[mature] like dreams that turn to dust,

[atrox]

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

What makes you think I don’t want to be here?

He doesn’t answer. She knows that he won’t and he feels no need to prove her wrong. She knows that he knows the fabric of her heart—that he understands the dark need that twists beneath the angelic surface. That thing that pushes her forward when the knife is at her throat. That thing that presses her head into the gunmetal and the thing that causes her to moan when his teeth press slowly into her flesh.

It is fascinating, he thinks, this thing that contorts beneath her surface.

The way that her moral compass just spins and spins.

She is more than he remembered—different than he remembered. Back then it had been so easy to just write her off as another bland, boring Light (he had never paid too much attention to see the obvious signs  that pointed otherwise) and yet another pristine friend of Agetta. It was so easy to glance over what now is so obvious. But she shivers beneath his touch, grows warm and wanting, and she is not easy to ignore.

He hearts the way her breath catches, the way the moan builds, the way that she shivers. He smiles to himself as he watches her skin begins to itself together. Interesting, he thinks, but says nothing. Instead, he skims his mouth up the side of her and then begins to curve behind her. He lingers here for a moment, lets his breath roll over the silken flesh, the delicate promise of her and laughs.

“You know I don’t have favorites,” he growls lightly. “But you are not my least favorite.”

An understatement, but he’s not about to fess up to it. Instead he steps away, feeling the tension in his chest, the tug of gravity and the frustration of self-denial as he steps up her other side. His teeth skim over her other hip, the curve of her ribcage and then come to rest on his shoulder. “You have to ask to play this game,” he says, laughter in the black smoke of his voice. “But I probably won’t make you beg.”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING