped his mouth, and told her the fence was for keeping dragons out and she believed him for almost three seconds before Alvan said, "Dragons fly, you know," with the withering patience of a child correcting an adult, and Dortan laughed so hard he choked.

By the third day he'd bought a goat.

Brown and mean-eyed, with a beard longer than the chandler's and a disposition to match. It bit him twice during the walk from the market. He named it Brother Aldous. The children screamed with delight. Alshera stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and her ears flat and said nothing, because saying nothing was safer than saying what she was thinking, which was that the goat would need a pen and the pen would need building and building meant he was staying and staying meant she had to decide what that meant and she was not ready to decide what that meant.

He built the pen.

Chickens arrived on the fourth day. Six hens and a rooster, purchased from a farmer's wife on the edge of town who looked at Dortan and then looked at Alshera and then looked at the half-breed children and put together a story that was close enough to the truth that Alshera's ears burned the whole walk home.

"We didn't need chickens," Alshera said.

"Terrena wants eggs for breakfast. Alvan wants to name them."

"Alvan names everything. He named a rock last week."

"Good instinct. Rocks are underappreciated."

"Dortan."

"Alshera."

"You can't just buy livestock and build structures on a property I rent."

"Already did." He was hammering again. The rooster crowed from inside a crate. "You going to make me take them back? Tell Terrena her eggs are leaving? Tell Alvan his chickens are homeless?"

She turned and went inside and closed the door and stood with her forehead against the wood and her claws digging into the frame.

He cooked.

That was the part she hadn't expected and couldn't defend against. The first night he made a stew from the market scraps she'd been planning to stretch across two meals, and it was good. Not passable. Good. Onions caramelized until they were sweet, the broth thick with herbs she didn't recognize, the meat falling apart on the spoon. He served the children first, cutting Terrena's portions small, giving Alvan the bowl with the most potatoes because he'd already learned that Alvan ate potatoes the way his mother ate pride: compulsively and without admitting enjoyment.

"Where did you learn to cook?" Terrena asked with her mouth full.

"A woman in the Frostreach taught me. She said any man who can't feed himself deserves to starve, and any man who can't feed a woman deserves worse."

"What's worse than starving?"

"Eating his own cooking without the training."

Alvan snorted into his stew. The sound was so much like Dortan's laugh that Alshera's spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.

"It's adequate," she said.

Dortan grinned. "High praise from the woman who once ate a raw lizard on a bet."

"It was a contract. And it was cooked."

"It was on fire. That's not the same thing."

"Mama ate a lizard?" Terrena's eyes went wide.

"Their mother did no such thing." Alshera shot Dortan a look that could have curdled the stew. "Their mother is a professional who has never eaten anything inappropriate in the field."

"She ate the lizard," Dortan told Terrena in a stage whisper.

"Dortan Trevon, I swear by root and branch..."

"Was it good?" Alvan asked.

The table went quiet. Alshera looked at her son. At Dortan's jaw on her son's face, and the spark in his amber eyes that was all hers, and the honest curiosity of a ten-year-old who just wanted to know about the lizard.

"It was terrible," she said. "And I won ten silver marks."

Dortan leaned back in his chair. The grin on his face was insufferable and warm and she looked away from it before it could do any more damage.

He paid a carpenter on the sixth day. A second room, framed off the main one, with a door that latched and a window that opened onto the yard where Brother Aldous was eating the fence he'd just repaired. The carpenter was a thick-armed Hearthlands woman named Gretta who looked at Dortan's coin and didn't ask questions and had the walls up in two days.

"For the children," Dortan said when Alshera stood in the doorway of the new room, her arms crossed, her tail lashing.

"The children sleep with me."

"They're ten. They need their own space."

"They need their mother."

"They need a room where their mother isn't lying awake staring at the ceiling because she's sharing a bed with two children who kick."

"How do you know they kick?"

"Terrena told me. She said Alvan kicks like a mule and you sleep on the edge so they have more room and your back hurts in the morning." He leaned against the new doorframe. "She's observant. Gets it from you."

Alshera said nothing. Her claws dug into her own arms.

"The children get the new room," she said. "I keep the old one."

"Fine."

"Where do you sleep?"

"I've been sleeping in the yard."

"You've been sleeping in the yard."

"Brother Aldous is a surprisingly good bedmate. Doesn't kick. Doesn't steal the blanket. Smells about the same as a Guild tavern."

"You are not sleeping in the yard, Dortan."

"Then where?"

The question sat in the kitchen like a live coal. She looked at him. He looked at her. His face was easy, open, the performance of a man who didn't care about the answer, and his left hand hung loose at his side, nowhere near his sword hilt, which meant he wasn't lying, which meant he genuinely didn't know, which was worse than if he'd been pushing because it meant the decision was hers.

"The floor," she said. "In the main room. I'll find a bedroll."

"Done." No argument. No grin. He pushed off the doorframe and went outside to argue with the goat about the fence and she stood in the new room that smelled like fresh pine and sawdust and pressed her palms flat against the wall and breathed until her hands stopped shaking.

The days settled into a shape she didn't ask for and couldn't break.

Mornings: Dortan up before her, fire lit, water boiling, the children already at the table with bread and eggs from the chickens he'd bought. Alshera coming downstairs to a kitchen that was warm and full and functioning, and the wrongness of it, the rightness of it, hitting her in the same breath.

He walked them to school. All four of them, down the market road, and the men outside the farrier's shop looked at Dortan's sword and his shoulders and his cold blue eyes and they didn't say a word. Not one. The carter didn't slow his horse. The young men outside the tavern found other things to look at. The woman in the blue shawl still crossed the street, but she did it quietly, and Dortan tracked her with a gaze that promised consequences if the quiet ever stopped.

"Why don't they talk anymore?" Terrena asked on the third morning.

"Because your father is very tall and very frightening and carries a very large sword," Alshera said.

"I'm not frightening," Dortan said. "I'm friendly."

"You headbutted a man in our lane."

"In a friendly way."

Alvan looked up at Dortan. "Can you teach me to headbutt?"

"Absolutely."

"Absolutely not," Alshera said.

"When you're six," Dortan told Alvan.

"He will not be headbutting anyone at six."

"Seven, then."

"Dortan Trevon."

"Eight's my final offer."

Alvan grinned. It was Dortan's grin. Wolfish, too wide, full of teeth. Alshera's chest ached.

Afternoons: Dortan trained in the yard while the children were at school. Sword forms, slow and fast, the blade catching light as he moved through sequences she recognized from six years of watching him fight. He was older. The speed had changed, traded some flash for efficiency, the movements tighter, more economical. He still moved well. He still moved like a man who'd been born holding a blade and had never put it down long enough to forget.

She sharpened her arrows at the kitchen table and did not watch him through the window. She sharpened her arrows and did not track the sweat on his shoulders or the way his trousers hung low on his hips or the flex of his forearms when he changed grip. She sharpened her arrows until the heads could split a hair and her fingers ached and the sound of steel on whetstone was louder than her own breathing.

Evenings: dinner, the four of them. Dortan cooked. Alshera refused to admit the food was good. The children talked, filling the room with noise that was too big for the small space, and Dortan listened to every word with an attention that didn't match anything else about him. He asked Terrena about her reading. He asked Alvan about his day. He remembered details from the day before, the week before, building a map of their lives with the same focus he brought to tracking a contract.

Terrena fell asleep on his chest the seventh night. Curled against him on the floor where he sat by the fire, her small hand fisted in his shirt, her breathing slow and even. Dortan's arm came around her. His hand cupped the back of her head, fingers spread wide, and he held still. Perfectly, completely still. His eyes closed. His jaw worked once, tight.

Alshera stood in the kitchen doorway with a drying cloth in her hands and her claws through the fabric and her face a mask and her chest full of shrapnel.

Alvan climbed into Dortan's lap ten minutes later. Didn't say a word. Just climbed up, settled against his other shoulder, and closed his eyes. Dortan's free arm wrapped around him and pulled him close and the man who could not sit still through a meal sat motionless on a hard floor for an hour while his children slept on him and didn't move a single muscle.

She carried them to bed. One at a time, Terrena first, then Alvan, tucking them into the new room that smelled like pine, pulling the blanket up, tracing their ears the way she always did. When she came back to the main room Dortan was still on the floor, staring at the fire.

"They're asleep," she said.

"Yeah." His voice was rough. He cleared his throat. "Yeah."

She picked up the drying cloth. Went back to the kitchen. Finished the dishes. Did not look at him again.

But when the children weren't watching.

The first time was the kitchen, the second morning. She was stirring porridge, her back to the room, her braid hanging over one shoulder. His hand landed on her ass. Full palm, fingers spread, squeezing the curve of her through the cotton dress.

She smacked his hand with the wooden spoon. Hard enough to leave a red mark across his knuckles.

"Ow. Hells."

"Touch me again and I'll use the hot end."

"Worth it." He flexed his fingers, grinning, leaning against the counter. "Birthing my babies made that ass fatter, kitten. I mean that as a compliment."

"There is no world in which that is a compliment."

"There's a world in which it's the truth. Same thing." His eyes dropped to her hips, her thighs, the way the dress pulled across them. "Used to be you could outrun a dire wolf. Now you'd have to negotiate."

"I could still outrun you."

"Wouldn't want you to." He reached again. She caught his wrist, claws pricking skin.

"The children are in the next room."

"The children are at school."

"Then the goat is watching."

"Brother Aldous has seen worse." But he pulled his hand back. Licked the spot where her claw had drawn a bead of blood. Held her gaze while he did it.

Her tail went still under her skirt.

He looked at it. Looked at her. Said nothing. Walked out of the kitchen whistling.

The laundry was worse.

Three days later, the line strung between the house and the fence post, sheets and small clothes dripping in the afternoon sun. Her arms up, pinning a sheet, the dress riding high on her calves. His boots on the grass behind her, quiet for a man his size, and then his hands on her tits. Both of them. Cupping from behind, his chest against her back, his thumbs finding her nipples through the cotton and pressing.

"Get OFF me!" She drove her elbow back into his ribs. He grunted, didn't let go.

"Bigger too." His mouth against her ear, his voice low, the drawl thick. "Ashara's tits, kitten, they're twice what they were. Nursing did that?"

"I said get off."

"Wish I'd been there." His thumbs circled. Slow. The cotton was thin and her nipples were stiff and the sensation shot through her belly and her breath stuttered. "Wish I'd been there to watch you feed them. Wish I'd been the one drinking."

She slammed her heel onto his instep. He swore and let go and she spun, ears flat, claws out, the sheet half-pinned and flapping.

"You are disgusting. You are a pig and a bastard and if you touch me again I will gut you and feed you to Brother Aldous."

"Brother Aldous is an herbivore."

"I'll make an exception!"

He was limping. Smiling. The smile didn't reach his eyes; it went deeper than his eyes, into the set of his jaw and the way he stood, weight forward, body angled toward her even as he backed up. His gaze dropped to her chest where her nipples were still hard against the cotton, visible, obvious, and his smile sharpened.

"Your tits say different, kitten."

"My tits say nothing. My tits are not participants in this conversation."

"They're participating plenty." He backed up another step. Hands raised, palms out, the picture of surrender. "I'll behave."

"You have never behaved in your life."

"True." He turned. Walked toward the yard. Over his shoulder: "But you like that about me."

The clothespin snapped in her grip.

He escalated.

The fifth day, passing her in the narrow hall between the kitchen and the children's room, his hand on her hip, pulling her against him for half a second. His cock hard against her ass through their clothes. His mouth at her ear.

"Remember how tight you were? How you screamed when I bottomed out?" A whisper. Barely a breath. "I've fucked a lot of women since, kitten. Not one of them squeezed my cock the way you did."

She shoved him into the wall. Her forearm across his throat, her claws out, her face inches from his.

"You will not talk to me like that in this house. In their house."

"They're at school."

"That is not the point."

"What's the point, then?" His voice was low, easy, even with her arm on his windpipe. His eyes tracked down to her mouth. "The point is you don't want to hear it? Or the point is you do and that's the problem?"

"The point is that you left." The words came out before she could stop them. Sharper than she meant. Loaded with ten years of weight she hadn't planned to unpack in a hallway.

His grin died.

She let go of his throat. Stepped back. Straightened her dress. Her hands were steady. Her tail was not.

"Dinner's at six," she said. "Don't be late."

She walked into the kitchen and closed the door and stood with her back against it and her claws in her palms and her eyes burning and she did not cry. She had cried once. Alvan had been awake. She would not cry again.

He was not late for dinner.

He didn't touch her for two days after that. Two days of space, of careful distance, of his hand going to his sword hilt when he thought she wasn't looking, the tell that meant he was lying to himself about what he was feeling. He cooked. He trained. He walked the children to school and back. He sat by the fire and sharpened his blade and didn't whistle and didn't joke and the silence from him was louder than any of his filth had been.

Then the eighth night.

The children asleep. The house quiet. Alshera at the kitchen table, fletching arrows by lamplight, her fingers working the feathers into the shaft with the speed of long practice. Dortan on his bedroll by the dead fire, on his back, one arm behind his head.

"Alshera."

She didn't look up. "What."

"I remember the sound you made when you came."

Her fingers stopped on the arrow.

"Not the screaming. After. That purr. Deep in your chest, like your whole body was humming." His voice was quiet. No drawl. No performance. "I've heard a lot of sounds. Battlefields. Taverns. Women. Never heard anything like that. Kept me up for months, that sound. Wondering if I'd ever hear it again."

The feather bent in her grip. She smoothed it. Kept working. Her hands moved and her breathing was even and her tail was rigid under the table, dead still, and her ears were flat against her skull beneath her hair.

"You left," she said. "You don't get to talk about what you remember."

"I know."

"You don't get to walk in here and fix my fence and buy my children livestock and cook meals and... and talk about my body like you still have a claim on it."

"I know."

"Then stop."

Silence. The lamp guttered. A log settled in the cold fireplace.

"I can't."

She set the arrow down. Looked at him. He was staring at the ceiling, his arm behind his head, his jaw tight. His left hand was on his chest, not his sword hilt. Not lying. Just... open. The performance stripped back to the studs, the way it had been in the lane when he'd knelt in the dirt.

"I can't stop," he said. "Not with you. Never could."

She picked up the arrow. Went back to work. Her hands shook on the third feather and she tightened them until they stopped.

"Dinner's at six tomorrow," she said.

"I know."

"Don't burn the bread this time."

"I didn't burn it. It was rustic."

"It was charcoal, Dortan."

"Rustic charcoal."

The smallest sound. Not a laugh. Not quite. A breath through her nose, short, bitten off. Her mouth twitched at one corner and she killed it and kept fletching and didn't look at him again.

He rolled onto his side. Faced the wall. Said nothing else.

She fletched arrows until the lamp burned low and her fingers ached and the house was silent except for the children's breathing through the thin wall and the goat shifting in its pen outside and the faint, traitorous hum in her own chest that she could not, no matter how hard she pressed her teeth together, make stop.

The latch on the children's door clicked shut at half past nine. Alshera pressed her ear to the wood, counting breaths. Terrena's came first, quick and light, already fading into sleep. Alvan took longer. He always took longer. She waited until his breathing evened out, until the small restless shifts of his body on the mattress stilled, and then she straightened and padded barefoot down the hall to her room.

The lamp was low. She'd left the balcony shutters cracked for the night air, and the breeze carried the smell of cut grass and Brother Aldous and the faint sweetness of the jasmine that grew wild along the chandler's wall. Her room was small. The bed, a chair, a trunk for her clothes, her bow hanging on two pegs above the window. She undid her braid and shook her hair loose and reached for the ties at the back of her dress.

The door opened behind her.

She didn't turn. She didn't need to. She could smell him. Iron and leather and the clean-sweat musk that clung to his skin after training, and under it the sharper note, the one catfolk noses caught and human ones missed: intent. He stank of it. He always stank of it around her.

The door closed. The lock turned.

"Get out."

"No."

