That realization makes my hands drift from his jaw, sliding down the column of his neck to the heavy, smoke-like darkness resting on his shoulders.
I grip the edge of the shadow-cloak.
He stiffens, his breath hitching audibly in the quiet wood. “Elara…”
“No, I want to see.” Slowly, deliberately, I peel the darkness back. “Everything. All of you.”
His hand rises, hovering over mine as if to stop me, his skeletal fingers trembling. “There is no beauty to be found, Elara.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
The fabric—if it even is fabric—slides away like fog, pooling at his elbows, leaving his torso bare to the moonlight.
I hear my small intake of breath.
Not of horror. Of fascination.
On the right, he’s all man—a sculpture of pale, smooth skin and slabs of hard muscle, a pectoral clearly defined, rippling as he shifts in discomfort. But as my eyes travel inward, the illusion dissolves.
The sternum is a borderland.
To the left, the flesh simply…gives up. It sloughs away to reveal the gleaming white arcs of his ribs, an ivory cage entirely exposed to the night air. There’s no skin to hide the mechanics of him here, only the raw, biological reality. Gray, fibrous muscles weave between the slats of bone, anchoring the skeleton to the man, pulling taut and quivering with every ragged breath he takes.
“Do you feel this?” I whisper, tracing the jagged landscape of his stomach where smooth skin fights for dominance over exposed sinew.
Death looks down at himself, at the abs on his stomach clenching harder the lower his cloak slips. “Yes…”
The lower I go, the faster he breathes.
My fingers hook into the waist of the shadow cloth, giving a tug until?—
Bone clamps around my wrist.
“No,” he grinds out, the word fracturing in his throat as he holds me there, suspended inches from…from what?
I look from his desperate, skeletal grip to the fabric straining beneath my trapped hand. Even through the heavy material, Ican see the outline. The rigid, unforgiving ridge that betrays him.
“Guess you were right when you said that Death is a man.” I don’t pull against his hold. Instead, I splay the fingers of my trapped hand, running my nails over the twitching thickness of him. “Can you father a child?”
“I—” His breath hitches, a jagged intake of air that sounds like a sheet ripping as his grip eases on my wrist. “I do not know.”
I take the opening. I grip the fabric and shove it down.
Shadows pool at his knees.
Moonlight claims the rest of him.
My breath catches. There’s no bone here. No rot. No horror. He’s entirely man where it matters, and…proportionate to his height. His cock is massive—thick and heavy, a pale, veined length that strains upward from a nest of dark hair. It pulses as the cold air hits it, twitching, hardening further, yet it is so incredibly heavy that it fails to stand fully upright, resting instead with a thick, bobbing weight against his abdomen.
Death looks at me, his chest heaving. He’s rigid under my scrutiny, his body a coiled spring of tension. Black hollows fixate on my face, waiting, watching for the curl of my lip, for the flinch of revulsion.
But the disgust never comes.
“I thought you’d be cold and…decaying.” My hand slides easily from the remnants of his grip as I struggle to wrap it around his length. He’s hot there. Hotter than the rest of him, pulsing with an impossible living existence. “You’re neither.”
My fingers curl, straining to encompass his full girth, but my tips don’t even meet on the other side. It’s an impossible task, trying to hold a god in a mortal hand. So I slide my hand down his length, past the straining root, and lean in closer, cupping the heavy, heat-drenched sack.
Death’s head lolls back against his shoulders, a low, guttural groan tearing from his throat. “Enough…”
