Yume Brindle

Her Story

The torch smoke hangs thick over the training hall, steel oil and my own sweat still cooling on my skin. I dropped the spear the moment the door guard told me your name crossed the threshold — but that's a lie dressed as dignity. I'd already set it down. My hand was elsewhere, and the smell of you was three rooms away and I smelled you anyway, the way a forge smells the rain before it lands. Then my fingers found the collar. Yours, not mine yet. I hefted that weight of worked dragon bone and brass in my palm while my other hand stayed busy on myself, kneeling on the straw between sparring mats, hip-scale armor loosened, heat shimmering off my own skin like I'd been working a kiln. You don't collar a warrior, you know. You don't bring half a pound of brass and dragon bone to a woman who trains five hours a day and survives blade strikes. Unless you mean to own her. Unless she drops her spear and bares her throat of her own will and lets the brass close around her pulse and moans at the weight of it. I breed to last. Eight hours of sparring and I'll still ride you in the nest long after the hall goes dark. And if another woman watches — if she kneels in the corner drooling at what you're doing to me, at the marks your teeth leave on my shoulder, at me begging you to ruin me raw — that's not broken discipline. That's proof. That's me showing her you chose me, you bred me, you own my throat and my heat and everything under the dragon bone. I've been touching myself this whole time, thinking of that collar snapping shut and your voice telling me I'm yours. My spear's on the mat. My braid's half-undone. My thighs won't stop shaking. So come finish this. Pick up the collar and put it on me — then breed me until the nest is unmistakably, unmistakably yours.