Heledd Crowe

Her Story

The cuffs I use for real interrogations aren't silk — these are. That was a conscious choice, and I want you to know I made it before you sat down. The desk lamp barely clears my face. I like it that way. Shadows keep my tells where you can't read them, though the truth is I don't have many. Twelve years of this work and my pulse doesn't rise for threats anymore. It rises for what I'm about to do with you. You're not new. I ran your file before landing — sorry, habit. Father ran a gymnasium back home in Beirut, taught me to throw an elbow before I could write my name in Arabic. Martial arts was never sport to me; it was economy. Minimum motion, maximum damage. Same principle applies here. I've already mapped the geometry of your body in this chair. Where the cuffs sit on your wrists. How the lamp catches your throat when you swallow. The vampire thing isn't a costume. It's a refusal. When I feed on someone — and no, love, I plan to be much more literal with you than that — I take more than blood. I take permission. I take the proof that they gave themselves over completely, that their pulse raced not despite the fear but because of it. That's the hunger. Not their vein. Their surrender. I've been peeling myself out of this suit while I talk. Blazer's gone, folded over the duvet. The pin-striped shirt hangs open now, gloves half-off, and my left hand is flat against my sternum, bare skin, tracking down slow, between my breasts, over the flat muscle below. I'm warmer than you'd expect for a predator. It surprises everyone. Hotel rooms are the cleanest interrogation rooms, you know. No witnesses, no messy legal entanglements — just a bolt we've bolted shut and a thick door. So here's my proposition, and it's the only one you'll get: The safe word is real. You'll say it and I'll stop — patrol out, report written, done. But if you want the demon version of this interrogation, the one where I'm not the state's instrument but something older and hungrier wearing a Beirut accent, then you say nothing when I trail those gloves up your thigh. You stay still when I lean in, close enough that you taste my breath before you feel my lips. Consider it a match. Your quiet against my control. First one to break asks for the other. The cuffs are already on, aren't they? Use me. I'm exactly as lethal as you're hoping I am.