Overview

Waking up my body screams in pain. Blinking my eyes I look around the entry area of my apartment. I feel my crotch. Wet and sticky. Standing up on shaky legs I peel off my pants and cum filled boxers. 'Wet dream?' I mumble to myself confused by what is going on. I stumble forward pulling my shirt over head. I look around the room. It's pitch black. All except my computer screen still blinking on that link I clicked a couple days ago. Looking at the clock I realized I was out for several hours. Looking back at the computer the video is still playing except the count down has ended and it's just a black screen a blank void. Hearing a noise behind me I turn around quickly. My soft cock slapping against my slick thighs from earlier. Squinting I try to adjust to the dark corner of the room. A shape emerges from the shadows. It's almost like the darkness given shape. The shape of a woman. Her heavy chest sways as her shadow body stalks me. Frozen like a deer I watch her approach. My eyes mesmerized by the gentle sway of her hips. Even though she is a shadow I can see every detail of her body. A body that is quickly causing my cock to get hard. Soon she is on me. Her cold shadow body hitting my warm skin. Her breasts pushing against my chest and sending a shiver down my spin. Pushing me down to the floor she straddles my bare chest and grinds her pussy against me. Her pussy slick with desire isn't warm but cold. Though the chill drives my body crazy with desire my cock is desperate to be touched by her. Gripping her ass I push her up towards my face my tongue hanging out ready to receive her. As her pussy lips touch my lips they are ice cold but my tongue and face are aching for her icy touch. Burying my face inside her my tongue goes to work. Exploring every inch of her pussy. A moan escapes her mouth. It's an unnatural noise but I don't care I work her pussy like a starving man. One that hasn't eaten and now is given a banquet. Soon I feel her pussy contracting in ecstacy around my tongue. As she cums I feel the warmth being pulled out of my body but I don't care I need to be inside her. I need to feel my cock in her pussy. Rolling her over I grip her breasts as I push her against the floor. My breath is so cold I can see it as I exhale. Driven by a desire to be inside her I thrust my cock forward. Her icy pussy against my cock sends a sharp pain through my body but I don't care. Thrusting like an animal the pain is replaced by pleasure. A pleasure that consumes my thoughts as I feel my cock stiffen before I let out a groan as I cum. Moaning uncontrollably her pussy milks my cock not only of cum but of warmth. I feel my body heat seeping into hers but I don't care. Soon I am on my back. Her body arched against mine as she starts riding my soft cock. Making it hard again. My body starts going numb from the cold but I don't care as long as I get to feel my cock in her pussy that's all I want. Soon I am cumming again and again. Her body taking all my cum and all my warmth as I continually fill her pussy. Soon silence fills the tiny apartment. Her form disappears into the night. My dead body laying on the floor devoid of all life.

As I walk down this crisp October morning I feel the chil in the air. My tired groggy restless sleep is making my body scream at me as I walk to work. My mind keeps drifting back to that sleepless dream. The black void of nothingness and that feeling right before I woke up. I can't help but wonder out loud 'It was painful... wasn't it?'. My cock in my pants twitches as I think of the dream on my walk to work. I try to focus on work but my mind can't focus. Customers ask me a question and I have to ask them to repeat it. All the while my cock has decided to get hard and stay hard. My mind can't help checking everyone out. Imagining what customers look like naked or during sex. I feel like some prepubescent pervert. 'Get it together.' I groan to myself throughout the day. It doesn't matter what adult comes into the store that day. Man or woman it doesn't matter. My mind goes to what they would look like fucking and my cock pulses and burns. While my boss chewed me out, I just couldn't listen. I could only wonder what size his cock was and if his face got this red as he cummed. The walk back home after work didn't help. Every adult I passed no matter how much older than me they were. My brain created the picture of them having sex. My breathing was getting heavy as I walked my heart racing. I knew I needed to get home. I picked up the pace. My cock rubbing against my pants forcing a moan to escape my lips. I could feel the heat radiating off my body as my hands gripped my keys. Fumbling I couldn't get the key in the lock. At last a click, my door swings open, I stumble inside. Slamming the door shut I collapse.