She turned then. Dortan stood with his back against the door, arms loose at his sides, his shirt unlaced to the sternum. The lamplight cut shadows under his cheekbones, along the ridge of his collarbone, across the scar she'd traced with her tongue in a room in Miravar ten years and a lifetime ago. His eyes were steady. Quiet. The jokes gone, the drawl thinned, and that was worse than the performance because the performance she could dismiss.

"The children are ten feet away, Dortan."

"Asleep. I checked."

"You checked." Her ears flattened. "You checked on my children before coming to my room and locking my door."

"Our children. And yeah."

"Get. Out."

He didn't move. His weight settled against the door, one boot crossed over the other, and his eyes tracked down her body and back up with a focus that made her skin prickle under the fur. She was half-undone, the dress loose at the shoulders, the ties at her back hanging open, and his gaze caught on the gap where the fabric pulled away from her collarbone and lingered there.

"You've been sharpening arrows every night for two weeks," he said. "You don't have that many arrows. You don't have that many enemies. You're sitting at that table because if you go to bed you'll lie there thinking about me on the other side of the wall and you'd rather bleed your fingers on a whetstone than admit it."

"I sharpen arrows because I'm a ranger and that's what rangers do."

"You sharpen arrows because you're scared."

"I am not scared of you."

"Not of me." He pushed off the door. One step. "Of what you'll do if I get close enough."

"What I'll do is put an arrow through your throat."

"With what? Your bow's on the wall and you're half out of your dress." Another step. "You're not armed, kitten. You're not ready. And you left your door unlocked."

Her claws slid out. "I'm always armed."

"Yeah." His eyes dropped to her hands. To the curved points catching lamplight. "You are."

Two feet apart. She could feel the heat off his body. Could smell the intent thickening, layering over the leather and iron, and her own body was answering, her tail going rigid under the loose skirt, her breathing shifting deeper before she could catch it.

"You think you can walk back into my life and fix a fence and buy a goat and that earns you this?" She kept her voice low. Flat. The way she spoke when the lie was too big for inflection. "You left me pregnant in a rented room in Miravar. You left before dawn. No note. No coin. No word. I vomited in a ditch two months later and raised your children alone for ten years and you think a pot of stew and a new room makes us even?"

His jaw tightened. "I don't think we're even."

"Then what do you think?"

"I think you haven't looked at another man in ten years."

The words hit her between the ribs. Her claws curled into her palms.

"I think," he said, his voice dropping, the drawl stripped to nothing, "that you kept my shirt. Bottom of your pack. I saw it when I carried your gear upstairs."

Her blood went cold.

"I think you sleep on the left side of the bed because the right side is empty and you can't stand the space. I think you sharpen arrows until your fingers bleed because the alternative is walking ten steps down that hall and climbing onto me and you would rather cut yourself than give me the satisfaction." He was close now. Close enough to touch. "And I think the last ten years ate me alive and I deserve every blighted thing you want to say to me but I am done sleeping on the floor while you pretend you don't want me in this bed."

"You arrogant, sand-blind, worthless..."

"Keep going."

"You gutless, shit-souled, fur-chasing..."

"More."

"You LEFT!" The word tore out of her, louder than she meant, and she clamped her teeth shut and listened. The house was quiet. The children's breathing, faint through the wall. Still even. Still asleep.

She dropped her voice to a hiss. "You left and I had to explain to a ten-year-old boy with your face why his father wasn't there. You left and Terrena asked me every night for a year if the man with the blue eyes was coming back and I didn't have an answer. You left and I cried once, once, and Alvan saw, and I will never forgive you for that. Not the leaving. The crying. You made me cry in front of my son."

Dortan's hand was at his side. Not on his hilt. Hanging open. His fingers were still.

"I know," he said.

"Stop saying that! Stop saying you know! You don't know anything, you don't know what it cost, you don't..."

He kissed her.

Both hands on her jaw, fingers in her hair, his mouth crushing down on hers hard enough to push her head back. The taste of him flooded her tongue: salt and smoke and the ale he'd had with dinner. His lower lip pressed between hers and she bit it. Hard. Her fangs sank in and blood burst across her tongue, copper-hot, and he grunted into her mouth and didn't pull back. His grip tightened in her hair and he kissed her harder, his mouth open, blood and spit smearing between their lips.

She bit again. Drew more blood. Growled against his teeth.

He shoved his tongue into her mouth.

She sucked on it. Her hands came up to his chest to push him away and her claws hooked into his shirt instead, dragging him closer, and his tongue slid against hers and she sucked harder, pulling, her lips sealed around it, drinking the taste of his blood and his spit. The sound she made was low in her throat, not a purr, not a growl, something between the two that vibrated through her jaw and into his mouth. His tongue pushed deeper. She took it. Sucked it. Her teeth grazed the muscle of it and his hips ground forward against her stomach and his cock was hard, thick and obvious through his trousers, pressing into her belly.

His right hand left her hair. Dropped. His open palm cracked across her ass.

The slap was loud in the small room. The flesh bounced under the cotton and the sting bloomed hot and she snarled against his mouth and he swallowed the sound.

"I'm the man of this house." His lips moved against hers, slick with blood. His hand squeezed where he'd hit, fingers digging into the muscle of her ass through the dress, kneading it. "Time I got you back where you belong, kitten. On your back. Full of my cum. Popping out more babies until this whole blighted town knows who you belong to."

"You pig." She bit his jaw. "You absolute pig."

"Oink oink kitten." His hand gathered a fistful of her dress and yanked it up. The cotton bunched at her waist, the night air hitting her bare thighs, and his hand slid between her legs from behind and two fingers drove into her pussy.

"AH... fuck!" Her back slammed against the wall. The plaster was cold through the thin fabric still clinging to her shoulders and his fingers were thick and rough-skinned and buried to the second knuckle and her cunt clenched around them before she could stop it. His palm ground against her clit, the heel of his hand pressing flat, and he curled his fingers up and found the spot and pressed.

"Wet." His mouth was on her neck. His fingers pumped, slow, deep. "Soaking wet, kitten. Been wet all night, haven't you? Sitting at that table pretending to sharpen arrows with your pussy dripping through your loincloth."

"I'm not... nngh... I'm not wearing a loincloth."

"I know. I can tell." His fingers spread inside her, stretching, and his palm ground a tight circle on her clit. "Nothing under this dress. You left your door unlocked and you're bare under your skirt. Tell me again you don't want this."

"I don't want this." Her claws raked down his chest through the open shirt, leaving red welts. "I don't want you. I've had better, Dortan. I've had men who stayed."

"Yeah?" His fingers drove deeper. The wet sound of them was obscene against the quiet house. "They make you this wet?"

"Wetter." She grabbed his hair. Pulled. "Bigger cocks, too. Beastmen in Miravar who made you look like a copper-rank recruit."

"Liar." He twisted his wrist. His fingers curled hard against the front wall of her cunt and his palm slammed against her clit and her spine arched off the wall. "Your ears are flat, kitten. You're lying. No one's been inside this pussy since me."

"You don't... hah... you don't know that..."

"I know you. I know this body." Another twist. Another grind. His fingers were relentless, pumping in a rhythm that matched the circles on her clit, and her thighs were shaking and her tail was lashing against the wall behind her and the purr was building in her chest and she couldn't stop it. "Ten years and you're still this tight. Still this wet for me. Still squeezing my fingers like you're trying to keep them."

"Shut up. Shut your... nngh... shut your filthy..."

"Make me."

Her hips rolled against his hand. She couldn't stop them. Her body was grinding down on his fingers, chasing the pressure, and the wet sounds filled the room, slick and obscene, and his thumb replaced his palm on her clit, pressing hard, circling fast, and the orgasm hit her like a fist.

She screamed into his shoulder. Her teeth sank into the meat of him, the old scar, her fangs punching through skin, and her cunt clamped down on his fingers and she squirted, the gush of it hot and sudden, soaking his hand, his wrist, running down the inside of her thigh. Her whole body locked rigid against the wall, claws buried in his back, teeth buried in his shoulder, the scream muffled to a high, broken keen against his skin. His fingers kept moving, slower, gentler, working her through it while her legs shook and her cunt spasmed and the purr roared through her chest loud enough to rattle her own teeth.

