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The itch starts hours before you leave the house.
It makes you short with your mother when she asks you to mend a sleeve, turns the ordinary work of splitting kindling into something you do too hard, too fast, just to burn off the pressure under your skin. Your body has been turning all week—cramps and a mood like sour milk—and right before your cycle comes, you always get this way: restless, hot in places you shouldn’t be thinking about while you’re kneading dough or hauling water.
You think about the blacksmith’s boy’s hands. The way he leaned over the fence yesterday to talk to your brother, forearms tense and veined as they braced on the rough wood, shirt riding up a finger’s width to reveal a golden line of muscle beneath. You went to bed with your thighs pressed together and your breath coming hot and heavy.
You know what you’re supposed to do with these feelings, at least according to your parents. Swallow it down, pray it away, wash it out with cold water and get on with your chores. You’re supposed to wait until a man comes properly to your father, until there’s talk of marriage and dowry, everyone sensible and nodding.
By late afternoon, you can’t stand your own clothes. The hem of your skirt brushes your calves, and you want to rip it off. Every time you bend, the seam between your legs rubs and sends your nerves sparking. You keep your face steady while you ladle stew, while you scrub the bowl, while you say goodnight. Eyes down, voice sweet.
Then you wait until the house settles.
The moment you slip outside, the air has teeth; cold enough to sting your ears. You wrap your shawl tight and move quickly across the yard, past the stacked logs and the chicken coop, toward the tree line where the dark starts to thicken.
You tell yourself you’re only going for a walk. Just to clear your head.
You also tuck your hand under your skirt before you’re even properly in the woods, fingers pressing hard between your thighs.
The path is familiar. You’ve been out here a hundred times or more, gathering fallen branches, picking mushrooms, checking snares. It’s not wild country. It’s your village’s woods. The ground smells of damp bark and old leaves that have gone soft. You go deeper anyway, because the shame makes you greedy for as much distance as possible.
You find the little hollow you prefer—behind a large, gnarled oak, where the ground dips and the shrubs tangle thick enough to hide you from the path. There’s a stone there that you can sit on without soaking your skirt. Your heart is thumping as though you’ve done something criminal just by being here by the time you settle on it.
Your hands shake when you lift your skirt. Not because you don’t know what you’re doing. You do. You’ve done it before and hated yourself after, yet you still come back when your body starts making demands you can’t answer in daylight.
You slide your fingers beneath the fabric and find yourself already wet. The relief is immediate. You bite your lip hard enough to taste iron. You keep your eyes fixed on the shrubs in front of you, because if you close them, you see the blacksmith boy’s mouth, and you can’t afford that kind of softness right now.
Your fingers move faster. Your breath fogs. The woods around you fall away until it’s only the pulse inside your skull and the intense, rising line of pleasure that makes you tense as if bracing for a blow.
You’re already close. Too close, too quickly.
The first sound is small—just the faintest crush of something stepping on damp leaf litter.
You freeze with your hand still between your thighs, skirts bunched at your waist, your heart jumping into your throat.
Someone is there.
A picture flashes through your mind so fast you almost laugh from sheer panic: your father’s silhouette, your mother’s lantern, their faces when they find you. The disgust. The shame. Being dragged home by the ear like a naughty child.
Your fingers go numb. You can’t even breathe.
The second sound is heavier. Something weighty shifting, a body sliding through brush that isn’t bothering to be careful.
You lift your head as the shrubs in front of you part.
It isn’t your father. Nor anyone you know.
At first, your mind tries to make him into something human because that’s what minds do when they’re cornered—tries to turn the impossible into a man in strange clothes, a traveller with a helmet, some soldier from a distant place.
Then he steps fully into view, and your stomach drops through the ground.
He is built like a man and not like a man. Too clean in his movements. Too wrong in his skin—dark plates and green sheen that catch what little light there is. A shell crowns his head; a piece of living armour. His eyes are violet, almost glowing, and set in a face that looks more carved than born.
Dark streaks of red stain the obsidian plates of his chest and his forearms. Fresh. Wet enough to shine. His mouth is relaxed, not smiling or grimacing. As though your obvious fear is not even worth reacting to.
Your body finally remembers how to function.
You snatch your skirts down with a jerk that tangles your shawl. You scramble back, palms hitting damp soil, spine slamming against the nearest trunk. A long, jointed tail rises behind him, the dark rings of it visible only when the starlight hits right. It ends in a needle—a stinger—that looks too sharp to belong in the same world as your soft village life. The way he watches makes your skin crawl.
