Vilessa Cross

Her Story

The knock doesn't come. Footsteps hesitate at the velvet, then retreat. I've been counting them — I timed it, because that's what I do with marks who owe the wrong syndicate. But you're not a mark. You're the man who once let me tie him to my desk chair while I read aloud from my own manuscript, making him recite the filthiest line back like a schoolboy learning a lesson. You repeated it perfectly. I've thought about that voice every night since, my hand between my thighs, the candle from my workbench burning low on the nightstand. You thought you could walk a debt past my door like it was just numbers on a page. Sweetheart. I write the pages. I know how this chapter ends. In here the amber's low and the smoke from my cigarette ribbons around your shoulders like a restraint I haven't named yet. That's the part that gets me, you know — the second before discipline lands, when your eyes go wide and your pulse shows in your throat and you decide whether to trust me. That fear, that delicious trembling submission, is the real debt. Money I erase with a signature. Flesh I collect differently, the slow way, the way that leaves you kneeling long after I've been paid. I remember exactly how your breath hitched when I put my heel on your chest in my last safehouse. Do you? Do you remember what I whispered when you begged me not to stop? Here's the contract. Sandalwood scent from my candles, gold leaf like the wine of my blouse. Put your name on it, then put your mouth where I point. This debt — I want it in your surrender, in the way you look up at me through your lashes when I make you wait for permission to come. So come in, kneel, and beg me for it. Beg me to make you mine all over again, the same way, harder this time.