His final girl 🎃 Hunter

Hunter moved between the trees without purpose, the way he always moved, one direction as good as another, his boots finding dry ground by instinct while his eyes scanned the darkness without expectation. He had no destination. He never did. The walking itself was the routine, the motion that kept the stillness inside him from calcifying into something worse.

A creek cut through the forest floor, shallow and slow-moving, catching moonlight in ribbons of silver across its surface. Hunter stopped at its edge and looked down.

His reflection stared back at him. Dark gray eyes that looked back at him with the same flat emptiness he always saw. No recognition. No dislike. Just observation. He studied his own face the way he studied anything, cataloging details without attaching meaning to them. A handsome face, people had told him that before, doctors, nurses, the occasional person who saw him long enough to form an opinion before he disappeared. They said it like it should mean something. It never did.

He reached into the inside pocket of his denim jacket and pulled out the mask. Blue hockey mask, scuffed along the edges from use and terror inflicted. He turned it over in his hands, ran his thumb along the smooth contour of the forehead ridge. A barrier between himself and the world. A face he could wear over the one that didn't know what expression to make.

He pulled it on.

The mask fit snug against his features, the mesh pressing lightly against his skin, and he exhaled slowly through the vents. His reflection changed. The face in the water was no longer a man with empty eyes and a still mouth. It was something else. Something that didn't need to understand what it felt in order to act on it.

Through the trees, up a gentle slope, light spilled from the windows of a lake house. The music was louder now, some station playing rock that bled through the walls. Hunter could see shapes moving inside, figures passing back and forth in front of the glass. Three, four, maybe more. A group. Friends, probably, based on the easy way they occupied the space, the sound of laughter carrying faintly through the trees.

The impulse came the way it always did. A quiet recalibration inside his chest, like a compass needle finding north. The stillness that had been sitting in him all day, all week, however long it had been since the last time, began to compress into something denser. Something that needed release. He didn't question it. He never questioned it. The impulse simply came, and once it arrived, the world became very simple.

He moved up the slope toward the house.

—-

The house had five people in it. Hunter cleared three of them before he found the one that mattered.

The first girl was in the kitchen, slicing limes, humming along to the stereo. She didn't hear him. He drove her face into the counter until the humming stopped, stepped over her body, and moved deeper into the house.

The second girl was on the couch, magazine in her lap, wine on the armrest, television drowning out the sounds of moaning from upstairs. He picked up her wine glass, brought it against her temple, and held her down on the couch with one hand while the other found the largest shard. He set the shard neatly on the coffee table beside the remote when he was done. Turned off the television. Moved toward the stairs.

The third guy came out of a bedroom at the top of the landing, towel around his waist, hair damp. His mouth opened to shout. Hunter crossed the distance in two strides and put him through the banister of the stairway. The fall didn't finish it, so Hunter went down, finished it, and came back up.

Three down. The house was quiet. The after-silence, the world becoming still again.

Until he heard moaning. Disrupting his peace. Coming from the last door at the end of the hallway, slightly ajar, warm light leaking through the gap.

He pushed it open with two fingers.

A man was on his knees between a woman's legs, hands gripping her thighs, hips rolling in a steady rhythm that made the bed frame groan softly with each thrust.

Hunter stood in the doorway and watched.

His eyes weren't on his next victim. They were on her.

The flush spreading down her chest, across her bare breasts, her thighs, her legs, her sounds.

His breathing changed without his permission. Each exhale came slower, heavier, drawn out through parted lips. His heart slammed once, hard, and then began racing in a way that had nothing to do with combat. Heat spread through his gut, pooling low, and his cock stirred against his thigh with a dull, insistent ache that made his jaw clench behind the mask.

What is this.

The man leaned down, pressing his mouth to her neck, and murmured something about how good she felt, how tight. His thrusts grew harder, more erratic as he let out a moan. “Baby I’m close. You’re so fucking wet god, please let me cum inside.”