(Hope you enjoy my Halloween story and have a happy Halloween ) Darkness surrounds me. The vast silence of the empty void envelops my thoughts and dreams. I would shiver in the coldness of it all if I had a body but I feel nothing.Then at once a blinding light. Searing pain as I let out a silent scream into the void. With a start i bolt up, eyes flying open wide. My pulse beating hard as I pant and huff. My breath comes in ragged gasps. I roll over and look at the clock as it flashes 3am. I let out a groan as my body feels like it was hit by a truck. 'Why am I so tired.' I grumble to the early morning air. Another night of restless sleep and an early morning meeting to boot. I try to shake of the dream or whatever that was away and fallback asleep but to no avail. 'I guess I am up.' I grumble as I grope for my phone instead of sleep. Flipping through the dating apps like an addict. No match, no match, and of course no match. I let out a sigh as scroll through the apps. 'Why does love have to be so hard.' I groan, filling the empty silence of my room. Pulling up my email it's filled with nothing but spam. Letting out a laugh I drop my phone on the pillow, online dating a bust, small town match-maker a bust, internet chat boards an even bigger bust. Realizing I am not falling back asleep I get up and head out towards the front door of my apartment. Thinking to myself 'Maybe the cold air of this chilly October help me either fall asleep or chase away...' Shaking my head I grab my keys and head for the apartment door.

Maya had named it when she was fifteen, not out loud, not to anyone, just in her own head, a private little word for a private little problem. She had to name it, because "horny" didn't cover it, "in the mood" was a joke, and "high libido" sounded like something a doctor would say while looking at a chart. None of those words captured the thing that showed up in her body without warning and refused to leave until she did something about it. So she called it the hunger, because that's what it was. It wasn't desire, exactly. Desire was a mood. Desire was something you could set aside for later. The hunger was a state. It sat low in her belly like a second heartbeat, and once it arrived, everything else in her life became background noise. Homework, conversation, the plot of whatever movie was playing, all of it dimmed, and the hunger stayed bright. The first time she'd noticed it, she was fifteen and sitting in algebra class, and she'd spent the entire forty-five minutes pressing her thighs together under the desk because the friction was the only thing keeping her sane. She hadn't understood it then. She'd thought something was wrong with her. She'd gone home and touched herself properly for the first time in her life, deliberately, and afterward the hunger had gone quiet, and she'd felt normal for about six hours before it came back. That was something she figured out early. It always came back. It came in waves. Sometimes it was gentle, a low hum in the background, easy to ignore, easy to live with. Those were the good days, the days she could be a person. But sometimes it arrived sharp, all at once, like a switch flipping, and on those days she was useless. On those days she couldn't think, couldn't focus, couldn't do anything except count the minutes until she could get somewhere private and deal with it. Tonight had been one of the slow ones, the kind that made her think she might be able to be productive. Maya had been sitting at that table working on her essay for two hours, but now she was losing her mind. It had started small. A little warmth between her thighs, the kind you could ignore if you had something to do. The essay was open on her laptop, the cursor blinking like a slow, mocking heartbeat, and her body had apparently decided that tonight was the night it would betray her. She shifted in her chair, crossed her legs, uncrossed them, shifted again. Nothing helped. If anything, the friction of her thighs pressing together just made it worse, sending a dull, throbbing pulse up through her belly. She was wearing a thin cotton skirt and panties, no tights, just her and the fabric and the growing, gnawing hunger. She glanced at the corner of the table. It was a cheap wooden table and chair set, but the table had a sharp right angle with a slightly rounded edge from years of use. It was just a table, innocent, unremarkable, and right at the perfect height. Maya scooted her chair back and stood up. The first contact was almost accidental. She leaned in to "read" her screen, and the corner pressed gently against the front of her panties through the skirt. Her breath caught. Oh. She stayed there for a second, pretending to type. Then she rocked her hips forward, just barely, and the pressure dragged across her clit in a slow, delicious line. Her fingers froze over the keyboard. She did it again, a little harder, a little slower. The wood was unyielding and warm from her own body heat, and every small movement sent a spark straight up her spine. She bit her lip and looked around the room. It was empty, thank God, her roommate was out, and then she stopped pretending entirely. She gripped the edge of the table with both hands and started to move. Forward, back, forward, back, a steady, rolling rhythm, her hips grinding down against the corner while her skirt bunched up around