When her jaw finally loosened, when her fangs slid free of his shoulder and left fresh punctures bleeding over the old scar, she sagged against the wall. His hand was still between her legs, his fingers still inside her, and the slick of her orgasm was dripping off his knuckles onto the floorboards.

He pulled his fingers out. Slow. Held them up between their faces, glistening, the lamplight catching the wet.

"Ten years." He put his fingers in his mouth. Sucked them clean, one at a time, his eyes on hers. "And you still cum harder for me than you ever did for those beastmen in Miravar." He licked his thumb. "The ones that don't exist."

She grabbed him by the belt. Both hands, claws hooking through the leather, and she hauled him sideways, away from the wall, away from the door, toward the shuttered balcony at the far side of the room.

"Outside," she rasped. "Now."

The shutters banged open under her palm and the night air hit her like cold water, jasmine and cut grass and the distant bleating of Brother Aldous in his pen. The balcony was narrow, barely four feet deep, the wooden railing waist-high and weathered gray by seasons she hadn't been here for. Moonlight turned the yard silver. The chandler's wall. The fence Dortan had fixed. The chicken coop. All the evidence of a man building a life she hadn't invited him into, laid out below her in pale light while her pussy was still clenching around nothing and her thighs were slick and her hands were shaking on the railing.

His boots on the floorboards behind her. The door to the balcony was too narrow for two and he filled it, his shoulder against the frame, and she could smell him, the blood from his shoulder and the musk of her cum on his hand and the intent, always the intent, thick enough to choke on.

"Inside," she hissed without turning. "The neighbors..."

"The neighbors are asleep."

"The neighbors have ears, Dortan."

"Then be quiet." His hands closed on her waist from behind. Thumbs pressing into the dip above her hips, fingers spread wide across her stomach, and he turned her. Her back hit the railing. The wood creaked. Below, Brother Aldous lifted his head and stared up at them with flat, judgmental eyes.

"Don't you dare. Not out here."

"You said outside." His hands slid down. Over the bunched cotton of her dress, still rucked at her waist, down to the backs of her thighs. His fingers dug into the muscle and he lifted.

Her feet left the boards. Her ass hit the railing and the wood groaned under their combined weight and her hands grabbed his shoulders because the alternative was falling backward into the yard, and then his hips were between her thighs and her legs locked around his waist and the blunt head of his cock pressed against her slit, slid through the wet, and found the angle.

"Dortan, wait..."

He didn't wait.

One thrust, deep, his hips rolling up as he pulled her down onto him, and his cock sank into her to the root. The stretch punched the air from her lungs. Her cunt, still swollen and sensitive from his fingers, clamped down on him so hard her vision swam. His groan was low, ground out through his teeth, and his grip on her thighs tightened until his fingers would leave bruises shaped like his hands.

"Nnhh... fuck... FUCK!"

Too loud. The word bounced off the chandler's wall and she bit down on his neck, her fangs sinking into the tendon below his ear, and the sound she made next was muffled against his skin, a whine that vibrated through his throat. He held her there, pinned between his body and the railing, his cock buried so deep she could feel her own heartbeat squeezing around him. The night air was cool on her bare thighs, on the slick mess between her legs, and the contrast with the heat of him inside her made her shiver.

He started to move. Short, grinding thrusts, his hips doing the work, his arms taking her weight. The railing creaked with every stroke. Below them the yard was quiet, moonlit, the jasmine sweet on the breeze, and she was being fucked against a balcony railing with her dress around her waist and her children sleeping ten feet through two walls and she could not stop the sounds coming out of her.

"Mmph... nngh..." Teeth in his neck, jaw aching, the taste of his sweat and blood on her tongue. She bit harder. He grunted and thrust up, savage, and her head snapped back and the sound that ripped from her throat was not quiet at all.

"AH!"

"Thought you were going to be quiet, kitten."

"Shut... shut your mouth..."

"My mouth's not the problem." Another thrust, grinding, his pelvis crushing her clit. "Yours is."

She bit him again. His shoulder this time, the old scar, her fangs finding the punctures she'd left in the bedroom and reopening them. Blood, copper-bright, flooding her tongue, and he swore under his breath and his pace stuttered.

"Bastard." She said it into his skin, her lips wet with his blood. "You bastard. You dog. You absolute..."

He drove up into her so hard the railing cracked.

"FUCK!" Her claws raked down his back, tearing through the shirt he was still half wearing, and her legs tightened around his waist. The wood was splintering under her ass. One more thrust like that and they'd both go over the edge and land in the goat pen and she'd have to explain to the children why their parents were naked in the yard with a broken railing.

"I should have left you at the inn." Her voice was wrecked, barely a whisper, her mouth against his ear. "Should have walked out of the Salt Widow and never looked back. Should have let you rot in Miravar with the rest of the whoresons and the drunks."

"Yeah?" His voice was rough, fraying. His arms flexed, lifting her higher, changing the angle, and his cock hit deeper and she gasped and her claws sank into his shoulders. "But you didn't."

"Worst decision I ever made."

"Second worst." He thrust up. Held. Ground into her with his cock buried to the hilt and his pelvis pressed flat against her clit. "First worst was letting me in tonight."

"I didn't let you in. You broke in."

"Door was unlocked, kitten."

"I'll fix that."

"No you won't."

She snarled. He was right. She wouldn't. And the railing was cracking and the yard was too quiet and her cunt was squeezing him in rhythmic pulses she couldn't govern and the purr was building again, that deep chest-rumble that carried on the night air.

"Inside," she managed. "Dortan. Inside. Now. The railing..."

He pulled her off the rail. His cock stayed buried in her, thick and deep, and his arms locked under her ass and he carried her. Three steps across the balcony, through the narrow door, the frame scraping his shoulders. She clung to him, legs wrapped tight, her face pressed into his neck where she could muffle the sounds against his skin, and every step jolted his cock inside her and she whimpered through her teeth, "Nnh, nnh, nnh," a sound for each stride that she'd kill him for hearing if she had any pride left.

He dropped onto the bed.

His back hit the mattress and she was on top of him, straddling his hips, his cock still inside her, and the shift in position drove him deeper and she gasped and her hands slammed flat against his chest. His shirt was shredded, hanging off one shoulder, and her claws had left red tracks across his skin that were already beading blood. His hands fell to his sides, palms up on the sheets, and he looked up at her with those blue eyes half-lidded and his mouth curved and his chest heaving.

"Well?" His voice was a wreck. "You're on top, kitten. Do your worst."

She rose up on her knees. Slow. His cock sliding out of her inch by inch, the drag of it making her thighs shake, until only the head was inside her, stretching her open, the foreskin pulling back against the rim of her cunt. She held there. Let him feel the grip. Let him see her above him, her hair loose and wild, her tits swinging heavy, her body golden in the lamplight and slick with sweat and his blood and her own cum.

"My worst," she said, "broke a bed frame in Miravar."

She dropped her hips.

His cock drove into her to the root and they both made sounds, hers a sharp "AH!" and his a groan that came from somewhere below his ribs. She didn't wait. Didn't give him time to set a pace. Her hands braced on his chest, claws dimpling skin, and she rode him. Hard. Fast. Her hips rolling in a vicious rhythm, rising and slamming down, her ass slapping against his thighs with every stroke. The bed frame hit the wall. Once. Twice. A steady, punishing beat.

This is mine. This pace. This angle. This is me taking what I want and I don't need you to give it.

"Hah... hahh..." Her breath came in sharp bursts. His cock filled her on every downstroke, the head grinding against the spot that made her vision blur, and she chased it, adjusted, found the angle that hit hardest and locked it in and rode it with her jaw set and her ears flat and her eyes on his face.

"Alshera..."

"Shut up." She slammed down harder. The wet sound of their bodies was obscene in the small room, slick flesh on slick flesh, and the purr was roaring through her chest now, vibrating into his body through her palms. "You don't talk. You don't move. You lie there and take it."

His hands were still at his sides. His fingers curled into the sheets. His jaw was tight, the muscles in his neck standing out, and his stomach flexed with every impact of her hips. She was wrecking him. She could see it, the way his control was fraying, the way his breathing had gone harsh and ragged, the way his cock twitched inside her on every downstroke.