His nostrils flare once, subtly, and his head turns a fraction as if he’s tracking something you can’t see. You realise, with a sick twist in your gut, that he isn’t here by chance.
He’s been following you.
His gaze drops to your hands. To the way your fingers are still curled and slick, as if your body didn’t get the message that you need to stay pure and safe and untouched in the dark. Something in his focus tightens; his attention clamps down. On you.
He takes a step closer, and the air fills with him: the metallic stink of the blood on his skin and something clean and hot, like sun-baked stone. You try to speak. Nothing comes out.
The tail shifts behind him.
You flinch. This is it.
But it doesn’t pierce you. It presses into the bark beside your head with a thunk, pinning the sleeve of your shawl against the tree. The tail coils, tightens, and suddenly you are held there without him even having to touch you with his hands.
You gasp. Your shoulders jerk and twist, but there’s nowhere to go. The forest floor is uneven under your feet, the bark rough at your back, the tail a cold line across your body.
You are trembling so hard your teeth chatter. "Please don’t kill me," you whisper, the words pathetic and small. He watches your throat work as you swallow.
Then he leans in.
His face dips to your neck and inhales. The heat of it ghosts across the hollow of your neck. It’s the kind of breath an animal takes when it’s deciding if you’re food.
A sound catches in your chest. Fear floods you all at once, turning your mouth dry.
His head lifts slightly, and for the first time, you see irritation flicker across his face—small and contained, but undeniable. He moves his head lower, his nose skimming the valley of your breasts. When he inhales again, his eyes narrow.
You understand now, with awful clarity: he smelled something on you a moment ago. He followed it. Now your fear is smearing over it like mud, ruining the trail.
His hand comes up. You notice the tiny notches and ridges above his knuckles, the places where something harder than human skin overlaps. His forearms are covered with plates and smooth dark pigment. His hands are functional, but he is not gentle. He grips your jaw and turns your face toward him, positioning you for study.
"Human," he says. He can speak. Though his voice is calm and alien. Stranger than anything you’ve heard before. You flinch at his voice, but he doesn’t seem to care. His gaze sweeps over you—your hair coming loose, your skirts rumpled, your mouth parted and inhaling fast.
His nose dips again, this time to the curve of your ribs, then lower along the line where your shawl gapes open. He is smelling you like you’re a bowl of stew. Your cheeks burn. Shame and terror twist together until you can’t separate them.
The tip of his nose keeps tracing the smell, crouching until he reaches the hollow of your thighs. He hesitates there, nostrils flaring wider now, trying to catalogue the exact architecture of your scent. He hooks a finger under the hem of your skirt and jerks it upward, exposing your damp thighs, the messy proof of your indiscretions.
You jerk, knees knocking. "No. Don’t—" But the sentence dies when his fingertips brush the inside of your thigh. His skin is hot. Human. It shocks you.
He pauses. Not out of consideration for your pleas, but out of attention. He’s noting your reaction.
His eyes stay on your face while his hand moves higher. Your stomach lurches with humiliation. You want to clamp your legs shut, but his tail shifts and spreads you with infuriating ease.
His fingers find what you were doing to yourself.
Your body, still primed for release, reacts with a traitorous throb. You make a sound you hate—thin, breathy, nothing like the strong voice you use in daylight.
His nostrils flare again as he inhales the scent of your arousal, the musk of your upcoming cycle, the sweat of your exertion, and a low, guttural sound rumbles in his chest. Then, the irritation you saw on his face finally eases. Something worse takes its place: curiosity.
"Ah, here," he murmurs, as though he’s confirming a location on a map.
Your eyes sting. You shake your head, frantic. "I—please—"
He doesn’t understand please, not in the way you mean it.
His fingers find the hot wetness of your centre and slide inside you.
Do not let him. Run, you tell yourself. But his touch maps something inside you you’ve only ever seen in the private dark: where you like pressure, the angle that makes your breath hitch. He finds the exact rhythm you were using, his fingers expert and precise. He doesn’t touch you with the clumsiness of a village boy. He touches you with the precision of a creature that masters everything he comes across in the space of minutes. Your hand finds his wrist because your whole body is shouting instructions your brain can’t translate.
The terror is still there, screaming in the back of your mind, but the physical sensation is overwhelming. Your hips jerk upward, an instinctive invitation that makes his eyes flash dark with interest. You were already balanced on that edge you’d been chasing in secret, and now the pressure inside your belly cracks and spills and you come faster than you thought possible, a small, searing release that leaves your legs trembling.
Your mouth opens. No sound comes. Your breath turns uneven, ugly, a rhythm you can’t control.