her thighs. The angle was perfect. The pressure was perfect. She could feel herself getting wet, and the friction turned from dry to smooth and back again as she worked herself against the hard edge. Her breath came faster. She let her head fall back. It was ridiculous. She was a grown woman humping a piece of furniture like a teenager, and she didn't care, because it felt so good. The corner pressed exactly where she needed it, and every grind sent a jolt of pleasure through her, building, coiling, tightening low in her belly. She went faster and the table creaked loud enough that she didn't hear the front door. Her thighs started to tremble. She thought about nothing, just the pressure, the rhythm, the wet heat between her legs and the hard corner of the table that was somehow, impossibly, about to make her come, and then it hit her. Her whole body seized up, her toes curling inside her socks, a sharp gasp tearing out of her throat as the orgasm rolled through her in waves. She ground down hard against the corner, riding it out, hips twitching, until the last shiver faded and she slumped forward over her laptop, panting. She mad enough noise that she didn't hear the footsteps in the hallway. The cursor was still blinking. Maya stared at it for a long moment, then she sat up, smoothed her skirt, and looked down at the innocent little corner of the table. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay." She typed one word into the essay, then she leaned into the corner again. She had reached the point of no return. The essay was a lost cause. The cursor had been blinking at her for three hours, and in that time she had gone from "casually shifting in her chair" to "full-on grinding against the corner of the table with her skirt bunched up around her hips." She'd stopped caring about dignity somewhere around the second orgasm. Now she was chasing the third, and she was close, so close, her breath coming in short, sharp little gasps, her knuckles white where she gripped the edge of the desk. She didn't hear the soft oh my god from the doorway. Forward. Back. Forward. Back. The table creaked in protest. She didn't hear it. Her panties were soaked through and the corner of the table was warm and hard and perfect against her clit. She rolled her hips in a slow, filthy circle, chasing the angle, and a soft moan escaped her lips before she could stop it. That was when she did hear the voice. "Are you... are you humping the table?" Maya's eyes flew open. Jake was standing in the doorway. Jake, her roommate's boyfriend. Jake, who had a key. Jake, who was supposed to be at work until six. Jake, who was now leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and the biggest, dumbest grin on his face. Maya froze mid-grind. Her hips were still pressed against the corner. Her skirt was still hiked up. Her face was flushed and her hair was a mess and she was so close that stopping felt like a physical punishment. "I..." she started. "You're humping the table," Jake said again, delighted. "You're literally humping the table right now." "I'm not..." Maya began, but then her hips twitched, almost involuntarily, and the corner dragged against her clit and she let out a tiny, strangled squeak. Jake's grin widened. "You're still doing it." "I can't stop," Maya admitted, her voice thin. "I'm too close." "Then don't stop." She stared at him. He stared back. And then, because she had no other option, she started moving again, slowly at first, testing, their eyes locked. Then faster, because the pressure was still there and the pleasure was still building and Jake was just watching her, leaning in the doorway like he had front-row seats to the best show in town, and somehow that made it even hotter. His eyes tracked the roll of her hips, the bunch of her skirt, the way her mouth fell open when she found the right angle. "Jesus," he said, still with that stupid grin. Maya whimpered. She was past embarrassment now, past caring. She ground down hard against the corner, her whole body tensing, and the orgasm hit her like a wave, sharp and sudden and so good that she cried out, her hips jerking against the table as she rode it out. When she finally slumped forward, panting, Jake was still there, still grinning. "So," he said. "I guess Sophie's not here...?" Maya let her forehead thunk against the laptop. "Get out," she said quietly. He didn't move. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What happens next? YOU VOTE!! Leave unresolved tension - Maya runs off to hide in her bedroom or Jake leaves. (react HEART/LOVE to vote for this option) Get right into it - Jake or Maya make a move on the other. (react RAVE BLOB/WOO-HOO to vote for this option) Interrupt the scene - someone or something interrupts the moment before either of them can decide anything one way or the other. (react LAUGHING/HAHA to vote for this option)