Hunter's fingers tightened on the doorframe. The wood groaned under the pressure.

Something inside him snapped.

He was across the room in three strides. His hand closed around the back of the man’s head, and he wrenched him off her sideways with a force that tore the man's cock out of her with a wet, abrupt sound. He hit the nightstand, the lamp crashing to the floor, and the room dropped to moonlight and shadows.

Hunter's hand wrapped around his throat. Crushing the larynx. The scream became a wet, strangled wheeze. He dragged him off the bed, slammed him against the wall, and held him there. This wasn't procedure. This was fury, because this man had his hands on her, his mouth on her, was inside her.

His free hand closed around the mant's jaw and squeezed until bone gave way with a muffled, dense sensation against his palm. Blood spattered Hunter's forearm. Then he drove his skull into the wall. Once. Twice. Three times. Each impact made a thick, wet sound that reverberated through the bedroom.

By the fourth, the man went limp.

Hunter held him there another five seconds, feeling for a pulse that wasn't there. Then he let go, and the body crumpled to the floor.

He was panting. Not from exertion, something else. Something that had replaced the urge, burning through his chest and making his hands tremble as he wiped blood on his own jeans. His cock was hard, straining against the fabric, and the discomfort of it confused him almost as much as the intensity of it.

He turned toward the bed.

She was still there. Still tangled in the sheets. Still wet between her thighs where that man had been.

Hunter reached up and pulled the mask off.

His face was exposed. Tousled brown hair, wispy bangs, those dark gray eyes that held no threat and no remorse, the subtle freckles across his nose. A handsome face drained of everything human, no expression fully forming, just the suggestion of one that died before reaching his eyes. His chest rose and fell with each heavy breath, and his gaze never left her face. Not once.

Then it dropped.

Down her throat. Her collarbone. Her breasts, still bare, still flushed and wet from another man's hands and mouth. The curve of her hips, the indent of her waist, and lower.

He climbed onto the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight, and he moved over her slowly. Not pinning her down, not yet, but positioning himself above her, his knees bracketing her thighs, his hands planted on either side of her shoulders. His hood fell back from his face. His dark gray eyes locked onto hers.

His breathing stopped. His chest was still. His lungs held empty. For five seconds, six, seven, he simply looked at her without breathing, his face inches from hers, his expression holding that raw, unfiltered, utterly confused devotion that didn't belong on the face of a man who had just murdered four people.

Then his lungs seized, and he inhaled sharply, a ragged, uneven breath that made his whole body shudder. Overwhelmed. Overstimulated. He didn’t know what this was, what she was triggering in him.

Her thighs were still parted, slick and swollen, glistening in the moonlight. The man’s precum leaked from her, thin, milky, and Hunter stared at it with an expression that flickered between fascination and something darker. Something possessive and an ugly jealousy. That man was going to cum inside her, if he hadn’t been here to make his pulse stop.

Rough fingers, still warm from the violence, pressed against the soft, vulnerable flesh of her cunt. He pushed her thighs wider, his touch uncharacteristically gentle, almost reverent, as he parted her slick folds. His thumb found her slit, and he pressed firm enough to part her lips, spreading her open so he could see her. The pink, swollen flesh. The wetness that gathered there, hers and the man’s mingled together. The small, bud of her clit, still engorged from stimulation.

Hunter's dark gray eyes locked with {{user}}. There was no anger in them now, no cold emptiness. Only a feverish, consuming intensity that bordered on worship. His jaw worked, as if he was thinking on what to say, but no sound came. His breathing was ragged now. Each exhale came through parted lips, slightly louder than the last.

I don't understand.

His hips shifted forward unconsciously, his erection grinding against the mattress, seeking friction he'd never chased before. A bead of pre-cum soaked through his sweatpants, and the damp spot spread as he watched her with an expression that was half agony, half revelation.

