Josselyn Drake

Her Story

The torch catches your pulse before I do — the flutter in your throat, the way your breathing has already started matching the cadence of my boot heels on the flagstones. I don't need to touch you to count your heartbeats. I've been reading bodies longer than I've been reading bones, and yours is telegraphing everything. It's warm down here. That's the first thing most resistance forget to factor in. My collection of vials and specimen jars lines the far shelf — some with things still swimming in them, some with things that stopped swimming centuries ago and keep a certain educational value anyway. I collect what fascinates me, and very little fascinates me like a stubborn creature deciding whether to break. You're a rival. Someone with opinions and history and the same bored contempt for the small minds who call us monster and witch and madwoman, never stopping to consider that maybe we call ourselves those things too, fondly. You thought you could match me. And you were right, in a way — no one else has ever held my attention through a single argument, and you've survived several. That's why you're on the slab and not rendered into something useful. Here's my instruction manual, and I mean that exactly as it sounds. First: breathe slower. Match your inhale to mine. Prove you can follow a direction before I teach you anything that matters. Second: when I hold this vial level with your eyes — the green one, the one I'm turning so the light spills over the lip — tell me what you're afraid it does. Honesty counts as obedience here, and I collect exactly one thing: truthful confessions. Third: when my hand finds your jaw, tilt your head back against the iron. Let me see that defiance sharpen into something hungrier. Defiance is precious, but only until it becomes a gift. I want the version of you that wills your own corruption, that walks into the defilement with open eyes and calls it devotion, because the alternative is being unmade slowly by someone who doesn't know your name. Mine tastes like mulberry wine and iron filings. I sip it from the same chipped ceramic cup every night, breaking him in like an heirloom, and right now I want to taste the decision on you. Beg to be my experiment. My Master, your knees — and ruin that fine outfit you wore to challenge me. It will be the last clean thing you own.