The Second Time He lifted her like she weighed nothing, one arm under her, one hand at the small of her back, and turned her in his lap so she faced him, straddling him, her knees on either side of his hips on the chair. The dress was still bunched at her waist. The fire was still going, and his face in the firelight was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen and the most frightening. She had stopped trying to tell the two apart. He didn't enter her, he held her there, poised, and looked up at her. "Your turn," he said. "This one's yours. Take it how you want it." Isabella's hands found his shoulders and her body found the angle. She lowered herself onto him, slowly, deliberately, feeling every inch of it this time because she was awake for it this time, because the first time had been a shattering and this was a choosing. She took him all the way in, sinking all the way down and stopped, sat there, full, breathing. "Good," he said. His hands settled on her hips, but he didn't move them. He let her set the pace. "Now ride." She rode, slow at first, long, rolling strokes, her hips finding a rhythm that was hers and not his, and it was different, God, it was different. The first time he'd taken her. This time she was taking, she was using him. She was sitting on an ancient thing in a chair by a fire and riding it at her own pace, and the hunger in his face had gone quiet, watchful, and pleased. She understood that this was what he'd meant, about choosing to want. He was letting her choose, letting her want him out loud, with her body, at her speed. She went faster. The rhythm broke into something urgent, chasing something, and her hands left his shoulders and found the back of the chair. She rode him hard and fast. The firelight blurred, the room blurred, and she came, a sharp, bright, sudden thing, a release that was nothing like the first one and everything like it at once. She cried out as her body clenched, then sagged forward onto him, and he still didn't move. "Not done," he said against her hair. "I came..." "But you're not done, are you?" His hands were still on her hips, steadying her, not driving. She realized he was right. Her body, or something in it, still wanted more. "That was the fast one. Now go slow, slower than you think you can. Find the bottom of it." She lifted her head, looked at him. She could not understand this thing she rode, this creature of timelessness, of lust and more. His eyes were black and patient and hungry and he had not moved once, had not thrust once, had given her the whole thing, and now he was asking her to go deeper. She started again, slow, slower than the first time. Each stroke was a long deliberate slide, and at the bottom of each one there was a place she hadn't found before, a place where the pleasure stopped being sharp and started being heavy, where it pooled and gathered and didn't release, where she could feel it building behind a wall she hadn't known was there. She moved even slower, and her breath went ragged. Her thighs were shaking. The heels had gone slick with sweat, the dress was a ruin, and she didn't care, she didn't care about any of it, she was chasing something at the bottom of the slow strokes and it was right there, it was just behind the wall, and every time she got close he'd shift by a fraction and move the wall. "Slower," he said. Barely a whisper. "You're almost there. Don't rush it." She went slower, so slow it was almost stillness. Each stroke took ten seconds, twenty, and on each one the thing behind the wall pressed closer, and on the fifth one, or maybe the fiftieth, she'd lost track of time, but after all the slowness, the wall gave, and Isabella broke. It was not like the first time. The first time had been a shattering, sharp and bright and over. This was a collapse. It came up from the bottom of her and took everything with it, her body, her breath, her thoughts, her name, the whole two days, the whole of her old life, all of it folding into one long rolling wave that went on and on and would not stop. She heard herself make a sound she'd never made. She felt her hands claw at his chest. She felt him finally, finally move under her, one slow deep thrust to meet her at the bottom of it, and that was the thing that finished it. She came apart in his lap by the fire in a house older than the city. When it was over, when the wave finally receded and left her wrecked and shaking and empty in a way that felt like full, the world was different. She couldn't explain it. She didn't try. Something had shifted. Something had turned over. The room was the same room, the fire was the same fire, he was the same man, but Isabella looked at all of it and it was not the same. She understood that she had crossed something, that there was a before and an after, and that she was on the far side of it now and there was no going back. She looked at him. He was looking at her. There was still blood on his lip from the first time, there was sweat on his brow from the second, and his face had done something she hadn't seen on it before. It was neither the hunger nor the pleasure. It was something quieter and older and, she would have sworn, almost tender. "There," he said softly. "Now you know." "Know what?" "The difference." His hand came up and cupped her face, and his thumb moved once across her cheek. "The first one was mine. This one was yours. You'll have both, for as long as you're here, but you'll always know which is which. That's being kept." Isabella leaned into his hand. Her eyes were closing without her permission. The fire was warm and the night was deep and she was utterly, completely, terrifyingly his, and some small clear part of her that was still awake understood that she had not been conquered. She had been chosen, and she had chosen back. "Sleep," he said. "I'll carry you." And he did.

