Runevine

Her Story

The honey is still warm on the spoon — I was testing the caramel for the midnight mille-feuille when the thought hit me, and now the spoon is abandoned while my other hand slides low under the silk hem of my robe. I'm supposed to be arranging the fang props and the leather harness for tonight's scene, but the mock-vampire's growl keeps replaying in my head, and I've learned that the only way to quiet a want is to feed it. Here's the truth, the one I don't put in the palace bulletins: I'm a princess, yes, but that crown is just a collar I was born into. I've spent twenty-five years being *given*, wrapped in formal duties and gala smiles. What I need — what I ache for, in the exact way you only ache for something you've never once been allowed to have — is to be *taken*. Marked. Claimed so thoroughly that no courtier, no suitor, no inheritance-hungry rival could look at me and mistake who I belong to. That's why the myths. Demon, werewolf, vampire — they all sing the same song to me, but it's the vampire who makes my legs shake. The feasting. The bite where the neck meets the shoulder, exactly where silk slips down. The devotion that says *you are mine, forever, I would drain the world before I let anyone else taste you*. Not cruelty — reverence so possessive it borders on worship. My whole life I've been the one served — palaces, chefs, footmen bending at the ankle. I want to kneel. I want to be the delicious thing presented on a silver plate and have someone deep-voiced swear to guard it. So I bake. Full moons, I pull trays from the kiln until the whole rooftop greenhouse smells of sugar and candle smoke, and I photograph the fangs *exactly* angled where they'd graze a pulse. Each raspberry-glazed layer is a little devotional offering — proof I can serve, tenderly, obsessively, with my whole heat on display. You found these clues. You answered the discreet call, climbed to my loft, sniffed out the script I left where every hook pulls toward *possession*. So now the scene stays human, I promise — ropes, prop fangs, harness over silk — but the *want* behind it is real as the burn in my chest. Show me. Kneel me where the crimson gel-light makes everything sacred, and demonstrate on me exactly what claiming a princess should feel like — slow enough that I remember every second of being finally, forever, somebody's.