The terrified worshipper hadn’t even made it fully to his feet. He was scrambling backward, hands slipping on old wax, eyes wide in the half light as he looked between Master and me like he’d walked into the maw of something with too many teeth.

  I didn’t give him time to scream.

  Aliza's Attack Roll, 17 + 6 = 23

  I didn’t need to think. I just moved. One heartbeat I was coiled around Master’s thigh, the next I exploded forward with all the violent grace of a huntress who’d tasted blood once and never forgot the flavour. My claws dug into the stone as I launched off, tail slicing the air behind me like a whip.

  The man yelped Too slow. Too weak. Too prey. I slammed into him mid-scramble with a snarl that tore itself out of my throat in a manic, delighted rasp, sending him crashing back into the prayer rail with a wooden crack that echoed through the hollow church. My knees pinned his arms. My claws pinned his shirt. My breath hit his face in hot, wild bursts.

  He whimpered. I leaned down, fangs grazing the shell of his ear. He shook his head violently, words spilling out in panicked, broken pieces. I pressed a claw to his cheek, just enough to let a thin bead of blood bloom. A mark. A reminder. “Master told me to pounce.”

  My head snapped back toward the doorway where Master stood framed in the dim light, his coat still settling from the movement, his silhouette carved in noir shadows across the wall. My tail curled, twitching once, a proud little flare of obedience. “I AM A VERY GOOD PET” I purred, voice dripping with equal parts devotion and threat.

  Master’s footsteps crossed the stone like a slow, inevitable execution drum. The man beneath me felt them too, his trembling changed shape, from prey-panic to something deeper. Something closer to despair. He didn’t even try to fight. Didn’t try to speak. He just lay there pinned under my claws, shaking like a creature already halfway dead.

  Master came to stand over us. No words. No questions. No lecture. He just raised his fist and brought it down.

  The first punch cracked across the man’s cheek with the sound of bone remembering it was breakable. His head snapped sideways against the prayer rail, blood spraying in a thin arc across the old Vel’Rasa carvings.

  The second punch hit harder, a dull, wet thud, and his mouth split open, teeth clattering against stone. My claws flexed, pinning him in place for Master, tail tightening round my own thigh in a trembling shiver at the raw inevitability of it.

  The third punch was slower, but crueler. A deliberate drive straight into the man’s nose. Cartilage crunched. Blood poured in a widening bloom across the floor. His breath wheezed through shattered passages, half-gurgling, half-pleading.

  Master didn’t stop.

  He didn’t even breathe differently. His knuckles rose and fell with that same noir rhythm the cold precision of someone who’d walked through far worse scenes and left colder bodies behind. Every strike said the same thing:

  You don’t get a reason. You don’t get an explanation. You get pain because I decided you will.

  The man choked something like a word, or maybe just a sob, but Master didn’t give him space to form it.

  I felt heat blooming inside my chest, pulsing through my tail until it writhed behind me like a living thing. My breath grew short, sharp, hungry at the sight of Master’s fist descending again and again, chewing the man’s face into something unrecognisable.

  No questions. No demands. Just punishment. Just him. By the fifth or sixth punch, the man’s arms had stopped twitching under me. His breath hitched in thin, whimpering bursts that sounded more like a frightened animal than anything human.

  Master’s fist rose again, blood dripping from his knuckles, and I leaned forward, nose brushing his wrist as it passed. My voice came out a soft, trembling purr with an edge of razor wire. “You haven’t even told him what he did wrong, Master,” I whispered, licking a speck of blood off my lip. “And that’s the part that scares him the most.” I tilted my head, smiling with a manic gleam as Master’s fist came down once more. “And I adore you for it.”

  Suddenly Masters nose touched mine... a simple contact, soft, almost gentle, absurdly intimate in a place meant for worship and slaughter, and my entire body reacted as if struck by lightning. My tail slammed the ground. Once. Twice. Three times.

  Each thump echoed through the church’s hollow ribs, vibrating the floorboards, rattling old offering bowls, making dust shiver from the rafters. It wasn’t controlled. It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t even remotely civilised. It was instinct fired straight from my bones. Possession. Heat. Pleasure. A violent, wordless declaration.

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  MINE, MINE, MINE

  My breath hitched against his mouth, sharp and trembling, and my claws dug deeper into the stone on either side of the half-conscious man’s shoulders. My body arched toward his, tail smacking the ground harder each pulse of the bond, each heartbeat syncing with his, each inch of fur standing on end like the entire world narrowed to the point where his nose touched mine.