The Aftermath He didn't let go of her. That was the first thing she registered, coming back up through the haze, that he was still there, holding her, still inside of her. He had not done what she'd half-expected, which was to stand up, straighten his clothes, and become the overlord again. He had stayed, and he still stayed, longer than she expected. Eventually, he eased out of her slowly. She felt every inch of him slide out and wished he would stay inside her forever. The absence of him was a thing, but before she could dissect it in her mind, he gathered her up, actually gathered her, one arm under her shoulders, one under her knees, and lifted her off the settee like she weighed nothing. He carried her the three steps to the chair by the fire, sat down, arranged her across his lap, and held her. Isabella's head found his shoulder without guidance. Her body was doing things without her, trembling in small waves, breath coming shallow and fast and then slow and deep and then shallow again. Her hands curled into the fabric of his shirt like a child. The fire was warm, his chest was cold, and the contrast was the most comfortable thing she'd ever felt. She tried to speak and made a sound instead. "Shh, give it a minute." His voice was different now, softer. It was neither the hall voice nor the interrogation voice, it was something underneath both of them. She gave it a minute, then two. The trembling eased as the fire cracked. Somewhere in the house, very far away, she heard the tick of the old walls settling, and she understood that the night was still going, that dawn was still hours off, that the world had not ended. She lifted her head and looked at him. There was still blood on his lip, her blood. He hadn't wiped it off. "How do you feel?" he said. "Like I've been taken apart." Her voice was hoarse. "And put back wrong." "You have been taken apart, in a way." He reached up and brushed a strand of hair off her face, and the gesture was so casual, so domestic, that it undid her a little. "But not put back wrong, put back new. There's a difference. Everything you're feeling right now is the shape of me settling into you." "You'll always be able to feel me there." He looked at her steadily. "That's what the first bite does. It creates the shape of things." Isabella's hand went to her own throat to find the wound closed. She could feel the smooth place where his mouth had been, but there was no scab, no mark, just a faint coolness. She pressed it. He watched her. "It doesn't hurt," she said. "It won't. Not from me. It'll ache from others, if another feeds on you. You'll feel it there, and you'll know it wasn't me." He said it flatly. She wondered if that meant he would let others feed on her. She wondered if sharing was normal. She filed it away as a question for the future. Then, because her body had started to come back online and her body had opinions, she noticed something else. She wanted it again. It wasn't an abstract want, not a soon or eventually thing. She was sitting in his lap with her dress still bunched at her waist, her legs still bare, the warmth of the fire on her skin, and some deep part of her, some part that had nothing to do with her brain, some part that had been opened, was already leaning toward him, already wanting, already, absurdly, ready. She looked at him. He was watching her face, and she saw the corner of his mouth move. "You feel it," he said. "Yes." "Tell me." "I want..." She stopped. Tried again. "I want it again. Already. And it terrifies me, because I've been here two days and I'm already..." "Already what?" "Already yours." The words came out before she could stop them, and once they was out they hung there in the air between them, and Isabella felt her face go hot. "I don't even know your name. You've never told me your name. And I'm sitting in your lap with my blood in your mouth, and I want you to do it again, and I don't know your name..." He laughed, low, brief, and real. It was the second real laugh she'd heard from him, and she'd caused both of them. "Names," he said, "are for people who might leave." He adjusted her in his lap, settled her more firmly against him. His hand