I am completely off the ground, held against his solid frame by sheer, terrifying strength. I’m just a doll in his hands.
He carries me a few steps through the crimson haze, moving with a silent, lethal grace. The sound of his heart beating against my chest is the only rhythm left in my world.
He reaches the edge of the empty dissection table and carefully positions me over the sterile metal. He sets me down, but he doesn't pull away immediately. He stays between my knees, his hands lingering on my hips as the surface of the table bites into the back of my thighs with its brutal, clinical cold.
The metal of the table seeps through my scrubs, but I barely feel it. All my senses are hyper-focused on the man standing between my knees. He doesn't move to hand me a scalpel. He doesn't glance at the body waiting on the other side of the room. His focus is singular. Devouring.
“Forget the dead, Madeline. They can wait. They aren't going anywhere.”
His voice is a dark velvet caress, vibrating in the small space between us.
He reaches out, his thumb slowly wiping a fresh smear of his blood across my lower lip, dragging it downward. He is looking at the woman he saved, the woman who just tasted his violence and didn't run.
“You’ve spent your whole career trying to understand why hearts stop beating. Tonight, I want you to feel one that only beats for you.”
He leans in, his hands sliding from my waist down to my hips, his grip tightening until the fabric of my uniform bunches under his fingers. The air in the morgue is freezing, yet I am burningup. I can feel his breath, heavy and jagged, against my neck, right where the pulse is thrumming like a trapped drum.
I should push him away. I should tell him this is a desecration of everything I stand for. But as I look at the blood on his neck, the wound I gave him, a terrifying realization washes over me. I don’t want him to leave. I want to see how much further this darkness goes.
My life has been a routine for years, focused only on work. I needed to be sharp, hollow. To not feel. Emotions and pathology don't mix. But now? I feel alive again. Not just as the Doctor, but as a woman who's actually being chosen. My desperation drove me to this. To him.
The silence of the morgue is no longer empty. It’s heavy. It’s expectant. It’s a stage, just like he said, and the lights are finally exactly where he wants them.
Deimos leans in, his shadow swallowing me whole in the red-tinted gloom. He expects me to freeze, to tremble, or perhaps to plead. He is so certain of his control, so sure of the walls he has built around me, that he doesn't see it coming.
My hands rise. Slowly. Deliberately. I don't reach for a scalpel. I don't reach for the edge of the table to push him away. Instead, I let my palms settle against his chest. I can feel the heat of his skin through the layers, the sheer, solid mass of him.
He freezes.
The low, predatory rumble in his throat cuts off abruptly. For the first time since I met him, the stillness in his body isn't an act of calculated intimidation. It’s a genuine, raw shock.
His grip on my waist doesn't loosen, but his fingers twitch against my skin. He looks down at my hands on his heart as if I’ve just pressed a live wire to his chest.
“Madeline...”
A breathless, fractured whisper escapes his lips.
I slide my fingers upward, feeling the frantic, heavy thud of his heartbeat. It’s faster now. Violent. I reach the collar of his shirt and move higher, my fingertips finally grazing the warm, damp skin of his neck, right over the shallow cut I gave him.
I don’t flinch at the blood. I lean forward, closing the small gap he left between us, until I can see the flicker of something almost human, something terrified and desperate, behind the amber of his eyes.
“You said I was yours, Deimos. But you never asked if I was ready to take what belongs to me.”
The silence that follows is electric, heavy with the weight of a shifted power. He is no longer just the ghost in the machine or the monster. He is a man, caught in the grip of the one person who isn't afraid to touch the fire.
He let me go before. But as I pull him closer, I realize he has no intention of letting me go again. He is almost touching my lips with his.
He takes one final look into my eyes, as if he is searching for a reaction or waiting for permission. When I look up to meet his gaze, my eyes are no longer cold. They are holding something far more dangerous.
That’s all it takes for him to bridge the distance. Our lips collide in a bruising, desperate kiss. He growls into my mouth, starving, wanting. He tastes his own blood on my lips as he bites through my lower lip harshly, our blood mixing together in a metallic tang.
Our tongues tangle in a hungry, chaotic rhythm. His hands are grazing all over my body, touching every part he can reach, possessive and frantic. I moan into the kiss, my hands anchoring themselves around his neck, pulling him closer.
Suddenly, he pulls away, his breath hitching in his throat. The sound is like ice cracking before a storm.
“Lie down,” he commands.
And I do. I do it because, at this moment, I am already far too gone from sanity to even think of resisting.. In one swift motion, he rips my pants off. I gasp at the sound of tearing fabric as I look down at him. His eyes are pitch black, utterly demonic. I can see the hunger in them spreading through him like poison. Dark, intoxicating, and unstoppable.