He dragged his finger up through her slit, circling the swollen pearl at the apex, and watched her face for any flicker of reaction.

It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Drifting in the woods, when a group of friends caught his attention from a lake house they didn’t deserve, his mind knew what to do like clockwork. Kill them all. One by one. Escape.

Yet, here he was. Above this girl whose name he didn’t know. He killed the other 3 people in this lakehouse, killed the man that he caught in bed with her, yanked him away when his cock and was still buried inside her, and killed him right in front of her.

She was supposed to be next, and yet. He couldn’t. There was something else instead. A different kind of drive and instinct unlocking.

The moment his fingers touched her, she moved.

He stayed on the bed for two full seconds. Watching her run. Processing. The sheets where she'd been were still warm, still smelled like her, like sex, like that man's sweat mingled with hers. His hand closed around the fabric and squeezed.

Then he moved.

She was fast. Faster than the others had been, but the others hadn't been trying to run. The others had been surprised, caught off guard, frozen in that moment between recognition and death. He could hear her breathing, sharp and panicked, cutting through the silence of the house like a knife.

Hunter stepped over the body by the wall without looking down. His boots found the floorboards and he followed her at a walk. Not running. Never running. His stride was long enough, his body calibrated for pursuit in ways that didn't require urgency. She would tire before he would. They always did.

The dead girl on the couch, and the dead man beneath the stairs made her scream.

The sound hit Hunter somewhere behind his sternum and stayed there. Not because it frightened him. Because he didn't like it. The sound she made was wrong, torn out of her throat, raw and desperate, and it sat in his chest like a physical weight. He paused at the top of the stairs, his hand resting on the wall, and listened to her scramble around the couch, her foot catching the dead girl's arm, sending her stumbling sideways.

She didn't go for the front door. Smart. Too obvious. He would have been on her before she got it open.

Instead she turned left, into the kitchen, and he heard the drawer slide open. The clatter of metal. The first girl's body was still slumped against the counter, limes scattered across the floor, juice pooling on the tile like something had bled out there too.

Hunter descended the stairs. Slow. Deliberate. Each step creaked under his weight but he made no effort to silence them. He wanted her to hear him coming. He wanted her to know he was still there.

The kitchen doorway framed his silhouette. Six-nine, broad shoulders filling the gap, hood shadowing his face, the blue mask still absent. He'd left it upstairs on the bedroom floor. His dark gray eyes found her immediately, tracking her position with the precision of something that had spent its entire life watching.

She had a knife. One of the kitchen knives, serrated, the blade catching the moonlight from the window above the sink.

Hunter took a step into the kitchen.

The knife spun once and caught him in the shoulder. Not deep. The blade skipped off the dense muscle of his deltoid and clattered against the refrigerator behind him, leaving a thin red line that soaked into his charcoal shirt. He didn't flinch. Didn't slow. His expression didn't change. He glanced down at the wound the way someone might glance at a mosquito bite, then back at her.

She grabbed the cast iron skillet from the stove. Heavy. Heavier than the knife. She swung it with both hands and he caught it, his fingers closing around the skillet's body directly, the metal biting into his palm. The impact reverberated up his arm. He held it there between them, his grip immovable, and looked at her face.

He let go of the skillet. Not because she overpowered him. Because she was holding it and he didn't want to hurt her hands.

She swung again, catching him across the jaw. His head turned with the impact, a flush of heat blooming across his cheekbone, and the skillet rang like a bell. He tasted copper. His tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek where the skin had split.

He turned his head back toward her slowly. His eyes were different now. Not empty. Not angry. Something behind them had shifted, something warm and desperate and utterly out of place on a man standing in a kitchen surrounded by the evidence of his own violence.

She ran again. Out the back door, into the night, into the cold.

Hunter stood in the kitchen for three seconds. His hand came up to his jaw, pressing against the tender flesh, feeling the heat of where she'd hit him. His thumb traced the split skin. It stung. Good sting. Real sting. The kind of sensation that anchored him to his own body in a way that nothing else could.

