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A dent marks where his body had been—a long, cold impression in the layered blankets and moss. But no dark hair, no blue eyes, no impossible body stretched beside mine, just the imprint of his body already cooling.

Something small and stupid sinks in my chest.

I mean, obviously he was going to get up eventually. The man—creature—whatever he counts as doesn’t exactly seem built for sleeping in until noon. He probably woke up hours ago and decided I needed rest. Rationally, I know all that. Emotionally, the first thing I feel is disappointment so immediate it hurts my chest.

“You’re embarrassin’,” I mutter at the empty nest.

The whole place is him. Not just his scent, though that’s everywhere, richer here than it’s ever been in my cabin or on the trails. It clings to the blankets, it lives in the walls, and it’s woven into the old nest itself. Lying here alone in the middle of all that feels oddly soothing.

I push myself up slowly, blanket sliding to my lap, and just… exist in my own skin for a second. There’s a dangerous urge to laugh because I’ve been bracing for pain since the moment this all started. But I feel good. Not just functional—good as hell and lighter, somehow.

I glance down at myself and immediately realize I am still very, extremely, fully naked.

Right.

The memories from last night come back in pieces and then all at once, not hazy the way I half expected them to be, but sharp and full and enough to make heat brush under my skin all over again.

His mouth. His hands. His tongue in places tongues have never been before. The sound of my voice and the exact second everything inside me settled when he pushed in fully and the fever just… broke. The word “right” slipped out after because there wasn’t another one.

“Jesus,” I whisper, dragging a hand down my face.

The motion draws my attention lower, and I look down. Skin marked here and there in ways that make my stomach flip. Faint bruises at my hips where his grip had tightened in the right moments. A mark near the inside of my thigh that I’m pretty sure is from his mouth. My whole body feels claimed in the gentlest, most overwhelming way.

“Pretty sure you should be freakin’ out a little more, Dawson,” I mumble into my hands, voice muffled.

I sigh and look around, but don’t see my clothes anywhere. There are blankets. Furs. Moss. One shirt that absolutely isn’t mine draped over a low stone near the nest, probably his stolen human-shape clothes, but no sign of my sweatpants or boxers or anything I came here in.

I wrinkle my nose. “Did he eat them?”

Fine. If I’m naked, I’m naked. There’s no one here but me, and if there’s one thing the last week has done, it’s destroy any illusion that modesty matters much in the face of actual biological magic. I pull one blanket loosely around my shoulders, more for temperature control than shame, and climb carefully out of the nest.

The stone floor is cool under my feet, smoother in some places than others where centuries of movement have worn paths into it. Standing fully upright outside the nest, I get my first proper look at the den in the morning light.

It’s… beautiful.

Not in the tidy, curated way humans like to make homes beautiful. There’s nothing decorative in a conscious sense. No matching furniture, no framed prints on the walls, no practical little baskets labeled in a handwriting font. It’s older than all that, built out of use and instinct and things gathered because they matter.

The main chamber opens wider than I realized in the half-dark, the rock walls curving inward and up in strange, natural lines where roots push through here and there, as if the earth is still trying to reclaim it from the inside. Moss grows in thick green patches along one wall where damp collects. Dried herbs hang in careful bundles from an old root that dips low near the entrance, the air around them green, sharp, and clean.

And then there are the walls.

At first I think they’re just marks in the stone, discolorations where moisture ran, or minerals surfaced. Then I step closer and realize they’re drawings. Not crude scratches—actual drawings.

They spread across one section of the den wall in layered, overlapping lines, some older and faded almost to nothing, some darker and newer. Charcoal, maybe. Burned wood. Pigment from crushed stone or plant.

There are animals drawn with the kind of accuracy that comes from watching them for centuries. Elk with their heads lowered in winter. Wolves crossing a ridge. A bear standing beside a river, one paw lifted mid-step. Trees shown as more than trunks and branches, their root systems carved beneath them, deep and tangled, as if the part above ground was only half the story.

Storms, fires, floods, and moons in different phases; the same mountain drawn again and again with slight changes. Human shapes too, fewer and farther apart at first, then more as the drawings move along the wall. Small figures with packs. Wagons. Axes. Cabins. Roads.

Time carved by a creature who outlived everyone he watched.

My throat tightens at the thought.

I’m no archaeologist, but even I can tell some of them are old enough that if anyone from the university saw them, they’d probably lose their minds on the spot.

That thought comes and immediately feels wrong, because just imagining strangers in here with lights and brushes and hushed, reverent academic voices makes something protective rise within me.

This feels private in a way that goes deeper than ownership. A record made by Onyx’s hand for himself, maybe for others like him once, maybe simply because some things need to be marked somewhere if they’re going to survive. The idea of anyone else laying claim to it makes my jaw tighten.