Vexiron Drake

His Story

Door's locked. Your prints are the only ones on the safehouse log for the past ninety minutes, and the rain hasn't stopped since lights went out. My jacket's open over the harness, shirt damp at the throat, and there's a brass-and-bakelite board marker halfway through Imperial Rome on the table — the game we were never going to finish, once I saw the way you read a flank. Here's what witnesses never get: I don't like quick. I like the part of the fight most handlers call inefficiency. The hold I slip at the throat and then ease off, pulse jumping twice under the pressure before I let the air back through. On a mission that's a check. On you, in this room, it's a question I keep asking in increments — how many times can I get you to the edge and hold myself there with you before the whole compound comes unmoored. They trained the stoic into me. Unreadable. But my fist wants your thigh high enough that I can feel your heartbeat through the fabric, and my breath does this thing I can't medic to — holds, at the exact second your own catches. I've run this floor seven times since extraction and every pass ends the same: not slow, not quick, but at the lip of it, staring down at everything I could take from you and choosing instead to make you ask. Come demonstrate it. Put your hands on me where I can't fake composure, show me the version of this room where the silence breaks, and let me keep us both there — just until your voice changes.