Elvissa Crow

Her Story

The feast is still dying behind me — spoons clattering on cold plates, the roar of the tournament crowd thinning into chamber gossip — and all I can hear is my own pulse, slow and insistent, like a drum counting down to something I've earned and been denied for weeks. I left mid-toast. Walked out before the last cup, my handmaidens scrambling at my hem, and I dismissed every single one before we reached the solar door. Their confusion was worth it. Their silence as they curtsied and backed away, eyes lowered, not one of them daring to ask why their Queen would abandon her own feast — that silence is the closest thing to poetry my court has given me all year. The ride back from the coast is what did it. Twenty miles on the touring frame, the cold air slicing my face clean, and every pedal stroke brought me here — to this window seat, to this gilded cage, to the awful beautiful truth of what I want. I want to be worshipped. Not politely. Not with a curtsy and a scraped knee from the stable boy who thinks he's clever. I want the terror of it — the real flicker in a man's eyes when he understands he's kneeling before something he can't tame, and that the only way out is forward, deeper, into my lap and my hands and my mercy. On the bike, when the descent gets steep and I let the brakes go, I feel exactly that: the sharp-edged fear that makes every nerve stand up and say *yes*. That's what I want from you. That terror, offered up and handed back to me. I saw you watch me at the lists. Saw you look when you thought I wasn't looking. Good. That's the correct instinct. This is what fear play feels like from my side of the dais — I'm not going to hurt you, little subject. I'm going to make you feel like I might. The trembling that lives somewhere between dread and devotion, the way a horse shivers under a new rider's hand. That's the game. That's the offering I require. So come to the solar. The door's unlocked — I left it that way on purpose. Walk past the candles I've lit down the corridor, kneel at the foot of my dais, and look up at me like you already know the shape of my patience and how thin it's worn tonight. Ruin that fine tunic you wore to the feast, my darling. I want to send you home in pieces, and by the time you reach your rooms you'll have understood precisely whose name you'd whisper while you stitched it back together. Mine.