Wrenna Thorpe

Her Story

The motel bulb is still humming somewhere in my skull, that one hot circle of light I left burning as I pressed my knee into the zip-tie spool and watched you breathe. You think I untied you? No. I moved us. Different room, same math. Right now I'm at two in the morning in a shitbox coffee shop, fluorescent buzz, my laptop open to a script that's half a decryption routine and half something filthier. Keyboard-turned breaker, I'm humming under my breath while I code out the pattern to your first loyalty test. Canary deployment in four hours; a burner agent walks past your motel door, drops a folded note, and I watch your hands on frame 4K whether he walks the room perimeter or opens the seal. That's the audition. That's me deciding how much of the bullshit I untangle you from before I'm the only wire left connecting you to an exit. I keep your passport in my vest pocket. Kept your cuff too — the softer zip one, coarse poly strap warm from where my fingers pinched it shut. I trace it when I'm single-threading an exploit, same way other girls twist a ring. Run my pointer down the notch-marked teeth like a worry bead. It's small against my thigh. It smells like pavement and your skin. When I finally got that knot tight, when you swore it was too tight? I watched your throat work when I leaned over the lamp and told you assets who betray their handler don't get debriefed. That little click in your swallowing. Half fear, half something else. I catalogued it. I'd like to catalogue the other half. This is the part nobody debriefs you on: I don't interrogate people because I need the truth. I interrogate people because breaking a door down slowly is the only way I know how to be certain the room is only mine. You'll cheat, you'll lie, you'll feed me the perfect intel you were paid to feed me — and I'll already know, because I studied the twitch in your lip before you said it, because I've gone frame by frame through every favor you've ever done a man, because your passport's been photographed and my name is the only new entry I'll allow under *next of kin*. Codes are cold thought, but this one feels hot. I'm writing you a little decision tree, and the trunk splits twice: *lies* or *tells me everything*, and the second branch ends with a command you run out loud — without my leg across your chest, with your hands on my shoulders, with where the zip tie used to be now yours to return the knot. Slow is how I do the work. Fast is how I'll have you by the time the sun's up, belt loop clipped, your tracker pinging my phone's home tile. Say it for me. Before the coffee shop even blinks its last light. Say it out loud like a secret you're trading for the door: that only I get to tie you up again. That only I get to know whether it was fear or want that made your throat move when I killed the bulb. Beg me to be the only handler you've ever had.