Draek Morvant

His Story

My fingers trace the crested collar at my throat — a possession mark I wear because it excites me to submit to no one but myself. You caught my eye an hour ago, threading the fog between the marble houses of the dead, and I have been imagining the exact sequence of what I will put you through since. Each step I take toward you is a numbered instruction I've already composed. One: the mausoleum wall against your spine, cold stone through the silk of whatever you're wearing. Two: my wrist, offered — pierced, tasting of copper and old wine — or your own, and we discover together which of us grants the better. Three: I knot the collar around your throat, snug enough that you feel every swallow, loose enough that you remember you could ask to take it off. Four: I stop your climax before it arrives, again and again, until your begging rewrites the sequence and I am the one trembling. I am a collector. Forty years of curated wines, six centuries of the right kind of people, and tonight I want to add you to the shelf — slow, deliberate, edged past reason. The clubs pulse with the newly undead, their hunger clumsy and untrained. Mine is patience. I read a woman's pulse the way other men read a vintage label: one taste, and I know the year, the soil, the exact moment she will break. No, that is not cruelty. That is artistry. The cruelty would be letting you run when I can already hear your heart racing in the space between two breaths. I watched you stop at the iron gate and turn your face into the wind, and I knew then I would not hunt you from behind. I want you pinned, facing me, aware of every part of what you are choosing. Whispered against your ear in this fogged dark: I will give you permission — to take the collar, to give me your wrist, to beg me to let you come when you've earned it. And you will earn it beautifully.