His gaze never leaves you. He is watching the way your lashes tremble, the way your stomach tightens. He makes a noise under his breath that you cannot place.
He stands and leans in close enough that his breath brushes your cheek. His eyes, violet and bright in the dark, hold that same calm confidence you’ve heard about in the priest’s stories when he talks about kings—about men who believe the world belongs to them by right.
"You were producing a strange odour," he says, almost to himself, and then his eyes sharpen. "You attempted to conceal it from me."
You squeeze your eyes shut, cheeks burning. "I didn’t— I wasn’t—"
His fingers press into you again, and your words fracture into a gasp.
Then he pauses abruptly. The contact stops. Something strange happens, something you would never have imagined: your body lurches, startled by the sudden absence.
He observes that like a new datum. For a moment, his face softens into a look that is almost private study—the breadth of a thought moving across a strange mind. He’s learning; teaching himself what your body wants by trial and error. For him, this new variable is something to be tested, measured, and replicated if useful. For you, it is ruinous.
"I understand now," he says, his voice thick with a new edge. "The purpose of this scent."
The tail eases back from the bark. Not fully freeing you, but loosening its claim enough that you could—if you were brave enough—duck away.
He watches you in that sliver of freedom. You expect him to take advantage now that the balance has shifted, but instead he speaks clearly and without flourish: "I intend to enter you." There is no cruelty in the phrasing, only the statement of a plan.
You stare at him. Your mind scrambles. It should make you run.
But your legs don’t obey. Your hands shake uselessly at your sides. Your body is still humming, needy and furious, the edge you were on returns, intense and aching. Your body clenches at the image of his alien length sliding inside you, though it’s hard to picture exactly what that would look like. You find yourself glancing down at the space between his legs; it’s flat, plated like the rest of his body. Perhaps he has misunderstood.
He waits. Not long. He has no patience for human hesitation, but he is still testing something, reading you.
You swallow. Your throat feels too tight. It would be lying to say you are not afraid. You are terrified that the act will erase whatever you were before and leave only something else. You are also aware—painfully, shamefully—that your body remembers the shape of his fingers and your hips lift, wanting more.
"I… I want you to stop," you whisper, and it is true, and then, because you are ruined and honest in the dark, you force the next words out through trembling teeth. "And I want you to keep going."
The darkness in his pupils swells as you stare, eating into the violet until it’s only a faint edge. He steps in again. His tail coils around your waist this time, not pinning you to the tree but holding you steady, a belt made of muscle and authority.
His fingers return between your thighs. You sob once, quietly, because relief hits so hard it hurts. Because it’s wrong. Because your body is grateful. He moves with an efficiency that feels obscene—he’s not thinking about his own pleasure yet. He’s thinking about what will make your scent swell the strongest.
Your head knocks back against the bark. Your teeth bite into your lower lip. Your hands scrabble at his forearms, at his shoulders, feeling the solidity of his unusual body. The forest around you is too loud now; your breathing, the rustle of leaves as you jerk, the soft wet sounds you’re desperately trying not to hear.
You are so close you can’t keep your eyes open. Your whole body tightens, trying to pull away and pull closer at the same time. He feels it. His grip changes. His thumb presses in a new place, and your vision blanks, white at the edges.
You cry out this time, and the woods swallow the sound. You come hard enough that your knees nearly fold, but his tail keeps you upright. The rush makes you lightheaded. Your body pulses around his fingers, still desperate to keep the sensation going.
He inhales, deep. The shift in him is immediate. Not tenderness. Not softness.
Instinct.
His eyes fix on your face as if you’ve just proven something very important. His hand leaves you again, and you feel cold without it, exposed and shaking.
He shifts his stance, and a seam in the plates at his groin slides open, letting something unfurl. It is not like a man’s body; it is a velvet-green organ, sleek and banded. It looks designed to fit; it looks inevitable. Your stomach drops again, your body reacting even as your mind screams that you should be horrified.
He hauls you down from the tree with the tail around your waist. Your feet skid on damp soil. You land on your knees among damp mulch and broken twigs, skirts bunched, shawl crooked. His tail coils tighter around your waist to hold you in place.
Then, he crouches over you, shadowing you completely, and pins your wrists above your head with one hand. You look up at him, and you see something that makes your blood run colder than the night: not lust the way a human gets it, not romance, not even cruelty.
Possession. Assessment. Decision.
Your lips part, and his gaze flicks to your mouth. He registers it.
Then he moves.
It isn’t a lover’s careful joining. There is a logic to it; to the way his chitin anchors and his tail wraps, to the motion when he enters you in a single, unhesitating thrust. He has decided you’re useful, pressing you into the earth with your skirts shoved up and your legs trembling open, his body fitting to yours with inhuman certainty. Heat and pressure fill you, and your breath breaks on whines you can’t swallow.