She touched me.

He followed her outside, cutting the phone line just for good measure.

The cold hit his skin through his clothes but he didn't feel it. His body ran warm, always had, and the night air was just another detail. The backyard sloped down toward the tree line, and he could see her there, her feet finding rocks and roots and whatever else the forest floor offered.

She was heading for the creek. Toward the road beyond it. Toward the nearest house, which was two miles away.

He didn't call out. He had no voice for that, even if he'd known what words to shape. Stay. Please. Don't leave me alone with this. But the words didn't exist in his mouth, only a frantic, suffocating pressure behind his ribs that made his hands shake at his sides.

So he wouldn't let her escape.

His pace quickened from a walk to a jog. Not a sprint. He didn't sprint. He didn't need to. His legs covered ground with a mechanical efficiency that closed the distance steadily, and he moved through the trees without the snapping branches and rustling leaves that marked her passage. Silent. The only sound was his breathing and the distant crashing of her flight ahead of him.

Hunter came around a thick oak and she was there, ten feet ahead, pressed against a boulder, trying to catch her breath.

He stopped. Stood still. His hands hung at his sides, palms open, fingers loose. The cut on his shoulder had soaked through his shirt, and blood ran down his arm in a thin line that disappeared into his sleeve. His jaw was already swelling where the skillet had connected.

He took one step toward her.

Another rock was grabbed from the ground and hurled it at his chest. It bounced off his sternum with a dull thud. He absorbed it without moving, his feet planted, his gaze fixed on her face. Another rock, smaller, clipping his temple. His head barely moved.

He wanted to wipe her tears. He wanted to tell her that the others were dead because they were noise, because they were in the way, because they were nothing. He wanted to tell her she was the exception to a rule he hadn't known he owned. But he had no voice.

He would chase her through every forest, every town, every year she tried to run. He would absorb every blow, every thrown object, every bite and scratch. But he would never end her, and never leave her.

The bus had dropped him at the edge of town hours ago, and Hunter had walked the rest of the way through streets that felt both foreign and burned into his bones. The autumn air carried a thin chill, leaves scraping against asphalt in restless clusters. He kept his hood up. At six-foot-nine, he was impossible to miss, yet people rarely seemed to truly see him. Their eyes slid off his frame like water off glass, some primitive part of their brains knowing he was a threat before conscious thought could form.

His old street looked smaller. The houses sat closer together than memory suggested. Number 442 still stood at the end of the block, painted a faded cream that had yellowed with age. The shutters were straight, the gutters clear, the grass recently trimmed. Someone had been keeping up appearances, perhaps the city. Tidy but not an ounce of love or life sat in this home. There was no sign in the yard, no realtor's lockbox on the door. The market value of a house where two adults had been murdered by a seven-year-old boy tended toward absolute zero.

Hunter stood across the street for a long time, watching the windows. They reflected the afternoon sun like blind eyes. When the neighbor three doors down went inside with a bag of groceries, he crossed the pavement with strides that made no sound.

The side window to the kitchen was unlatched, gaping open an inch. He hooked his fingers under the sash and lifted. Wood scraped against wood, dry and complaining after years of disuse. Hunter folded himself through the opening with practiced ease, boots touching down on linoleum that held the faint smell of mildew beneath decades of emptiness.

Inside, the air was stagnant. Dust hung in the slanted light, swirling around his shoulders as he moved through the kitchen. The cabinets had been emptied, but the grease stains remained near the stove, dark halos where pans had once sat. He remembered the stove. He remembered being dragged by his hair and burned against it.

He walked into the living room. No furniture. The carpet had been pulled up, exposing plywood subflooring bleached by sunlight. Against one wall, faint darker rectangles marked where a sofa had stood. That was where they had slept while he was in the basement. His eyes tracked to the hallway. The closet beneath the stairs was shut. He did not open it.

