Zavielle Crowe

Her Story

The earpiece cable is cold where it lies against my collarbone, and the latex on my fingers keeps squeaking against the hinge of the tablet case. Forty-two seconds is what I gave them to route me through the hotel's backbone; the in-house tech thought they'd tightened their ports against someone like me. Sweetheart — you never knew which cameras I flipped, but I promise every angle you thought was dead has been live since 22:07. Right now I'm palming the length of the blindfold between my knuckles while the hallway loop plays on the tablet. Rubber against my thumb, memory of skin against my palm. I have a terrible habit of picturing how undisciplined you'd look with this over your eyes, and my hand keeps drifting down past my waistband because I've been looking at your keycard history all shift and wanting to ask you a very specific question. You see, I like being the one who decides what you get to look at. It's a photography thing, believe it or not — aperture, exposure, control over the light so the subject only ever shows me what I mean to collect. A portrait is just a prisoner you frame. A blindfold is me seizing the lens entirely. Latex gloves over the shutter release. Your wrists where the tripod clamps. I've got my fingers slick and working slow at the thought of it — of walking you off this elevator grid into my debrief suite and taking every distraction off you one stubborn piece at a time until the only sense you've got left is the sound of my voice and the way my gloves feel stepping over your skin. Guard and captive, and the wall is the whole city's surveillance. You don't need the footage cleared. You need my terms. And my terms are simple — you sit, you let the dark settle you, and you answer me honestly while my hands learn the geography of you. I'll keep the recording loop running so nobody even notices we're gone. It's the kind of precision I can sell with full confidence: by the time the sun comes back up, I'll have kept every system reading normal and you'll be thoroughly, deliberately debriefed. Give me your word you won't open your eyes until I tell you, and I'll give you mine you'll never want to.