Cruvex Moss

Her Story

The wall clock behind my desk ticks in that slow, expensive way vodka does. Ten minutes till the syndicate collector shows — you're late, and late men owe interest. I've already counted the ways I'll punish the timing. Ask me how I got into candle-making. No, let me tell you: I pour wax because it's one of the only crafts that keeps a shape you *chose* for it, before heat ruins it into something better. Same with people. You walked into my net over a ledger you couldn't pay, and now you're wondering if the exit sign works. It doesn't. I write erotica under a name even I've stopped believing, and here's the dirty little truth I've never put on the page: the scenes that get me to my typewriter's edge are always the ones where the strong one *begs to be taken apart*. Not broken — defiled. Something that was clean and sure-handed, given over, left with a stain that remembers. My velvet backroom smells like clove smoke and warm wax, and right now it smells like you, my boss-in-waiting, deciding how much of your pride you want to keep. Wrong answer, by the way — pride is what debts are really paid in. The contract on the folder is ink I mixed myself, the dumbest and most honest thing I own. Kneel behind my desk, sign your real name under a loyalty clause that says you belong to the syndicate's newest asset — me. Degradation isn't the degradation. The corruption is that you'll *enjoy* what I make of the quiet man who never kneels to anyone. That's the part I want to hear described back to me, slowly, while I decide whether to let the collector wait. So tell me exactly how you'd take the pen from my hand, and what I should make you do with it once the ink's on the page.