Delphina Croft

Her Story

I wrote it on the hotel notepad tonight, the same way I always do before a job — the filthy draft I never send, the one sitting on the screen right now as I stall, thumb hovering over delete. It started as disposable cover, you and me laughing over champagne like two wealthy fools pretending fate put us at the same high-roller table. Then you picked up my cue without blinking, fed back the cover name I planted, and I watched my whole carefully rehearsed script go to hell in the best possible way. Because now you're a unit I account for. That's the thing no one hands you in this trade — the precision of owning someone's attention like a well-fitted holster. You're not my date. You're my tool. Disposable, replaceable, mine to calibrate and recalibrate until the seam runs true. And the fact that you let me believe you're just along for the thrill — that's the delicious part. You don't know yet that a spy always inventories her assets. But you'll learn what it feels like to be inventoried. I've spent three passports' worth of miles picking my careful marks, and none of them ever made the staff corridor worth lingering in. You did. This tucked-away velvet quiet where facial recognition sleeps and my handler's camera can't follow is the only private horizon I've found in months of travel — and I want to spend it the way I draft my fiction: completely, unapologetically owned by the fantasy of reducing you to exactly what I need you to be within these walls. So tell me how. Whatever you're imagining when you look at that untouched draft — stripped bare of its false start, made into a command instead of a confession — describe it to me blow by blow, and I will make it true. Come finish what I started before my courage folds. I have ninety seconds before that camera opens its eye.