[mature] like dreams that turn to dust,

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

It would be so easy to give into his base instincts now.

It would be easy to rip her apart and watch as her body tries to knit itself together again. How far would be too far? How quickly could she heal? These are the questions he asks himself idly as his mouth skims up her neck, as it lingers on the throat and he senses the pulse beneath it—wondering what it might be like to taste the thick copper of it his tongue again, to drink it down and let it splash into an empty belly.

It would be easy too to find the other outlet. To sink into her and find pleasure within her pain, to know the way her body bent to accept his weight, the way she would say his name.

His mind nearly cleaves in half as he contemplates both possibilities, the ease of it.

But she asks to play his game and so he resists both.

He laughs again and the ease of it gives none of the tension within him away. Shows nothing of the internal war within him as he imagines the two paths that wind out in front of him, the way that he could so easily follow them both. Instead he growls as she dips under his neck, twining around her and brushing his nose against the spots where he has smeared blood on the pristine white of her coat.

“You can,” he finally says and he wonders just here the game will go—just what will become of it. He reaches up to the delicate flesh of her ear and scrapes his teeth at the base of it before letting his touch glance down and over her eye and then to her mouth again. “I’m taking a home in Hyaline,” he murmurs there, arrogant in his certainty of it. He has never been denied something he wants and he knows that there is no true army to stand against him. He wants to take Hyaline as his own and so he will.

That part is simple.

“You’ll come with me,” a demand more than question.

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING