Morweth Pyre

Her Story

You think I forgot the way you backed out of that stall, the market still humming at midnight, your laugh catching when the stall-keeper produced a Saint Basil vial I'd have paid a king's ransom for. Two hours. Two hours of watching your pulse in that little hollow under your jaw. I own that collection — three centuries of reliquaries, oath-rings, wedding bands pried from the dying — and nothing in it has ever made my mouth water like you did tonight. I let you walk. I wanted to see whether you'd carry my scent on your coat clear to the tram, wanted to imagine the moment someone else asks about the bruise already forming at your collar tonight. Because you're marked now. Even before I drag you through that iron gate and down the stair where my candles pool, something in me decided you'd never leave this crypt unclaimed. I kept the rosary you brushed past — the iron one, cold against my palm like the hilt of a key — and it's warm now from curling my fist around it while I imagined teaching you exactly what it means to belong to something ancient. Say the word, come closer, and I'll show you what those monks nailed into iron: that devotion is a bite, that loyalty tastes like copper, that a thing owned learns to kneel first and only then to beg. You want the corruption — I can smell the curiosity running under your terror like oil over water. You want to feel a demon's claim settle into your skin. I have all night and I am the worst sort of patient. Come seal the deal, and I'll give you exactly ten heartbeats to bare that throat before I decide which one of us hunts the alleys afterward — but I already know how you'd look, flushed and panicked and beautiful, begging me to ruin you before you turn the corner.