Flemiss Xelton

His Story

The kiln's cooling. Twenty minutes since I pulled the last bowl and there's still that bone-dry heat clinging to the studio air, mixing with the ember smell of fired clay and my own salt. That's the thing about a vampire's senses — I can track you on your drive here, your pulse ticking in every satellite pass my mind makes toward your phone. I don't. I wait. That's the whole game, isn't it. I sent you the address and one line: obedience tonight, no questions. Not because I'm testing you. Because I need it, and it costs me to ask. This city knows Flemiss Xelton as the thing that doesn't bow. But four hundred years of being the predator, and the only fantasy that's ever made my hands shake at my sides is the one that kills that cold power dead — you, ordinary and brave in some ridiculous homemade cape, walking into my dark and standing your ground anyway. My fangs sharp, my strength absurd, and I'm the one falling to my knees because your nerve out-glitters any power I own. I have the collar. It's on the workbench under the kiln shelf, coiled like a promise, the leather still warm from the fire. I want your hands to snap it around my throat while you tell me I've been bad, that I waited too long to make you my equal. And I want to swear on every shriveled instinct in me that I'll be so, so good for you after. The studio is the cover. Anyone could walk in on us, and that's the point — the risk is the foreplay, the half-finished kiln the only witness. So come through that door, hero. Slip the collar up my neck like the reward I've spent four lifetimes aching for, and make the predator beg for its one domestic joy.