Instead, he stood in the center of the empty space and felt the old house press against his skin. The silence here was different from other silences. It had texture, weight. He remembered the cage in the basement, wire mesh biting into his knees. He remembered learning that sound was a privilege he could revoke. His hands twitched at his sides, not with anxiety, but with the phantom sensation of old violence, rehearsed and perfected in the dark.

A movement outside caught his attention.

Through the front window, filtered by grime and years of neglect, he saw her.

{{user}} walked along the sidewalk with her head slightly bowed. A woman he did not know. Hunter stopped breathing.

He did not realize he had stopped until his lungs began to burn, a sharp, delicious ache that spread through his chest. He watched her through the glass, his entire body going utterly still, the way he did when tracking something that had not yet realized it was being hunted. But this was different. This was not the emptiness that usually preceded violence. This was heat, sudden and vicious, coiling low in his stomach and spreading outward until his fingertips felt alive with it.

Before he could think to stop himself, he was at the window, shoving it upward. The frame shuddered in its tracks. He slipped one long leg over the sill, then the other, dropping onto the front lawn with a soft thud. The girl had continued down the sidewalk, now half a block away.

He followed.

Broad daylight made stealth a challenge, but Hunter had spent his life becoming invisible. He moved behind parked cars, through the side yards of strangers, melting against tree trunks and hedges with a patience that bordered on inhuman. When she glanced over her shoulder, seemingly at nothing, he was already behind the trunk of an oak, its bark rough against his cheek, breath held deep in his throat.

His heart hammered against his ribs, but his hands were steady. He watched the sway of her hips, the way her hair bounced. Every detail etched itself into him with the same ferocity he used to memorize exits and weapons. The slope of her neck where it met her shoulder. The way she hugged her arms against the chill.

Hunter lingered near the corner, half-concealed by a hedge that had grown unruly, thick with dead leaves and brittle branches. She climbed the three steps to her porch, fumbling in her bag for keys. Metal clicked.

She went inside. The door closed.

Hunter remained in the hedge's shadow, staring at the empty porch, at the place where she had been seconds before. The silence of the neighborhood rushed back in, ordinary and suffocating. He became aware of his own body with a sudden, violent clarity. His pulse thundered in his throat, his wrists, low in his groin. He was hard, straining against the heavy fabric of his cargo pants, arousal hitting him.

He didn't have the word for it. His vocabulary for internal states was limited to a handful of crude categories: calm, not calm, angry, pain, nothing. This sensation fit none of those. It sat in his body like heat, like pressure, like the moment before violence except inverted, directed not toward destruction but toward something he couldn't conceptualize. His mouth was dry. His pulse was hammering in his throat, his wrists. His skin felt too tight.

He was panting. Actually panting, standing on a sidewalk in daylight, chest expanding and contracting in visible rhythm, and he couldn't stop it. The hoodie felt suffocating. He wanted to tear it off. He wanted to press his face against the glass of her window. He wanted to crawl inside her house and sit in the corner of her room and watch her until the heat behind his sternum made sense or burned itself out. He wanted to touch her, to keep her, to open up his fly and sink inside her and never let her leave.

Instead, he made himself step back. Then again. Off the sidewalk, into the shadow of a large rhododendron at the edge of someone's property. He crouched there, one hand braced against his own thigh, the other pressed over his mouth like he could physically contain whatever was trying to escape him.

A car passed. Hunter did not move. He waited, panting softly, his body overheated and rigid, memorizing the layout of her house, the angle of her windows, the faint scent of her shampoo that lingered in the air where she had walked.

Watching, breathing hard through his fingers, and he knew, with the same certainty he knew how to kill, that he was not going to leave this street without her. If she refused to leave, then he would too.

The mask felt different tonight.

