This morning, it was berries, bright and swollen in the reed basket Alo had risked several claw marks to fetch. I pried loose his arm with a carefulness that felt like lying, and brought a handful to my mouth. They bled sweet and cold on my tongue. I tried not to think about the way his mouth had bled on my neck, hours before.
The moment I chewed, I caught his eyes on me, bright and black and held a stripe too wide. His pupils dilated in a way that was not quite human.
"Does your head hurt?" I whispered. "You're staring again."
He blinked, then pressed his snout to the back of my ear. "Not head. Something else."
I waited. He flicked his ear once, twice, then said, "You're different."
It was the way he said it. Not with the threat he used for other males, or the soft-goofy way he said it to pups. Alo's different sounded like a secret only the world knew.
"Different how?" I asked, playing soft. I wanted him to explain. Wanted to hear it.
He took my shoulders in a grip that could snap bone and turned me to face him, slow and careful. His nostrils flared. "Your scent," he said, voice gone rasp and smoke. "Couldn't sleep. Couldn't think. Never smelled anything like you."
I tried to put down the berries but my hands shook. I'd read about this. Sprout left notes when I slept, written behind my eyes in a script only I could see:
> *Your Heat approaches. Prepare.*
I hadn't understood, but now as warmth crawled up my thighs and spine, I understood everything.
My breaths came in short puffs. His hand found the small of my back, followed the scrape of my ribs, spread on my belly hungry, possessive. I wanted to protest, only I didn't. "That's… Maybe I should go outside"
He growled, deep and low, and it was not a question. I felt it in my tailbone, in every place that had once only belonged to myself. He bit the scruff of my neck and licked the spot, apology and demand all tangled in the heat of his tongue.
"You smell so good. Want to eat you." His voice fogged the air.
Alo pressed me flat and caged my hips, not cruel but firm, gentle and claiming.
I let myself melt into the moss. There was a wildness in me that needed, and as his hands tore the buckskin shift off my shoulders, I didn't feel afraid. I felt right, peeled back and small, but never powerless.
His fingers were thick and warm smelled of flint and earth. The first brush inside me was rough, then careful, mapping places I didn't know I had. My head tipped back and I bit my fist to keep from making the noise in my chest, the soft whelp that wanted out.
"You" His voice, ragged. "Little Lu. You want it, yes?" (A/N ALWAYS GET CONSENT!)
I nodded, dizzy with wanting.
He kissed up my spine, up the delicate ladder of vertebrae, while his fingers worked me, patient and slow. When I finally broke, clawing at the moss with both hands.
I turned to look at him, sweat blooming in my hairline. "What if the others smell it?"
He looked at me with a hunger that was also, somehow, adoration. "Let them come. You're mine for now."
His teeth raked the underside of my jaw, slow and greedy, marking me where only we would know unless I exposed the curve of my throat to another. I knew then that I would never escape, not from this heat, not from the way Alo's gaze made reality itself curl at the edges like paper held too close to flame..
He nudged my knees apart, and every inch of his touch was both a question and an answer. I wanted him, wanted all of it, and the reckless need in me was matched only by the bared, trembling want in him.
My hips tipped to meet him, greedy and shaking, as his hands slid beneath me to cup my ass, lifting me up onto his lap, aligning me where he needed most. His cock was a live thing, heavy and shuddering between us, and when he pressed the tip to my entrance I held onto his forearm, hard enough to leave crescent prints, and let out a broken whine I didn't know I could make.
He pushed in and every part of me stretched and burned, bliss and ache in the same breath. He fucked me slow at first, just the head, then the full thick length, then deep and impossible, until I thought I'd split open and pour out sparks and light and berry-sweet breath.
Every thrust drove a whimper from me. He was so big, so hot and slick now, and I melted around him.
His balls slapped against my thighs, the sound obscene in the moss-padded hollow beneath our lean-to. I clenched and he moaned, low and soft and entirely unlike anything he'd ever let slip before. He pressed his face into the side of my neck and bit again, harder this time.
"You'll take it all," he murmured, voice vibrating through my bones. "All of me. Give you cubs, little fox. Mark you with my scent, fill you till you drip." His hand wormed its way to the front of my belly, and pressed down above where we were joined. I could feel the blunt pressure of his cock through the thin skin there, and it made me sob, desperate and keening.
"Harder," I gasped, and he laughed, a wicked, delighted thing, and gave me what I wanted. The next thrust knocked the air from my lungs. He folded me open, bending me in half so my knees nearly touched my ears. He fucked me like he wanted the world to know I was his.
The friction and the fullness and the unrelenting slam of his hips made me feral, clutching at him, biting his shoulder, arching up so my breasts bounced with every movement.
He licked and sucked and bit them too, leaving a swamp of bruises and love marks, circling my nipple with his tongue before catching it between his teeth until I yelped. He soothed it with a kiss, then made it hurt again. He wanted me loud. Wanted me helpless and overwhelmed, and all I wanted was to let him.
Sprout flickered in the back of my mind, flashing:
> *Fertilization probability: 98%*
> *Breeding Success: Optimal.*
Every time I came, once, then again he didn't pause. He fucked through it, fucked deeper, seemed to lose himself in the spasms of my body. He held himself out to the last second, then let go in a series of brutal, stuttering thrusts.
I could feel him pulse inside, could feel the heat of his cum flooding me. There was so much it dripped from me as soon as he pulled out, thick and slippery between my thighs. He didn't mind. He watched it, fascinated, then cupped a hand to my pussy and pressed it back in with two fingers, slow and adoring.
"Want it to stick," he said, reverent. "Want cubs. Strong, like you." He looked at me then, pupils eating all the blue from his irises, wild and unmasked. He wanted to fill me up forever.
My legs trembled and refused to close, so he rolled me onto my side and curled behind, spooned close, cock already hardening again against my ass.
This time he slid in lazy, so deep it made me see stars, and rocked slow while his hand mapped circles down my thigh, up to my breast, over my throat where his mark would purple by morning. His other hand found my tail and stroked it, indulgent and gentle, as if petting me was another form of claiming.
I reached back and dragged my nails through his hair, then over the heavy length of his thigh. "You smell different too, you know," I said, voice fuzzy and dreamlike.
He made a sound, somewhere between a whine and a purr, and nuzzled the back of my ear. "That's yours," he said. "All yours now."
We fell asleep tangled that way, his seed leaking out of me, the scent of sex and berries thick in the little den.
And even as the sprout whispered that my body was being remade down to the last cell, I knew it wasn't just the bloodline changing. I was different now. So was he. And as the heat rolled through me, drowning out the old rules, I realized I might never want to escape.