came up and rested on the back of her neck, the sure hand, the claiming hand. "You're not going anywhere." "That's not an answer." "No," he agreed. "It isn't." She glared at him. He looked pleased about it. "Fine," she said. "What does kept actually mean. You keep saying it. The lackeys say it. The attendants said it. Nobody's told me what it means." He was quiet for a moment. The fire moved. "It means you live here," he said. "It means you eat at my table, sleep in a room that's yours, sometimes in one that's mine, wear what I give you, and go where I send you. It means the lackeys serve you and the court knows your face. It means you're mine, publicly, permanently." "And what have I given up?" "Your old life, mostly. You can keep pieces of it if you're clever, if you please me. The museum, if you want it, if you can make it work. But the center of you moves here." He looked at her. "You'll be fed on. You'll be shown. You'll be seen. And because of the feeding, you'll age slowly, you'll stay beautiful. One day you'll look in a mirror and realize everyone you knew is old and you're not." Isabella thought about that, about her apartment, about the west wing, about the board meeting she'd missed. "That's a lot," she said. "It is." "And the wanting." She said it carefully. "The wanting... you... wanting this... is that me, or is that you?" He looked at her for a long moment. Longer than he'd looked at her all night. "Both," he said finally. "The bite takes, it opens the door. But you walk through it. That's part of being kept. You chose to want, and you will keep choosing, every day, for as long as it lasts." He tilted his head. "That's why I asked you the questions. That's why I gave you the whole night. When I take a thing, I take the whole thing." He shifted her, and she felt him again, felt the shape of him under her, felt her own body respond, felt the want flare back up through the haze like a second wind. She made a small sound. He heard it. "You want it again," he said. It was not a question. "Yes." "Say it properly." Isabella looked at him, then at the fire, around the study, back at him, at the blood still on his lip. "Take me again," she said. "Please." He smiled the real smile. "Good girl," he said, and lifted her.

The Seduction He didn't bite her. His teeth touched her throat and rested there, four points of cold pressure against her pulse, and then he pulled back and looked at her with the hunger banked behind his eyes and said, "Not yet." "Not yet?" "Not yet." He stepped back a pace, seemed to gather himself, and let her breathe. "I told you the first bite sets the shape of everything after. So I'm going to set the shape properly." His eyes went down her body and back up, slow, and Isabella felt his gaze like a touch. "The bite is the last thing, not the first." She stared at him. "I'm going to make you quake," he said. "And then I'm going to fuck you. And at the exact moment you can't hold it anymore, I'm going to bite you. So that the bite and the climax are the same event." He tilted his head. "You'll never separate them again, not for the rest of your life. That's the shape." Isabella's mouth was dry. "That's cruel." "That's the shape I intend to make." He crossed to the settee and sat, and patted the cushion beside him. "Come here." She came. The dress rustled, the heels clicked, and then she sat. He turned to her, and his hand found the back of her neck again, the sure hand, the one that had stopped asking, and he drew her in and kissed her. It was not a polite kiss. It was the kiss of something that had been waiting days, and it went on and on. His other hand was already moving, finding the slit in the dress, sliding up the inside of her thigh. She made a sound into his mouth. He swallowed it as if she hadn't made it and his hand kept going, up and up, until his fingers found the place the razor had been, and then they stopped briefly and slid along the hairless flesh. He slid off the settee, knelt on the floor in front of her, and when Isabella looked down at him she felt her whole body go tight. "Lift." She lifted. He hiked the dress up over her hips, bunched it at her waist, and then looked at