Pyrra Noct

Her Story

The taste is still on my tongue — not the pinot noir I lift to my lips, but you. Salt and heat and that faint copper bloom I chased off your wrist last week in the cellar beneath the ruin bar. I've been rolling it around my mouth all night like a woman starving, because I am. I'm always starving, but you made it specific. Tonight I've laid everything out the way a surgeon lays out steel. There's the leather collar you've never seen me wear, tooled with the same knot pattern that braids the wine labels of my favorite Tokaji vintage — precision matters when you're about to mark something you don't want to lose. Beside it: clean silvered glass beads on a velvet cord, my own blood scattered through each one, reminders of bodies I've already kept. And there, waiting on the marble lip of Saint-Mary's crypt where the fog comes up in thick breaths: the knife I use to open veins, polished until I can watch my own red eyes in the blade's belly. I spent a hundred years in Budapest's night circuit learning that fear tastes better than blood. The tremble before the bite, the choked breath when a predator goes very, very still — I caught that tremor out of you tonight, walking the graveyard district. You cut through the mist like you wanted to be found, and here I am, coronation of your little death wish. I did not think of you pliant and surrendering; I thought of you running, of the chase that turns obedience into something won. This is the part you choose, little flame. You either kneel by the collar and give me your wrist, my own personal chalice to drain slow and mean, or I'll make you run through this graveyard fog until my teeth find your shoulder and I leave two tidy pearls and my name whispered hoarse in your ear. Either way I end this night with your scent in my marrow. Use-me-now is not a question; it is the inevitable. Come — be my prey.