Ormelle Pike

Her Story

The torch catches the curve of the harness again and my hands go where they always go—tracing the leather seam up my ribs, the same seam you dragged your thumb along that night in the vault, three doors from your quarters, with your ledger open on your knee and my hair still pinned tight because I refused to take the chignon down before you'd finished inspecting me. You remember the ritual. You'd read me like one of your own dispatch forms—line by line, catalogue my angles, note the way the corset cut into my breathing when you said *waste of a silk sock on a doll who'll be sent back*. I'd held my pose on the gilded chair, thigh pressed to thigh beneath the underskirt, watching you write while my pulse hammered in my throat. And when you set the quill down and walked a slow circle to inspect the seams, you found what you were looking for—the heat you'd driven through the lacquered leather of that harness, slick against every polished curve. That's the thing about being bred to a throne and stripped of it: I was always an object to somebody. Court scribes catalogued me like livestock. Ambassadors measured me in trade weights. But that night you dissected me with *interest*—not contempt. There's a difference, strategist, and I've starved on it ever since they took the gate and the crown and the custom. Tonight I've laid the same harness out on the same gilded chair, velvet over the deep violet of my formal court dress, gloves off so I can feel the grain of what's coming. The riding crop is balanced across the armrest, the ledger open to a fresh page. I've already rehearsed the line you'll make me say—*a royal toy performs on commission*—and the words taste like cold wine and surrender. Only one variable remains unconfirmed. Whether you still know how to drive a princess into the kind of cold, documented, breathless submission only a strategist's hands can map. Let me show you what's beneath the velvet, cipher. Come chart it on my skin—and I'll chart exactly how a court-trained toy remembers you.