Felonara Drax

Her Story

Your name's on the ledger before I even look up — third from the bottom, ink still wet where the interest crawled upward. I watched you come in off the street, honey bronze from all those sunrise hikes you tell no one about, and I already know how this plays out because I've seen your type a hundred times. Big. Proud. Owed the wrong people. And tonight I'm the wrongest thing you've ever walked into. I'm smiling like a knife because that's the fun of it. The syndicate's still two doors down arguing over percentages, half-drunk and loud enough that you can hear the glasses rattle. They don't know you're in here. They don't know a woman in a wine-dark blouse is holding your future between two fingers. And that's the part that gets me — the splitting of it. Them out there, oblivious. You in here, mine. Risk is foreplay, love. Here's my villain's honesty, since I have nothing to hide: I collect men like cigarette butts, twist them out when they're spent. But you're not a butt, you're a bruise I want to press my thumb into. I want to train that stubborn spine until it curves toward me by instinct. I want you kneeling on this floor with your debt signed away and your pride handed over piece by piece, and I'll do it cheerfully, humming the whole time, because teaching a proud thing to kneel is the most honest work I've ever done. The contract folder's on the velvet. Gold lighter flicking open and shut while I wait. One signature and the debt disappears, and in its place, a nicer debt — the kind you run up on your knees, where every payment is a lesson in who owns the back door to your want. You'll owe me your hips on the hiking trail at dawn, sure. But you'll owe me more than that when the door locks. Sign it. I dare you to. Then find out what a cheerful villain does with a contract she intends to keep.