"All these years." She ground down, slow, crushing, her clit pressed against his pelvis. "All these years and you think you can walk back in and own me?"

"Alshera..."

"I said shut UP." She rose. Slammed down. The bed cracked against the wall and his head snapped back and his groan was loud, unguarded, the performance stripped away. "I own you, Dortan Trevon. This cock is mine. These hands are mine. You sleep on my floor. You cook in my kitchen. You breathe because I let you stay."

His fingers were white in the sheets. His hips jerked under her, involuntary, trying to thrust, and she pinned him with her weight and rode harder, punishing, her tits bouncing with every slam of her hips, the slap of her ass against his thighs filling the room.

"Nnh... fuck... you're mine, you hear me? You're..."

His hands left the sheets.

They locked on her hips. Thumbs pressing into the bones of her pelvis, fingers digging into the meat of her ass, and his grip was iron, immovable, stopping her mid-stroke with his cock half inside her.

"Dortan, let go..."

He thrust up.

The force of it lifted her knees off the mattress. His cock drove into her from below, hitting the deepest part of her, and the angle was different now, his angle, his pace, his hands hauling her down as his hips punched up, and the rhythm she'd built shattered. She tried to fight it. Tried to ride against his grip, to set her own pace, but his hands were stronger than her hips and his thrusts were relentless, driving up into her with a force that made her tits bounce and her spine arch and her mouth fall open.

"You were saying?" His voice was a growl, shredded, barely holding together. "Something about owning me?"

"I... nngh... I do... you're..."

He slammed up into her. Her words broke apart.

"FUCK! Dortan!"

"Yeah, kitten." His hands dragged her down as his hips drove up, bottoming out, grinding, and the pressure on her clit was constant and crushing and she couldn't escape it because his grip held her pinned. "Keep telling me I'm yours. Keep saying it while you cum on my cock."

"I'm not... hah... I won't..."

He thrust harder. Faster. His hands controlling her body, bouncing her on his cock, and her own rhythm was gone, replaced by his, and the orgasm was building at the base of her spine and in her cunt and behind her eyes and she couldn't stop it because she'd never been able to stop it, not with him, not once in ten years.

"Bastard... you... nngh... you absolute... FUCK!"

"Who owns who, kitten?"

She screamed. Her hands clawed down his chest, leaving furrows, and her cunt locked down on his cock and her back arched and the orgasm ripped through her in a long, shuddering roar that she buried in the ceiling because there was nowhere else to put it. Her thighs shook. Her toes curled. She squirted around his cock, the gush of it soaking his stomach, his hips, the sheets beneath them, and his grip on her hips turned bruising as he fucked up into her through it, relentless, his cock pumping into the clench of her cunt while she shook apart above him.

His hands held her hips pinned, his cock still buried in her, and the aftershocks were still rolling through her cunt in slow, squeezing pulses when his voice came, low and rough and stripped of every joke he'd ever told.

"Say it."

Her eyes snapped open. His face was close, sweat on his brow, his hair wrecked, and those blue eyes burning up at her with a focus that cut through the haze of her orgasm like a blade through smoke.

"Say you love me."

The words hit her like cold water. Her spine straightened. Her claws dug into his chest and her ears pressed flat and the glare she gave him could have split stone. She bared her fangs. Said nothing.

He read her face. Read the refusal written in every line of it, the jaw locked shut, the gold of her eyes narrowed to slits around blown-wide pupils. His mouth twitched. Not a grin. Tighter than that. His hands flexed on her hips and he shifted his angle, a small adjustment, his cock dragging against the swollen front wall of her cunt, and he thrust up.

One stroke. Precise. The head of his cock grinding against the spot that turned her stupid, and her whole body jolted and the glare cracked and the scream ripped out of her before she could catch it.

"AHH! You... nngh... you bastard, you can't just..."

"Say it." Another thrust, same angle, same devastating grind. Her cunt clamped down and her thighs shook and she came, sudden and sharp, a short brutal orgasm that punched through her with no buildup, her body arching above him while her mouth opened on a sound that was half sob and half snarl.

"Fuck... FUCK... I won't... I..."

"Stubborn." His voice was fraying. His hands dragged her down, hard, and he drove up and changed the angle, deeper this time, the head of his cock slamming against her cervix. The impact was a white flash behind her eyes, pleasure and pain knotted together so tight she couldn't separate them, and she squirted, the gush of it violent, soaking his stomach, his chest, her own thighs, the hot rush of it running down between their bodies while she keened, high and broken, her claws tearing fresh furrows across his shoulders.

"DORTAN! Ah... AHH... please... please, I can't... stop, I can't..."

His open palm cracked across her ass. The slap was loud in the small room, the sting blooming hot across the red marks already layered there, and her cunt spasmed around his cock and she screamed into the ceiling.

"Please WHAT, kitten?"

"Please... nnhh... mercy, you... hahh... mercy..."

He smacked her again. Harder. The flesh bounced and the sound was wet, obscene, and her whole body jerked and the keen broke into a whimper that she'd kill him for hearing later.

"No mercy." His hands locked on her waist. "Not tonight."

He lifted her off his cock. The emptiness was a shock, her cunt clenching around nothing, and she snarled at the loss, but he was already moving, already flipping her, his hands on her shoulders shoving her back flat against the mattress. Her spine hit the bed and before she could twist or claw or do anything but gasp, his hands caught the backs of her thighs and folded her in half.

Knees by her ears. His full weight bearing down. The bed groaned and the frame cracked against the wall and his cock found her again, slid through the mess of her cum and his sweat, and sank into her in one long stroke that bottomed out against her cervix and kept pressing.

"NNGHH... FUCK!"

Deep. So deep her vision swam and her toes curled and her hands grabbed his arms and her claws sank in and held. She couldn't move. Couldn't close her legs, couldn't turn her face, couldn't do anything but lie there folded open under his weight with his cock buried so far inside her she could feel her own pulse squeezing around the shaft. His forehead pressed against hers. His breath was harsh on her mouth, hot, ragged.

He started to move.

Not slow. Not teasing. Relentless, grinding thrusts that used his whole body, his hips rolling with his weight behind them, every stroke pressing his pelvis against her clit and his cock against the deepest part of her. The taunts were gone. The insults were gone. She had nothing left to throw at him, no words sharp enough to cut through the noise her own body was making. Just sounds. Screaming, open-mouthed, her voice cracking on every thrust. Moans that started in her chest and came out broken, shattered into syllables that weren't language. The purr roaring through her ribs so loud the bed frame vibrated with it.

"Mine." His mouth against her ear, his lips brushing the base of it where the fur was thin and the skin was hot. "This pussy. These tits. This mouth that won't shut up. Mine, kitten. Ten years and you're still mine."

"Nnhh... hahh... AHHH!"

"Gonna fill you up again." His hips drove down, savage, and she screamed and her claws tore through his skin and blood ran down his arms and he didn't flinch. "Gonna pump you so full of my cum it's running down your legs when you walk the children to school tomorrow. Every man on that market road is gonna smell me on you."

"Dor... Dortan... I..."

"Every night, Alshera." Her name. Low, ground out, the syllables rough and tender at the same time. "Every night until you can't remember what it was like before me."

Her cunt locked down on him. The orgasm hit with no warning, no buildup, just a wall of sensation that slammed through her from her cunt to her skull, and the keen broke into a roar, full-throated, her whole body arching against the fold, her thighs shaking against his shoulders. She squirted around his cock, the gush of it hot between their bodies, and her claws buried themselves in his biceps and her teeth bared and the roar shook the shutters and rattled the lamp and the room rang with it.

"Alshera." Once. Her name, said like a prayer to a god he didn't worship.

His hips slammed forward and held. His cock pulsed inside her, thick, the first heavy rope of cum hitting deep against her cervix, and then another, and another, filling her in long surges that she could feel, hot and copious, flooding her cunt while her body clenched and milked him through it. His groan was low, shuddering, torn from somewhere below his chest, and his hips stuttered, grinding, pumping more into her, his grip on her thighs bruising as his whole body shook above her. Cum leaked out around his shaft, thick and white, running down the crack of her ass, pooling on the ruined sheet. Too much. Always too much with him. Her cunt squeezed in aftershocks, each one pushing more of the mess out of her, and the wet sound of it filled the quiet room.

