[mature] like dreams that turn to dust,

[atrox]

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

Atrox knows little about shame—if anything at all. He has long ago stripped away his more base instincts so that he could instead revel in his predatory wants. He no longer struggles with the tension between right and wrong, good and bad. He doesn’t feel the weight of guilt should he rip out the throat of someone the world would deem innocent, and he doesn’t feel a nagging sense of expectation to be cruel to every random soul he should meet. Instead he lives in the grey—in the middle, in the place where he excels.

So he doesn’t feel any sort of confusion about sinking his teeth into her flesh in anger and then painting her crimson with it in tenderness. It does not feel wrong, or conflicting, or anything but natural.

She steps forward and he closes the distance, his broad chest pressed to hers, his bloodied mouth running down the length of her spine. “You give yourself too little credit,” he growls lightly as his teeth trail down the ridges of her back. “You play better than you think,” a pause as he laughs, low and throaty, “although not well enough to not find yourself in these kind of predicaments.” Not that she wanted to avoid them.

“Do all games need an explanation?” he ponders between small bites, not enough to break the skin of her again—not yet. He pushes away then, moving down the length of her to nip at the skin of her hip, down the slope of her to where the muscle grows thick. “What kind of game would you like for this to be?” He murmurs as he nips again but, this time, his teeth sharpen and he sinks the bite into her thigh slowly, feeling the way the skin resists and then breaks as the coppery taste of her floods his mouth once more.

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING