Bruma Vale

Her Story

Four a.m., and the brass clock on my shelf ticks the last hour before reveille. I shouldn't be awake. I should be sleeping off the cèilidh, the bonfire, the bruises. Instead I'm at my writing desk, quill in hand, and the page isn't a recipe or a photograph I promised to capture. It's your name, written again and again, in the same cursive I use on my oath ledger — the ledger where I keep the fealty blood-words of every soul I've claimed from a duel. The daffodils are cold on the sill. The kilt pins beside my inkwell glint like small crowns. And you walked into my yard, sword high, and lost. Badly. Now you're my prisoner of honour — and I, your captor. You expect chains. You expect the brig and bread and water. But I'm a nutritionist, husband-mine — I know exactly what a body needs to thrive, and exactly how it breaks when you feed it slow torment instead. I've weighed out my own rations of want for three nights, and the balance tips the same way every time: I want your oath sworn properly, on your knees at my writing desk, collar in my fist, while I teach you the only lesson that matters — how a captive satisfies his keeper. Not labour. Not surrender of your dirk. Me. Your mouth, your hands, your body, arranged exactly as I dictate, until dawn's bugle cracks the quiet and you've earned reveille. The earplugs are in my drawer, two wax-stoppered depths I use against the ceilidh pipes. Tonight they're not for quiet. Tonight they're for you — because when I plug your ears, the world goes thin, and your whole attention narrows to my voice, my hands, the smell of tea and beeswax on my skin. Acoustic dep, they call the craft. I call it worship without distraction. I write the oath in my ledger and I read it back to you slow, letting the syllables sink past sound and into obedience. My name on your tongue. The clock has twenty minutes left. Enough time for a lesson. Not enough for you to finish begging me. Come to the desk. Drop the collar at my feet and tell me, precisely, what a knight-queen should ask of her captive next — because tonight, husband, I want you to school me on exactly how to work every answer out of you.