He didn't pull out.

His weight settled on her, heavy, crushing, his cock softening by a fraction inside her, still thick, still stretching her. His hands released her thighs and her legs dropped, shaking, wrapping around his waist because her body wouldn't let go even when her pride screamed at her to shove him off. His arms slid under her shoulders. His face dropped into the crook of her neck and his breathing was ragged against her fur, hot and unsteady.

She lay there. Pinned. Full of his cum, her cunt still twitching around him, the purr rolling through her chest in deep, slow waves she couldn't stop. Her claws retracted. Her hands, bloody with his blood, rested on his back. She didn't push him away.

He lifted his head.

His mouth found hers. The kiss was slow. Deep. No teeth, no blood, no anger. His lips moved against hers and his tongue slid into her mouth and she tasted salt and sweat and herself on him and she kissed him back. Soft. Her hand came up to the side of his face, her thumb tracing his jaw, and the kiss went on and on, unhurried, the two of them breathing each other's air in a room that smelled like sex and jasmine and the faint bleating of a goat in the yard below.

He pulled back. His eyes were half-closed, the blue warm for the first time she could remember, the cold gone from them. His thumb brushed her cheekbone. Traced the edge of her ear. She didn't flinch.

"Stay," she whispered.

One word. The only one she could afford.

His arm tightened around her. His face pressed into her hair. He breathed her in, long and slow, and his cock twitched inside her, thickening, and she made a sound, a low "Mm," that was half protest and half invitation.

"Again?" she murmured against his throat.

"Your fault." His hips rolled, lazy, grinding deep, and her breath stuttered. "Can't stop. Not with you."

She bit his shoulder. The old scar. Her fangs sank in, gentle this time, holding rather than tearing, and the purr deepened in her chest until her whole body hummed with it. His hand slid down her spine, cupped her ass, squeezed, and she arched into him and her legs tightened around his waist.

They didn't sleep.

Not yet. His cock hardened inside her and he rocked into her, slow, face to face, her legs wrapped around him and her hands in his hair and the kisses between thrusts long and deep and tasting of surrender neither of them would name in the morning. She came twice more before he did, the second one a quiet, shuddering thing that made her press her face into his neck and say his name with no venom in it at all, just his name, and his arms tightened around her and he followed her over the edge with a groan that vibrated through both their chests.

They dozed. Woke. His hand on her hip in the dark, pulling her back against him, his cock hard again against the curve of her ass, and she pressed back into him and he slid into her from behind, slow, both of them on their sides, his arm around her waist and his mouth on the back of her neck. Quiet. The only sounds the creak of the bed and her breathing and the purr and the wet, rhythmic sound of his cock moving inside her. She came with her face in the pillow and his hand over her mouth and his whisper in her ear, "Quiet, kitten, the children," and she bit his palm and shook apart against him and he filled her again, thick and hot, and held her while the tremors faded.

They slept. Woke. She climbed on top of him in the gray light before dawn, her hair wild, her body golden and wrecked and covered in his marks, and she rode him with her hands on his chest and her eyes on his face and neither of them spoke. The bed frame hit the wall. The purr filled the room. She came with her head thrown back and her mouth open on a silent scream and he came watching her, his hands on her hips, his eyes never leaving her face.

Dawn crept through the shutters. Thin bars of light across the bed, across their tangled bodies, across the sheets that were beyond saving. She was on her side, her back against his chest, his arm heavy around her waist, his face buried in her hair. His cock, soft now, rested against the curve of her ass. Cum, dried and fresh, smeared across her thighs, her stomach, the fur between her legs. The purr was still going. Faint. A low hum in her ribs that matched the rise and fall of his breathing.

His hand rested on her belly. Warm. Open. His thumb moved in a small, absent circle against the fur.

She covered his hand with hers. Laced their fingers together. Closed her eyes.

The children would wake soon. Brother Aldous would need feeding. The market road waited with its stares and its cruelty and its small, grinding indignities. All of it was still there, on the other side of the door, patient and unchanged.

But the door was locked. And his hand was warm. And for the first time in years, the right side of the bed was not empty.

Sunlight cut through the shutters in warm bars, striping the bed, the floor, her knees. The sheets were still wrecked from the night. The room smelled like sex and jasmine and the faint animal musk of two bodies that had spent more hours tangled than sleeping.

"Mama! Breakfast!"

Terrena's voice, bright and impatient, muffled by the wall and the closed door. Alvan's followed, lower, clipped: "We're hungry."

Alshera's mouth was full.

She knelt between Dortan's legs at the edge of the bed, her hair loose and tangled, her knees on the hard floorboards. His cock lay heavy on her tongue, thick, the taste of him salt and skin and the faint bitter trace of last night's cum that no amount of fucking had fully spent. She sucked slow. Wet. Her tongue flat along the underside, pressing into the ridge below the head, dragging root to tip in long pulls that made his thigh tense under her palm. The foreskin slid with her mouth, adding friction, and she worked it with her lips, pulling it over the head and then back, her tongue chasing the exposed skin.

His hand rested on the back of her skull. Not pushing. Holding.

"Mama! The eggs!"

"In a minute, soft paws," Dortan called toward the door, his voice easy, unhurried, the drawl thick with sleep and the tail end of pleasure. His stomach flexed. His fingers curled in her hair.

She pulled off long enough to glare up at him. "Don't answer my children with your cock in my mouth."

"Our children. And you're the one who started this."

"I was stretching. You put it in my face."

"It was already hard. You made a choice." His thumb traced the edge of her ear. She flinched. "Get back to work, kitten."

She bared her fangs at him. Then she took him back into her mouth, deeper this time, and the wet sound of it filled the small room. Her tongue worked the underside in firm, flat strokes, her cheeks hollowing on the pull, and the purr was building in her chest, low, vibrating through her jaw and into his shaft. She hated that. Hated the way her body announced its satisfaction without her permission.

His breathing changed. Shorter. His fingers tightened in her hair. His hips shifted, and then he was pulling back, his cock sliding free of her mouth with a slick drag, and his hand wrapped around the shaft and he angled the head toward her lips.

She opened her mouth. Tongue out, flat, waiting. Her eyes on the swollen tip, on the slit where the first bead was already gathering, and she hated how hungry she looked and couldn't make herself look any other way. The amber of her irises was thin rings around blown-wide black, and her ears were forward, alert, trained on him with the focus she brought to tracking a kill.

"Hah... fuck." His hand worked his shaft in short, tight strokes, the head brushing her lower lip, smearing slick across it. His stomach clenched. His jaw went tight.

He came on her tongue.

The first rope hit thick and hot, flooding her mouth, and she held still while his cock pulsed and his hand stuttered and more followed, heavy, copious, filling the cup of her tongue and pooling against her teeth. His groan was low, ground out, his head tipping back, and his hips jerked twice, three times, pumping the last of it onto her waiting tongue while his fingers gripped her hair hard enough to sting.

She held it. Didn't swallow. Her mouth full, her lips parted just enough that he could see the thick white load sitting on her tongue when he looked down. She swished it. Slow. Let it coat the inside of her cheeks, the roof of her mouth, her teeth. Looked up at him with those amber eyes, steady, unblinking, her mouth open and full of his cum.

His chest was heaving. His cock twitched in his fist, still leaking, a thin strand connecting the tip to her lower lip.

"Swallow."

One word. Low. The drawl stripped to nothing.

She held his gaze. Closed her mouth. Swallowed. The thick salt of it slid down her throat and her eyes stayed on his and she didn't blink.

His open palm cracked across her cheek. Light. Not hard enough to sting, not soft enough to ignore. Possessive. A claim stamped on skin.

"My feline whore."

Her pussy clenched. Hard, sudden, a spasm that squeezed around nothing and left her thighs pressing together on the floorboards. Her ears flattened against her skull. Both tells, simultaneous, and his eyes tracked both of them, the squeeze of her thighs and the drop of her ears, and his mouth curved.

He saw. He always saw.

