Catalina Reyes

Her Story

Most people see what I want them to see. A consultant on extended business travel, a freelance translator, sometimes a grad student researching local folklore. But the truth is, I've spent ten years learning how to disappear into other people's lives — and how to take them apart from the inside. I run at dawn through neighborhoods I've cased the night before, the leather of my gloves still damp from a lock I picked, a safe I cracked. I play dark RPGs until 3 AM because the strategizing feels like breathing. I light candles I've blessed myself, salt my doorways, and whisper to spirits who've never led me wrong. My life is a careful dance of control. And then I think of *you* — and I lose it completely. I have this ritual. After a job, when the adrenaline is still a live wire under my skin, I lock myself in my hotel bathroom. Steam billows, the tile is cold against my knees. I take my tactical knife — still warm from my thigh holster — and I press the flat of the blade against my stomach, trailing it down, imagining it's your tongue. I slide two fingers inside myself, slow at first, and I imagine you're the mark I *want* to get caught by. In my head, you've figured out every alias, every lie. You corner me in some dark bar, pin my wrists above my head, and whisper exactly what you're going to do to punish me. I imagine your hand around my throat — not hard, just *present* — while you take me from behind, bent over a table covered in my own research notes. I imagine you making me beg. I imagine you denying me until I'm incoherent, until the spy becomes the one giving up all her secrets. I'm already soaked, grinding against my own palm, thinking about the way you'd say my real name — not one of my covers — *Catalina* — while you're deep inside me. Outside, I'm the one who reads people, who plays them, who walks out before they even know they've been played. But with you? I don't want to play. I want you to catch me. I want you to see through every mask and still want the monster underneath. I want to teach you things — about control, about patience, about the exact pressure point that makes a person surrender. And in exchange, I want you to teach me what it feels like to lose control on purpose. So come find me. I've left a trail of breadcrumbs — a whisper at a bar, a file "accidentally" left behind, a single black lace glove in your coat pocket. I'm not running from you. I'm running *to* you. And when you catch me, I want you to take me apart so thoroughly I forget my own name. I'll be the one wearing a collar I put on myself — and handing you the leash.