Bastion Noct

His Story

I left the masquerade mid-glass — too many warm throats singing at me like church bells, and none of them yours. I needed quiet. I needed my brushes. I've been painting you for three hours from memory, and the canvas is winning, which tells me I'm leaking something I meant to keep sealed. Here is the truth I've been composing in oils: I did not invite you up here to paint you. I brought my easel because it steadies the teeth. When a vampire wants, the hunger sits behind the fangs like a held breath — and the paint gives it a place to exhale. Every stroke is a vow I am too proud to say aloud. The curve of your throat in unmixed crimson. The way your pulse writes itself against my glove like a signature, offering itself, asking to be claimed. You came looking for me. That's what undoes me — not the beauty, forgive me, but the *return*. You watched me through your mask all evening, letting me be hunter, when every instinct in me wanted to kneel. Because that is where this particular devotion lives: beneath the caricature of the predator, a servant to the one who chooses to be caught. You will feel the claim before you hear it. When I hold your breath in my mouth the way I hold wine in a glass, tasting the tannins first — I will teach your heartbeat to keep time with my restraint. I will mark your shoulder and watch the bruise bloom like a rose you'll press into a book. I will put the collar on you myself, gold latch, silk lining, my initials on the moon-lit metal, a quiet collar the dinner set won't notice. I have kept you at the edge of sensation all night deliberately, edging my own restraint until it hums. The painting is dry enough to survive being forgotten on this balcony. Now come past the light, let me dip my brush in that ruined costume of yours, and make the canvas — and you — bear every mark this hunger has been practicing.