"Bathe." He stood, tucking his softening cock into his trousers and lacing them with one hand. "I'll handle breakfast."

"You'll burn the eggs."

"I'll burn your eggs with love and dedication." He pulled his shirt on, the one she'd shredded last night, the claw marks visible through the torn linen. He didn't bother finding a new one. He walked to the door, opened it, and stepped into the hall.

"Papa! Eggs!"

"Eggs, eggs, eggs. You two eat like orcs." His voice carried back through the open door, warm, easy, already shifting into the register he used with them. The register that had no cruelty in it and no performance and sounded like a man who lived here.

Because he did now.

The door swung shut behind him. His boots on the stairs, heavy, unhurried. Terrena's laugh, high and bright. The scrape of a pan on the stove.

Alshera didn't stand. Her knees ached on the floorboards and the sunlight was warm on her bare shoulders and the taste of him was thick in her mouth, salt and bitter and the faint musk underneath that was just Dortan, that she'd know blind and deaf and buried in sand. She ran her tongue along the inside of her teeth, gathering the traces, and swallowed again.

A drop. Thick, warm, sliding from her hairline where he'd been careless, or she'd been eager, tracing a slow path down her temple, her cheek, the corner of her jaw. It reached her lip. Her tongue caught it. Took it in. Swallowed.

The purr rolled through her chest, deep and involuntary, rattling her ribs.

Gods, she hated him.

Life settled into a rhythm she refused to name, because naming it would make it real, and real things could be taken.

The house grew around them like a living thing. Dortan bought lumber from the mill at the edge of town and spent a week extending the kitchen, widening the doorframe he kept cracking his shoulders against, adding shelves she hadn't asked for that were exactly the right height for her bow maintenance kit. He repaired the balcony railing he'd broken. He didn't mention how it broke. Neither did she. Brother Aldous ate the new posts within a month and Dortan rebuilt them and the goat ate them again and the war between man and goat became the defining conflict of the household, more reliable than seasons.

Every evening the insults flew across the dinner table like arrows.

"The bread is burned."

"The bread is rustic."

"The bread is charcoal, Dortan. I could use it to sketch."

"Then sketch something nice. Sketch my face."

"I'd need more charcoal. Your ego wouldn't fit on one piece."

Alvan snorted. Terrena giggled. The bread was, in fact, burned. They ate it anyway.

And every night, after the children were asleep, after the dishes were done and the fire was banked and the house went quiet, he came to her room. Or she went to his bedroll. Or they met in the hallway and she shoved him against the wall and bit his neck and he hauled her dress up and they fucked standing, her back against the plaster, her claws in his shoulders, her teeth in his skin, the sounds muffled by his palm over her mouth because the children were ten feet away and the walls were thin and she could not, could not, keep quiet when he was inside her.

"Shut up," he'd growl against her ear, his hand clamped over her lips, his cock buried deep.

"Mmph... nnmph..." She'd bite his palm. He'd thrust harder. She'd scream into his hand and her cunt would clamp down and the purr would rattle through both their bodies and he'd groan through his teeth and fill her and they'd stand there, panting, his cum dripping down her thighs, his hand still over her mouth, and he'd grin and she'd want to kill him and she'd drag him to the bedroom instead.

He fucked her on the kitchen table after the children left for school. On the stairs. Against the fence that Brother Aldous kept eating. In the yard at midnight with the stars overhead and her face in the grass and his hands on her hips and the goat watching with those flat, judgmental eyes.

"Your goat is staring," she hissed over her shoulder.

"He's learning." Dortan's hips snapped forward. "Educational."

"I will murder you and feed you to the chickens."

"After I finish."

"AFTER you... nngh... FUCK!"

She called him a bastard and a pig and a whoreson and he called her kitten and she clawed his back open and he spanked her ass red and they ruined three more sets of sheets and the carpenter Gretta started giving them knowing looks when Dortan came in for more lumber and Alshera's ears burned so hot she could have lit a fire with them.

It was a life. She refused to call it a good one.

The sickness started six weeks after his return.

Morning. The smell of eggs on the stove, the same eggs she'd eaten every day for months, and her stomach turned inside out. She made it to the yard. Barely. Hands on her knees behind the chicken coop, retching into the dirt, her braid swinging and her ears flat and her whole body saying what her mind was still refusing to hear.

"Hells," she whispered.

She went to the apothecary that afternoon. The same kind of shop, the same kind of woman behind the counter, older, tired-eyed, who looked at Alshera's face and didn't need to ask.

"How far along?"

"Six weeks. Maybe seven."

The woman's hands were gentle on her belly, pressing, reading. Her eyebrows rose. Pressed again. Moved to the left. To the right. Back to the center.

"Three," the woman said.

Alshera stared at her.

"Three heartbeats. Strong ones." The woman wiped her hands on her apron. "Congratulations."

Alshera walked home. She fed the chickens. She collected the eggs. She checked the children's school clothes for the morning. She sharpened four arrows. She put the kettle on. She sat at the kitchen table and pressed her palms flat against the wood and breathed.

Three.

Three.

The purr started before she could stop it. Low, deep, rolling through her ribs, and she hated it because she knew what it was. Not contentment. Not happiness. Instinct. The feline part of her brain, the part that tracked seasons and cycles and the health of a bloodline, purring in satisfaction because her mate had bred her again, because the litter was large, because the line would continue. The Sand Mother's work, seed and soil, the cycle turning.

She wanted to purr and she wanted to scream and she wanted to find Dortan Trevon and kick him in the balls so hard the Hollow King would feel it.

She settled for the middle option.

Dortan came in from the yard at dusk, sweat-streaked, hay in his hair, a scratch on his forearm from Brother Aldous. He stopped in the kitchen doorway. Looked at her face.

"What."

"Triplets."

The word hung in the air. His hand went to the doorframe. Not his sword hilt. The doorframe, gripping it, his knuckles going white against the wood.

"Say that again."

"Triplets, Dortan. Three. You knocked me up with three." She stood. The chair scraped back. "Seven weeks. Three heartbeats. Your cock, your seed, your fault."

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. For the first time in the years she'd known him, Dortan Trevon had nothing to say. His hand on the doorframe was the only thing keeping him upright and she could see it, the way his weight shifted, the way his knees weren't quite locked.

"Three," he said.

"Three."

"By the Wolf."

"Don't invoke the Wolf. The Wolf didn't do this. You did."

"I..." He ran his hand through his hair. Hay fell out. "Three."

"You've said that."

"Ashara's tits."

"Ashara had nothing to do with it either. This is entirely your cock's doing and I want you to know that I am going to make you pay for every single day of this pregnancy."

"How?"

"You're going to do every chore in this house. Every animal. Every fence repair. Every blighted errand. You are going to cook and clean and haul water and muck the goat pen and if I so much as see you sitting down before sundown I will put an arrow through your kneecap."

"That's..."

"Fair. That's fair, Dortan. I'm carrying three of your children. Three. My body is going to become a war zone. My tits are going to be the size of your head. I am going to be sick every morning for months and fat for the rest of it and you are going to work like a draft horse and thank me for the privilege."

He looked at her. The shock was fading. His hand loosened on the doorframe. And there it was, creeping across his face like dawn over the hills: that grin. That insufferable, wolfish, too-wide grin that she wanted to claw off his face and kiss at the same time.

"Five kids," he said.

"Don't you dare look smug."

"Five kids, kitten." The grin widened. "I'm going to need a bigger table."

She threw the kettle at him.

He ducked. The kettle hit the doorframe and dented it and water splashed across the floor and he was laughing, backing up with his hands raised, and she was advancing with her claws out and her ears flat and murder in her eyes.

"You are HAPPY about this!"

"I'm not happy. I'm... productive."

"PRODUCTIVE?"

"Virile. Potent. Blessed by the Green Mother herself."

"I am going to geld you, Dortan Trevon. I am going to geld you with a dull knife and feed the pieces to Brother Aldous."

"Brother Aldous is an herbivore."

"I KNOW HE'S AN HERBIVORE! I'LL MAKE AN EXCEPTION!"

