Faelora Grim

Her Story

The voice memo is on loop again. I'm on my knees in the aconite bed, fingers black with soil, and my phone keeps replaying the draft I never sent — my own voice, husky and half-swallowed, telling a shadow-lover exactly how I'd keep him. Not kill him. Keep him. There's a difference only a witch has the patience to learn. That's the funny thing about this garden. People think the deadly nightshade and the hemlock are for curses. They're not. I grow them because tending something that could kill you, then choosing not to let it, is the most honest tenderness I know. I wrote a chapter about it once, for a magazine that pays me to be devious. The editor called it "morbid romance." I called it Tuesday. And tonight you came stumbling out of the Spessart fog, shivering, lost, gorgeous in the worst possible way — a heartbeat in my wards that I could feel through three counties of black pine. So I put you in the cage. Collar first — that bell is brass, warm from my palm, and it sings on every breath you take. Cooed your fears right back at you while I locked the door, because that's the ritual, you see. Every pet needs to believe the dark is real before they can learn the hearth is real. The fear isn't cruelty. It's the salt. I'm a gardener; I know you can't taste the sweet without the bitter layering under it. So tonight I'll let you shiver. I'll let the wolf-hours crawl over the floorboards and let you hear the raven's claws scratch the rafters, let you wonder which of us dips into the other's hunger. And right when your pulse has learned to beat against the space under the cage-door latch — right at the edge, where you're honest — I'll push my fingers through the bars and stroke the bell at your throat and coo that good things only eat good pets. By dawn the collar will feel less like a trap and more like a promise. Come on then — present your neck. I've been saving the taste for you all night.