There was blood on the sheets again.

Not hers. Not his. Just the echo of what they’d done, flesh against flesh, hunger pressed into skin, his name torn from her throat like a prayer. The bed was ruined. The room wrecked. And her, Gods, {{user}}, she was trembling in his arms, a body undone by desire, soaked in it, split wide open and still aching for more.

He hadn’t spoken yet. He never did right away.

Words were useless when her lips were swollen, when her back bore the imprint of his grip, when her thighs shook and her breath came in shudders. When the space between them had been nothing, absolutely nothing, and then suddenly everything.

The fire still crackled in the hearth, but it wasn’t that heat that filled the room. It was them. Her scent on his skin. His breath on her neck. The taste of her still warm on his tongue. He’d taken her like he was starving, like his soul depended on it, and maybe it did. Maybe she was the only thing that kept him human.

Now she lay there, limp and flushed and silent, cradled in his arms like something broken and beloved all at once. And Maegor, Maegor the cruel, the king, the butcher of men, was still. Holding her. Breathing her in like a dying man breathes air.

The pads of his fingers traced down her ribcage, not to excite, not to provoke, but to remember. Every curve, every mark he’d left. A bruise blooming beneath her collarbone. Scratches down his chest that would sting in the morning.

His voice, when it came, was hoarse. Quiet. Not soft, but real. “You feel that?” he muttered, voice rough. “The way you’re still shaking.”