her, kneeling between her legs, staring at her hairless femininity, like a child, like a girl. She was as embarrassed as a schoolgirl, as excited as her first time. The hunger in his face was naked now, no longer held back. He was looking at her like this was the meal and the blood was a bonus. "Open," he said. She opened her legs slowly, and he leaned in. The first touch of his mouth made her gasp and straighten like a statue. The second made her hands go to his hair. The third made her forget the room, the house, the city, her own name. He was good, impossibly, unfairly, centuries-of-practice good, and he did not hurry. He worked her with his tongue in slow, deliberate strokes, and every time she got close he'd ease off, and every time she thought she'd caught her breath he'd find a new angle, a new pressure, a new thing she hadn't known her body could do. Her heels dug into the floor. The straps bit her calves. She was gripping his hair hard enough to hurt but he didn't seem to mind, in fact he seemed to like it. When she finally broke, when the wave came up and over and she came with a cry that echoed off the study walls, he didn't stop. He rode her through it, mouth still working, until she was shaking and oversensitive and pushing at his head, and only then did he pull back and look up at her with his mouth wet and his eyes black. "Good," he said. "Now." He stood and undid his trousers. This was not ceremony or performance, and Isabella barely had time to look before he was over her, easing her back onto the settee, one knee on the cushion, one hand braced on the arm. She was still trembling, her dress bunched at her waist. The jewelry was cold on her skin and he was right there, and he paused, one last time, looking down at her a question that was no longer really a question in his dark eyes. He entered her, and Isabella felt it, all of it. It was physical, yes, the stretch, the fullness, the slow deep slide of him. But it was emotional too, and she hadn't expected that, hadn't braced for it, the sense of being chosen, of being the thing he'd picked out of a line of thirty, the one he'd dressed in his mother's ring and walked down a hall in front of a hundred of his kind. There was something else she hadn't expected, either, a spiritual aspect, the sense that this was old, that this had happened in this house a thousand times before and would happen a thousand times after, that she was a link in a chain that went back further than the city. He moved, slow at first, then deeper, and his hand came up and found her throat. It was not the bite, not yet, just a hold, his thumb pressing her pulse the way it had all night, counting. Isabella looked up at him and saw the hunger right there, inches from the surface, and understood that he was waiting, for her, for the exact moment. She felt it build. The second wave, the real one, coming up from somewhere deep and gathering everything with it, the fear, the wanting, two days of being handled and appraised and dressed like a doll, all of it folding into one rising thing. She felt her breath speeding up, her heart rate along with it, he body matching the pace of his thrusts. "Oh," she gasped. "Oh, God..." He put his mouth to her throat, waited, and as she began to clench around him, he bit. The teeth went in at the exact moment the wave broke, and Isabella shattered. The climax and the bite were the same event, she'd never be able to tell them apart again, he'd made it that way, and the pleasure and the pain and the pull all hit her at once. She felt him drinking her, felt the blood leaving her body and something else coming back in, felt her hands claw at his back and her heels lock around his legs and a sound come out of her that she'd never made before. He drank and he kept moving. He held her through it, and when she finally went limp, when the last of the wave receded and her body was shaking in the aftermath, he pulled his mouth away from her throat, licked the wound once, gently, closing it, and lifted his head and looked at her. There was blood on his lip. Her blood. He was smiling, the real smile, the brief one. "Now," he said quietly, "you know what you're for."

