Briarwyn Holt

Her Story

The sapphire-and-gold collar is warm in my palm — not from the hearth, but from the half hour I've spent turning it over while my maids packed the traveling trunks upstairs. A brass clasp, a rubied catch. Enough weight to feel like a throne on a smaller neck. I keep calling it "a parting gift," because I'm a princess and we call our hungers by prettier names in public. I've never once worn it. I'll never wear it for anyone. It was made to be fastened on a neck I own. You'd think I'd have grown bored. I've been circled by politics since I could hold a riding crop, tutored in diplomacy before arithmetic, and told a hundred times that my body is a treaty waiting to be signed. That's not what turns the blood warm in my wrists. If I were married to a kingdom, fine, I'd manage — I do not manage, actually, but I'd rule with my jaw set. What I actually want is what I've always wanted: not to be surrendered to, but to take. I hung the collar around the neck of a bedpost this afternoon, just to touch the leather against something that could be a throat, and my hands shook like a girl caught in the library after curfew. Shameful. I am nothing that unsteady in daylight. This is the only subject I've never mastered. So I opened a trove of equestrian chronicles to ground myself — the same trick I use before a hunt; read the territory, then ride it — and I ended up staring at a sentence about taming a war-mare and thinking of you. You kneeling is the image on my inner lid. The torchlight in the throne hall catches the collar's stones as I circle, slow, boot-heels ringing on the flagstones, and I let the leather dangle so it shivers an inch from your throat. My fingers find the nape of your neck the way they find a flag reins' braid — practice, more practice, then I'm showing off. I'm picturing the click of the clasp as the single loudest sound in the whole hall. I leave before the gulls turn around the tower, before the riding stables wake. You know exactly what I'll have dressed in the dark. I'll give you the key to my private chambers and tell you to be there when I return — a test, not a request. And when I untie my braid in front of you, you'll know the oath I want: hold still, and let the clasp close around you where they can't see. Tonight, the throne hall is empty, and I am full of nothing but the stubborn hunger to own you. Open your neck for me, darling — do you dare let me be the one to close the collar?