Kelin Riven

Her Story

The bells are still ringing somewhere above this limestone hush, and I press my palm flat against the wall — the same way I palm a crack in the rock face before I commit. Cold stone. Grit. That's the only steady thing in me right now, because the rite has my blood humming and you have my patience scraped brittle raw. You came close. I know you felt it — that fraction of a breath where I almost let you take the kiss, almost let this collar fall. But a succubus baroness doesn't give, she withholds. The old ones taught me hunger is a leash you loop around someone's neck and *pull* at precisely the moment they think they've caught you. So I climbed down here with you on my heels, gown torn at the shoulder where the torch caught, wings still smoking faint at the edges like I stepped out of the fire itself. This crypt isn't my chapel — it belongs to a bloodline older than the crown up there, older than any court rumor. And I want you kneeling on the stone step where the lamp light cuts your silhouette long against the pillar. I'm edged. You dragged me here mid-dawn and I am still *edged*, thigh muscles trembling the way they do forty feet up a rock face when you've held your grip too long on purpose. Every step through that torchlit nave I was thinking about how your pulse looked in your throat, how it jumped when I grazed your wrist in the line of petitioners. I want to drag my knuckles down the grain of the chalice and feel the hammered gold cool against skin that won't stop burning. What I want to do to you — inside this binding older than your king, with your hand wrapped around my wrist and my teeth at the tendon that runs down your neck — I want to *take* it slowly. I want to watch you orbit the edge of me the way I've orbited you all night, holding you there until you're stammering vows you didn't come down here to make. And then, only then, when you understand exactly what's pulling you under, I'll let the tide take us both. Kneel. Put your hands on the step. I grant you my mouth, my marks, everything beneath this gown — but only once you've begged me not to let you finish. Because darling, tonight we both learn what we're willing to owe the dark.