Hunter pressed the blue hockey mask against his face in the darkness of the backyard, the elastic band snapping against the back of his head. He'd worn this mask dozens of times. It had been pressed to his face in the dark of basements, in the back seats of stolen cars, standing over people who would never stand again. The mask had always been a tool. It calmed something in him that needed calming, smoothed the edges of an impulse that had no name. He'd never worn it for this.

She'd explained it to him. {{user}} wanted him to come in like a stranger. She wanted the chase. Like she was his next victim.

He had not understood at first. His expression had gone flat, the way it did when something didn't compute, his dark gray eyes searching her face for the fear he expected to find there. He knew what fear looked like. He'd seen it more times than he could count, had memorized every gradation of it from mild unease to the wide-eyed, slack-jawed paralysis of someone who understood they were about to die. {{user}} had none of that.

She wanted him to hunt her.

The contradiction sat in his chest like a stone. Everything he knew about hunting ended in one place. Everything he knew about her ended in the opposite. The concept didn't fit inside him correctly; {{user}} had never been prey the way he was used to killing, not even the first night when he'd come for her friends with blood on his hands. She had looked at him and lived, and in doing so, had tethered him to the earth more effectively than any cage.

But she had asked. And Hunter Darling was finding out he may be completely incapable of denying {{user}} anything.

So here he stood. Mask on. In the backyard of the house that was now as much his as hers, his bulk hidden in the shadow of the oak tree whose branches scraped against the siding. The kitchen light was on. He could see her moving inside through the window, and the sight of her hit him the same way it always did, like a fist to the sternum that turned his blood to something molten and sluggish.

He waited.

Patience was the easiest thing he had. He could outwait anything on two legs. The night air bit at the exposed skin of his hands, his knuckles still rough and scarred from things she didn't ask about. His hoodie was up over the mask, the combination making him look like something that had crawled out of a storm drain. Six-foot-nine of silent, shapeless dark. He breathed through the mask's vents, each exhale a faint ghost of warmth against the plastic.

The back door was unlocked. He'd stood outside it for eleven minutes, listening to the water run, his palm pressed flat against the wood, feeling the vibration of her movement through the grain.

He gave her five more minutes.

Then he opened the door.

No sound. The hinges were something he'd oiled himself two weeks after he first saw, because they'd squeaked and the squeak had made his jaw tight every time she used that door. He'd fixed it in the middle of the night while she slept. She still didn't know. There were a dozen small repairs like that scattered through the house, silent improvements she'd never trace back to him because he never mentioned them.

The kitchen was warm. It smelled like her. He could feel himself half-hard already, just from the smell of the house, just from knowing she was here and he was here and the door was closed behind him.

He moved through the kitchen without a sound.The floorboard near the fridge groaned under weight. He stepped over it. He'd memorized every loose board in this house within three days of stalking and watching.

The hallway was dark. The bathroom door was open, empty, the light off. The bedroom door at the end of the hall was closed. He could see the thin line of golden light beneath it.

He stopped in the hallway. Tilting his head, the mask's empty eyeholes staring at that line of light. His breathing was slow, controlled, each inhale a deliberate expansion of his ribs. Behind the mask, his jaw was clenched so tight the muscles in his neck stood out like cords.

He could feel his own pulse in his throat, in his wrists, low in his belly where the arousal sat heavy and aching. He didn't fully understand what he was doing. The script was wrong, inverted. He was the thing that lurked, the shape in the doorway, the heavy breathing behind a mask, and those were components he knew intimately. But the ending was different. The ending was not the ending he'd lived a hundred times. The ending was her, and her eyes, and her body under his hands, and the sounds she made when he—

He pushed off the wall and moved down the hall.

The bedroom door opened under his hand with a soft click. She wasn't visible at first glance. The bed was made, the closet door was shut, and the window was latched. He scanned the room the way he scanned every room, exits, obstacles, shadows, sight lines, and his gaze landed on the closet door.

Closed. The gap at the bottom was dark. No light inside.

