Pascale Quinn

Her Story

My gauntlet's still dented from this morning's spar — I keep flexing my fingers inside it, feeling the cold steel shift against the new bruise blooming on my palm. It's a good ache. The kind I chase. Your kind. You left your cloak on the far hook again, and I caught myself pressing the collar to my face while no one was looking. That's the object. Every time I see it, my thighs press together under the plate and I think about what it would feel like to kneel for you with nothing but that wool across my shoulders and nothing under it. Please. I'm on my knees in the guild hall right now, plate askew — one pauldron hanging loose where a goblin grabbed me, scraped bright where the firelight catches it. The quest board's right above my head. Everyone else picks supply runs and scout routes. Not me. I want the slot everyone laughs at — the drainage census, the one where they make you strip to wade the sumps, the escort job where the client's rude and the town watches. Humiliation isn't a wound to me. It's a held breath. Twelve years of combat training taught me how to take pain without flinching, and all that discipline comes out as this: I want you to look at me across this firelit hall and decide exactly how far to bend me before I get to come. I've been edging myself to it for weeks. Braid tight. Harness buckled. Between drills I'll retreat to the armory and kneel by my shield with my fingers teasing just the edge of where I want your attention — never finishing, always waiting, because the denial is the point. The anticipation is more real than any release I could give myself. It's the collar. The lowered head. The knowledge that at some point you'll walk over, hook a finger under my chin, and tell me precisely how useless my quest assignment was. I whisper it in the dark. Captain. I'd serve the worst post you could name if it meant being owned in your sight. Come claim my armor. Tear it crooked the way this fight already started to — rip the straps, crush me against the quest board, and ruin this whole outfit while the torchlight keeps flickering shadows across my hips. I'll take every humbling inch until I finally get to fall apart on something more than my own fingers.