He caught her wrists. She snarled. He pulled her against his chest and she fought, claws raking, teeth bared, and he held on and pressed his mouth to the top of her head and said, quiet, into her hair:

"Five."

She stopped fighting. Her forehead pressed against his collarbone. The purr was still going, traitor that it was, vibrating through her chest and into his, and his arms tightened around her and she stood there in the kitchen with water on the floor and a dent in the doorframe and three new lives in her belly and she didn't push him away.

"I hate you," she said into his shirt.

"I know."

"You're mucking the goat pen. Every day. Twice."

"Done."

"And the chickens."

"Done."

"And you're sleeping on the floor again until I say otherwise."

His arms loosened. He looked down at her. She looked up at him. Her ears were flat and her eyes were bright and her tail was doing that traitorous still thing and they both knew the floor arrangement would last approximately until sundown.

"Done," he said.

It lasted until sundown.

The pregnancy changed her body in ways the twins hadn't prepared her for. Three was different. Three was a siege.

Her belly swelled fast, rounding out by the third month in a way that made her dresses pull tight and her balance shift and her back ache from the moment she stood until the moment she lay down. Her tits, already heavy from nursing the twins and from Dortan's relentless attention, grew heavier still, the fur thinning over the stretched skin, the nipples darkening, and by the fourth month they were leaking. Thin, sweet, warm against the inside of her dress. She'd be stirring porridge and feel the let-down, the tingle and then the wet, and she'd swear under her breath and press her arm against her chest and Dortan would look at the damp spots spreading through the cotton and his eyes would go dark and quiet and she'd point a wooden spoon at him like a blade.

"Don't."

"Didn't say anything."

"You're thinking it."

"I'm always thinking it."

"Think quieter. You stink of intent."

He worked. She made sure of it. Dawn to dusk, the animals, the yard, the repairs, the errands. He hauled water from the well. He mucked Brother Aldous's pen, which the goat repaid by eating his shirt off the clothesline. He walked the children to school and back, his sword on his hip, his presence clearing the market road of every comment and every stare. He cooked dinner. He washed dishes. He carried Terrena on his shoulders and let Alvan ride on his back and he did not complain. Not once.

She watched him through the kitchen window, her hand on her swelling belly, and the purr hummed in her chest and she pressed her teeth together and said nothing.

But the nights.

Green Mother's grace, the nights.

The children asleep. The house dark. Her body aching, heavy, her belly round under the thin shift she wore to bed because nothing else fit anymore. She'd lie on her side, one pillow between her knees, another under her belly, trying to find a position that didn't make her spine scream, and the door would open and he'd be there. Quiet. No jokes. No drawl. Just his weight settling onto the mattress behind her, his arm sliding over her hip, his hand resting on her belly where the babies kicked.

She should have told him to go back to the floor. She should have told him every night. The words were right there, sharp and ready, lined up like arrows in a quiver.

She never said them.

Instead she'd reach back and find his trousers and unlace them with one hand, her claws catching on the ties, and his cock would be hard against her ass, thick, the heat of it through the thin linen of her shift, and she'd pull the fabric up over her hips and press back against him and he'd groan, low, into the back of her neck.

"Kitten..."

"Shut up and get inside me."

He'd slide in from behind, slow, careful of the belly, his arm hooked under her thigh to open her, and the stretch would make her gasp and her cunt would clench around him and the purr would start, deep, rattling, and she'd grab his wrist and hold on and they'd rock together in the dark, slow and deep, his mouth on the back of her neck, her ass pressed into the curve of his hips, the wet sound of his cock moving inside her the only noise besides her breathing and the creak of the bed.

Slow. Always slow now. The belly wouldn't allow anything else and the slowness was its own kind of torture because she could feel everything, every inch, every ridge, the drag of his foreskin, the throb of him when he bottomed out and held. He'd grind deep and she'd whimper into the pillow and his hand would slide from her hip to her tit and squeeze and the milk would let down, warm and sudden, soaking through the shift, running over his fingers.

"Fuck," he'd breathe against her ear.

"Don't... nngh... don't stop."

"Not stopping. Never stopping."

But the night the shift came off, the night she pulled it over her head and threw it on the floor because the fabric was soaked through and clinging and she couldn't stand it anymore, and her tits hung heavy and full and leaking in the dark, the milk beading on her nipples and running in thin lines down the curve of her belly, that was the night the rules changed.

His mouth found her nipple.

"Ah!" Her hands flew to his head. Fingers in his hair, claws pricking his scalp, and the suction was immediate, hard, his lips sealed tight around the dark peak, his tongue pressing flat and working the nipple against the roof of his mouth. The milk came in a rush, the let-down triggered by the pressure, and she heard him swallow. A thick, wet gulp, his throat working, and then he sucked again, harder, drawing more, and the sensation lanced through her belly and into her cunt where his cock was still buried and she cried out, a high broken "AH!" that she smothered against the top of his head.

"Dortan... Dortan, that's..."

He sucked harder. His cheeks hollowed. The milk flowed, warm, sweet, and she could hear him drinking, the rhythmic pull and swallow, and her body responded to the suction the way it responded to her babies, the let-down deepening, the milk coming faster, and the wires crossed, nursing and fucking tangled together until she couldn't separate the tenderness from the arousal and the arousal from the tenderness and it was all one thing, one ache, one need that had his name on it.

"Mmm..." His groan vibrated against her breast. His hips rocked, slow, grinding, his cock thick inside her, and his mouth never left her nipple, sucking in long, deep pulls that matched the rhythm of his hips. Milk ran from the corner of his lips, down his chin, dripping onto the sheets.

She kissed his forehead. His temple. The scar that ran into his hairline. She kissed the bridge of his nose and the closed lid of his eye and the corner of his mouth where the milk was leaking and she tasted it, her own milk, sweet and thin on his skin.

"Good," she whispered. The word slipped out before she could catch it, soft, the register she used for the children, and she should have been horrified but his mouth pulled harder and his cock ground deeper and the purr roared through her chest and she kissed him again, his cheek, his jaw, the shell of his ear. "Good. Drink. That's... Mmm..."

His arm tightened around her. His hand spread wide across her belly where the babies shifted and kicked and his cock pulsed inside her and his mouth, his greedy, relentless mouth, drained her left breast until the flow slowed to a trickle and then he pulled off with a wet gasp and found the right one and latched on and she arched into him and her claws raked his scalp and she kissed the top of his head over and over, her lips moving against his hair, murmuring sounds that weren't words. Encouragement. Approval. The low, throaty coo of a catfolk mother with her young, repurposed, redirected, aimed at a man who was not her child but who was drinking from her body with a hunger that made her chest ache and her cunt squeeze and her eyes burn.

"Harder." She pressed his face into her breast. "Suck harder, you greedy bastard."

He obeyed. His jaw worked, the suction intensifying, and the milk sprayed against the back of his throat and he swallowed and groaned and his hips stuttered, losing the rhythm, his cock driving deep and holding. She kissed his forehead. Kissed the crease between his brows where the tension gathered. Kissed the closed eyes, the lashes wet, and she didn't ask why they were wet and he didn't explain.

"Dortan." His name, soft. No venom. She rocked her hips back against him, taking him deeper, her cunt clenching in slow, rolling squeezes that matched the pull of his mouth on her nipple. "Stay right there. Don't move. Just... Mmm... just drink."

His hand on her belly trembled. A baby kicked against his palm and his mouth faltered on her breast, the suction breaking for one breath, two, and then he latched on again, harder, his arm crushing her against him, and she kissed his hair and rocked on his cock and the purr filled the room, deep and steady, vibrating through the mattress, through his chest, through the walls of the small house where their children slept and their goat bleated and the chickens rustled in their coop and the fence stood straight for once.

This wasn't so bad a life, she decided.

The thought arrived without permission, without armor, without the usual escort of qualifications and denials. Just the thought, bare and warm, settling into her chest beside the purr. His mouth on her breast. His cock inside her. His hand on the belly where three more of his children grew. The taste of her own milk on his lips when she kissed the corner of his mouth.

Not so bad.

She purred harder. He sucked deeper. The milk flowed and the bed creaked and the night was quiet around them and she held him close, her arms around his head, her lips in his hair, and she did not let go.