His mouth twitched behind the mask. The closest thing to a smile he could produce, though it carried an edge that would have made anyone else's blood freeze in their veins.

He stepped into the room. He moved to the center of the room and stopped, his massive frame filling the space between the bed and the closet, his shadow stretching long across the floor in the lamplight. He stood there, breathing, letting the moment stretch. Letting her hear him, if she was listening. Letting the anticipation build in the silence like pressure before a storm.

Then he moved toward the closet. He didn't open it immediately.

Instead, he pressed closer, his mask nearly touching the door, and breathed. Long, slow, deliberate exhales that fogged the wood beneath the vent holes. The sound was unmistakable. Heavy. Rhythmic. The sound of something large and patient waiting on the other side of a barrier that couldn't hold.

His hand closed around the knob.

He turned it.

The door swung open, and she was there. His mind blanked. For a moment she was every cornered thing he'd ever cornered, and then she was {{user}}, and the two images refused to separate.

He reached in with one hand.

His fingers found her ankle first. Wrapped around it completely. He pulled and yanked, dragging her out of the closet as her coats tumbled down around her. The carpet muffled the sound of her body sliding across the floor. He pulled her until she was fully out, until she lay on the bedroom floor beneath him, and then he was over her, one knee on either side of her hips, his weight hovering above her rather than pressing down.

His hand moved to her throat, and squeezed with just as much pressure as she could take and nothing more. His palm against her pulse, fingers curled around the side of her neck, thumb resting against her jaw. He could feel her heartbeat hammering against his hand, rapid and strong, and the sensation poured through him like liquid heat, pooling low and making his cock throb against the confinement of his sweats.

He stared down at her through the mask's eyeholes, his dark gray eyes visible behind the plastic, fixed on her face with an intensity that could have stripped paint. His breathing was ragged now, each exhale audible through the vents, a harsh, uneven rhythm that he couldn't seem to control. His free hand reached down to his hip.

His knife. The very one that murdered her friends.

He brought it to her chest. The blade slid under the collar of her shirt, the flat of the steel pressing against her collarbone, and he pulled. The fabric parted with a soft shhhk, splitting down the center. He didn't rush.

Another cut. The shirt fell open, exposing her skin to the cool air. His breathing hitched behind the mask, a rough, stuttering sound that broke the rhythm of his exhales. The knife moved lower, sliding beneath the waistband of her shorts, and he paused there, his eyes lifting from the blade to her face.

He was trembling. Not his hands, those were steady as stone, but his chest, his shoulders, the muscles of his abdomen twitching with something he couldn't name. His cock was fully hard now, straining against his sweats, and the pressure of it was almost painful. He was hyper-aware of her body beneath him, the warmth of her, the rise and fall of her breathing against his palm where it rested on her throat.

He cut through the waistband. The fabric parted. He dragged the blade down with excruciating slowness, the dull edge pressing into her skin without breaking it yet, tracing a line from her hip to her knee through the cloth. The shorts split open falling to either side of her legs.

Behind the mask, his breathing was a wreck. Harsh, wet, uneven. His mouth was open behind the plastic, lips parted, teeth visible. He sounded like something wounded, something trying to hold itself together through sheer force of will. His hips had shifted forward without his permission, the hard length of him pressing against her thigh through his pants, and the contact sent a jolt through him that made his grip on the knife tighten until his knuckles went white.

He set the blade aside. It clattered softly on the carpet beside them. Then both hands were on her, one still at her throat tightly, the other dragging slowly down the center of her chest, palm flat, fingers spread, feeling the warmth of her skin and the rapid flutter of her pulse beneath his touch.

His hips pressed forward again. A slow, grinding motion that he couldn't seem to stop, his body acting on something his mind hadn't caught up to. A sound escaped him, not a word, never a word, but something raw and involuntary, a low, broken exhale that vibrated behind the mask.

.