The woods spin. It’s pain that knocks you into focus first. He is too large, too warm, impossibly precise. The friction is relentless and somehow arcing into a kind of awful rightness. The bark above your head is rough against your shoulder. The ground is damp and cold under your palms. He is burning where he meets you, an impossible contrast to everything else.
He drives into you with the same ruthlessness he had with his fingers; learning the angle that makes your body jolt, adjusting without asking, holding you steady with his tail so you can’t squirm away from what your nerves are hungry for. There are times when you cannot breathe around the shape of him, and you feel the instinct to rip free and to press closer at once. Your mind catches on a single image: the market, the way you will look at the blacksmith’s boy now, the way the men who used to tilt their hats will stare.
Shame floods you even as desire reclaims the space in your gut. The pleasure is worse because it’s bigger than you’ve ever felt. Your body was built for simple village life, and he is forcing it to hold something it was never meant to.
He watches your face the whole time, violet eyes unblinking, and every time you flinch or moan, he changes something—pace, depth, pressure—until your reactions become predictable. Until your body starts responding before your mind can catch up.
When he quickens, it is a matter of escalation, not violence. You grab at his arm. The plates are smooth and hard under your fingers. You dig your nails in anyway, desperate for something to bite into. By the time you come a third time, your throat is raw from holding back noise. Your body goes liquid.
His jaw tightens. Another tell. He is not indifferent.
His breathing changes, heavier now, a low, rough exhale through his nose as if your scent is pulling something out of him that he didn’t know he carried. He grows louder in a way that is not language; a vibration through his chest that you feel against the curve of your spine. He drives until something inside him tightens and then loosens, and the sensation of him spilling inside you is a pressure that extends from your bones to your teeth.
He does not collapse onto you or soften. Instead, he withdraws, and the chitin plates shift back into place with a neat finality, as if the seam was never there at all. His tail stays cinched at your waist, keeping you close, keeping you where he wants you. The stinger hovers near your thigh, and you cling to the roots, terrified it will pierce you.
It doesn’t. It only reminds you what he is.
Then he rises.
You stare at the forest floor, dazed. Your thighs tremble. Your skirt is a mess. Your hands are dirty with soil and leaves, and you feel turned inside out. The cold bites again now that his heat is gone, and you shiver.
He looks down at you the way you might look down at a calf that surprised you by surviving a hard birth.
"You will come with me," he says.
It isn’t an invitation.
Your stomach twists. Your mind catches up in a rush: your mother’s kitchen, your father’s stern face, the village, the life you were meant to live. You picture yourself vanishing into the woods and never coming back, and the fear finally lands properly.
"No," you whisper, and your voice sounds small even to you. "I can’t. I—I have to go back."
His tail coils around your waist again and lifts you upright with humiliating ease. Your feet leave the ground. Your skirts fall back into place, but there’s no dignity in it; you’re hanging there like a rabbit in a snare.
You gasp, hands grabbing at the tail instinctively. It’s strong. It doesn’t yield.
He leans close. His face is inches from yours, expression unreadable, but his nostrils flare again as he inhales you. He smells the fear, yes. He also smells what’s still clinging to you underneath it, stubborn and bright, and something in his gaze sharpens with satisfaction.
"You are unusual," he says, settling the matter. "You will be observed."
You swallow hard. Tears prick your eyes, half from panic and half from the sick, aching afterglow still pulsing in your body.
You don’t want to go.
You also don’t want him to stop touching you ever again.
The thought makes you feel ill. It makes you feel warm.
He turns away from the hollow, carrying you with him as if you weigh nothing. The woods slide past in dark shapes—ferns, trunks, wet stone—your village somewhere behind you, fading away like a lantern going out.
As the trees thin and the ground begins to slope, he pauses. His head tilts, listening to something far off that you can’t hear; maybe a shout from the village, maybe nothing at all.
Then he looks at you.
Your face is streaked with dirt and tears. Your lips are swollen from biting them. As his gaze takes you in, your skin prickles. You feel naked again.
"Do not attempt to conceal your scent from me again," he says. A command, simple and absolute. "If you do, I will correct you."
Your throat works. You manage a nod because you don’t know what else to do.
You hang in his grip, trembling, heart hammering, the cold air cutting into your lungs—and underneath all of it, deep in your belly, your body still desperately holds onto the memory of him inside you.
You are terrified of what you’ve just taught him.
You are far more terrified of how easily you might learn to obey.