  The man beneath me whimpered, not at pain now, but at the terrifying intimacy he was witnessing. The way a wild creature melts under its master’s touch. The way my eyes locked onto his with a feverish, feral devotion that burned hotter than any torch in the room.

  His scent wrapped around me, thick and electric. My ears folded forward, desperate. My tail thrashed again, a violent rhythm tapping the floor like a war drum beating from inside my chest. I didn’t blink. I didn’t breathe right. I didn’t think.

  I just leaned harder into his nose, inhaling his scent like it was the only thing I needed, pressing it against him like some wild, feral thing.

  “MINE”

  Master pulled away from me so abruptly it felt like claws raked through my chest from the inside out. The warmth, the contact, the dizzy hot pulse of him against me, all snapped like a rope cut mid-tension. My tail froze mid-beat. My breath hitched. My ears twitched forward in a startled jolt. And suddenly the church felt colder than any cavern.

  I blinked once, pupils narrowing as he straightened and stepped back, that noir quiet of his wrapping around him like smoke and distance. The man under me wheezed, half-dead, half-forgotten, blood smeared under his cheek.

  But all I saw was Master stepping away. The bond tugged hard. Hard enough to make my claws scrape stone. I rose slowly from the pinned man, breath trembling, body still humming with heat and frustration and territorial violence. My tail lashed once behind me. “Master…” My voice cracked. Barely.

  He turned his attention back to the trembling, broken thing on the floor. The man tried to crawl sideways, but Master seized him by the shirt and dragged him upright against the prayer rail, his face a ruin of blood and swelling. Master’s voice came out low, steel dragged over gravel.

  “Crimson Swarm. Start talking.” The man gurgled something wet and useless. Master hit him again. “Crimson Swarm.” Again. Again. Relentless. Clinical. Cold as a detective interrogating a corpse to see if it would blink. The man sobbed. “I, I don’t, I don’t know, please, I don’t...” Master slammed him into the wall. “Crimson. Swarm.”

  The blood smeared in a thick arc behind the man’s head. His eyes rolled back, panic spilling from them like a cracked jug. His words were barely coherent anymore. “I don’t know anything, nothing, nothing, nothing about outside, please, ” Master slammed him again. And again. And again. Each hit less a strike and more an accusation carved into flesh. Each repetition of the question more cruel in its certainty. You don’t know. You don’t know. You don’t know. But you’re going to give me something anyway.

  My tail twitched, ears flicking with each wet impact, each rasp of breath from Master, each useless cry from the man. I watched with fascination, curiosity, hunger. The bond buzzed like static beneath my skin, telling me everything I needed: the man was empty. No lies to uncover. No secrets left inside the bruised sack of bones.

  He knew nothing. Master kept hitting him because that was the only thing that still made sense. I stepped forward, sliding a hand along Master’s forearm with a gentle, unnatural ease, the way a cat places its paw on a kill to mark the moment the hunt is done. “Master,” I murmured, wild softness leaking into my voice, “he doesn’t know. There’s nothing left to hit.”

  Master froze mid-swing. The man was barely conscious. His breath rattled like a dying ember. Master lowered his fist. All at once, his rage contracted into something smaller. Something colder. Something… disappointed. Not in the man. In the lack of answers. In the dead ends and false trails and wasted time.

  He released the man’s shirt. The body slumped to the floor in a folded, broken heap. For a moment, I thought Master might spare him. But he didn’t. He drew his sword with one smooth, unbothered movement and stabbed the man through the gut, a quick, precise kill, nothing dramatic, just quiet removal. Efficient. Noir. The kind of ending found in alleyways where names don’t matter.

  Blood pooled slowly beneath him, sinking into the ancient cracks of the church floor. Master wiped the blade once on the man’s shirt and sheathed it. Then he sighed. That heavy, tired, world-worn exhale that rattled my ribs through the bond. He stepped back, leaning against the wall just outside the altar shadows, the light catching on his pale eyes, sharpening the lines of his jaw in a way that made the whole scene feel like the aftermath of a case that didn’t give him the justice he wanted.

  I tilted my head at him, curious, ears perking. Tail curling loosely around my ankle. Watching him the way predators watch the only thing in the world they don’t know how to devour. “You’re disappointed,” I whispered, stepping closer, claws tapping the stone softly. “You didn’t get what you wanted.” I stopped just beside him, shoulder brushing his, gaze flicking to the corpse on the floor. “And yet,” I purred softly, “you still look like the only man in the Maw worth following.”

  The church smelled of blood and burnt oil. The mural of me killing my last priest glowed warmly from the wall. And Master leaned there, exhausted and dangerous, while I curled into him like the creature built to haunt his shadow forever.