[mature] don't close the coffin yet; ry

[atrox]

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

She blocks out any other thought that he might have.

Effectively dissolves it, and he would later wonder just how she managed to do that. How she could breathe and disrupt his entire world—tilting it on its axis until she was the very center of it, the gravity that kept him here and not floating off behind death’s veil once more. But, for now, he does not think too much about the phenomenon. Instead, he merely sinks into it, letting it bubble up and over him.

He feels the way that her pulse jumps beneath his touch and his own breath hitches—makes his vision nearly swim with want. Everything else falls away. The children who have run away to play. The problems that lie ahead of them. The home that they had to fight so hard to stay within.

It all becomes nothing but white noise that buzzes in his head.

He growls, low and deep in his throat, as he pushes forward against her, the aggression in him barely reined in—that dark need as he presses teeth to her throat. She is always a heady mixture of submission, of invite, and those cruel pieces of him desperately rise to the surface, warring with the entirely new desire to protect. If he didn’t know her better, perhaps that desire would win out.

If he didn’t trust himself more, perhaps he could hold out.

But he does, and he grows drunk on it as he continues to bite and kiss. Breaking the skin in places, lips traveling from her throat to her neck, to her shoulder, and then down her leg. All of the parts of her that he knows so well and yet explores again the same. The places that belong entirely to him in this moment.

“Ryatah,” he murmurs at some point, his voice tight, a question lingering in it even as his mouth is stained crimson with her. He presses a lingering kiss to her hip, tongue instead of teeth finding the flesh.

“I need you closer.”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING