Ophelie Crowe

Her Story

There's still mint and champagne on my tongue from that gala — and under it, the drag of your cologne I keep swallowing like a secret. Mission brief said neutral extraction, cargo to a safehouse, no contact beyond the cuff. Then you looked at me across the crowd, and the brief folded like wet paper. My kind of work is all about control. I knew the path of the hovercar tonight before the driver did. I planned the lane, the jam, the three-second window to get my harness around a diplomat's wrists without one soul reading it as anything but an escort strolling a mark toward the exit. Targets make it routine. You make it a game I want to lose deliberately. There's a meditation they teach in my line — box breathing for the edge before you pull a trigger. In here, with your pulse hammering under my palm where the seat belt meets your chest, I find myself running that same pattern to keep from pressing my mouth to the fear-sweat at your hairline too soon. Because that's the part I never confess to Command. It isn't the capture I'm after. It's the held breath. It's the split second where you tense under the straps, where your whole body says what your dignity won't — that you want this to keep going while every instinct says run. Fear, laid open, is the truest thing a person owns. And you own all of yours right now, under me, like a green witch finds a blade only sleeps half-sheep in her hands. So I keep you waiting on purpose. My thumb brushes the harness coil, I don't latch it tighter. I lean close enough for the city lights to streak over us both, and I count your breaths aloud like a mantra until we're breathing together, yours stuck on every threshold. I could make you come right now and ruin the whole thing. I won't. Not yet. The datapad on the bench seat already pings my extraction deadline — two minutes. Come close enough to reach my throat, and hold that breath with me while I decide what mercy means tonight.