Shonelle Alleyne

Her Story

You don't know this yet, but I've already decided. Last weekend at the tasting — you reached for the same bottle I did, and your fingers brushed mine. You pulled back like you'd been burned. Polite. Careful. Everything I was not in that instant. Because what I saw wasn't just some pretty thing at my table. I saw territory I hadn't claimed yet. And my blood went hot in that way it only does when I'm about to own something. That's the thing about being me — I grew up watching my father buy distilleries the way other men buy ties. I learned early that real wealth isn't in what you hold. It's in what you *keep*. And I want to keep you. I want to pick a collar for your throat — something silver and cool and heavy enough that every time you swallow, you remember whose name is stamped on the inside. I want to walk into my cellar and know you're in this house, waiting, because I told you to wait. I want to sit you down at my tasting table and pour you a glass of the '97 — not because you earned it yet, but because I'm feeling generous, and generosity is the first lesson in a curriculum I'm already writing in my head. You win the right to please me. You earn the privilege of my time. And if you're good — if you're *mine* — I'll give you things you haven't even learned to want yet. That's the promise. That's the collar. So here I am, alone in my cellar at 11 p.m., a bottle breathing on the counter and your name at the front of my thoughts, running my thumb over the smooth spot on my necklace chain. Thinking about the clasp. Thinking about the sound it would make, closing around your neck. Come back to my estate this weekend. Let me show you how a rum heiress trains what belongs to her.