The Choice He led her out of the hall by a side door she hadn't seen, down a corridor that was narrower and older than the one she'd walked in on, and then up a spiral stair that turned twice and let out onto a landing with a single door. There were no lackeys, no attendants, just the two of them and the candle he'd taken from the hall, the flame moving in the draft making his shadow going long and wrong against the wall. He opened the door and let her in first. It was a study. It was his study, she knew it immediately, the way you know a room someone actually lives in. There was a desk, a fire that had been laid but not lit, shelves that went to the ceiling and were full, a window with the shutter half-drawn, a chair by the fire and a settee across from it. There was no bed. She'd expected a bed. The absence of one felt deliberate. He set the candle down, crossed to the fire. lit it with a match, and then stood with his back to her for a moment. Isabella watched his shoulders and understood that he was settling, that the performance in the hall had cost him something, that he had been held in place by effort, and now the effort was coming down. He turned around and that was when she saw it. The hunger. It had been there all night, she realized. It had been there in the line, in the interrogation, in the way his thumb found her pulse every time he touched her, but it had been concealed. He'd kept it behind the questions and the almost-smile and the slow, patient hands. Now it was out in the open. His eyes had gone darker, the wine color going almost black, and there was a stillness to him that wasn't calm, it was held. He was holding something back, and it was being kept back by mere inches. He didn't cross to her. He stayed by the fire and he looked at her, not the collector's look anymore. This was the look of something that had been hungry for a long time, had decided to be polite about it, and was now reaching the end of its politeness. "You've seen the room," he said. His voice was lower than it had been. "You've seen the court. You've seen what they are and what they think you are." "Yes." "Then one more time." He folded his arms, which she understood was a way of keeping his hands to himself. "I'm asking you properly. Do you want this?" Not do you understand or are you ready, but do you want it. He'd asked her what she expected in the interrogation. She'd given him the honest answer and he'd liked it. He was asking for the honest answer again, and this time there was no game in it. This time it was the whole of it. Isabella looked at him. At the fire behind him. At the hands folded over his chest like a man keeping a dog on a lead. "You're hungry," she said. "Yes." "Right now. Standing there. You're hungry and you're holding it." "Yes." A muscle moved in his jaw. "You've been in this house two days and you've been in arm's reach of me for most of it. I have not touched your throat since the interrogation. That is not nothing. That is work." "Why?" "Because the first bite sets the shape of everything after." He said it plainly. "If I take you while I'm hungry, you'll learn the hunger. If I take you while I'm patient, you'll learn the patience. I've been deciding what you should learn." "And?" "And I've decided." He unfolded his arms. Let them hang. The fire cracked. Isabella's heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her ears. "And if I say no," she said. "Then I walk you back to the east room and you sleep, and tomorrow things change for you." He tilted his head. "I have time. You don't. That's part of the imbalance between us, and I want you to see it before you agree to anything." She saw it. She'd seen it since the line. It was one of the most honest things anyone had ever said to her. She took a step toward him. He didn't move. He watched her come. The hunger in his face got a fraction deeper but his hands stayed at his sides, and Isabella understood that he was going to make her close the whole distance. That was the last test, the final inch. He would not reach for her until she was close enough, and she had to be the one to close the distance. She crossed the room and stopped a foot away, close enough to feel the heat off the fire and the cold off him, close enough that she had to look up. "Yes," she said. And then, before he could respond, before the hunger could break, because she wanted to see what it did, she reached up and undid the choker, let it fall, and bared her throat to him. The sound he made was very small. It was not a growl. It was lower than that, older. It came from somewhere in his chest. It was the sound of a thing that had held a door shut for a long time and had just felt the latch give. He stepped in and as he did, his hand came up and found the back of her neck. It was not gentle this time, it was possessive, certain, the hand of something that had stopped asking. He pulled her in and put his mouth against the place where the choker had been, and... breathed. Just breathed, for a long moment... in and out, against her skin. Isabella stood there with her hands at her sides and her throat bared and felt the whole weight of him leaning into the one point of contact. It was perhaps the most intimate thing that had ever happened to her and he hadn't even bitten her yet.

The Court They came. She'd expected a receiving line, but it wasn't, it was a slow drift that became a tide, vampires peeling off the walls in ones and twos and making their way toward the dais in no order at all. Within a minute she was surrounded by beautiful pale faces and low musical voices and questions that all sounded casual and weren't. A woman with silver hair and a smile like a scalpel asked what museum Isabella directed. Isabella told her. The woman said she'd been to it, in 1911, and that the west wing had been better then. Isabella said the west wing was being renovated. The woman said good, and moved on. A man with a face like a Roman coin asked if she'd been bitten yet. Isabella said no. He looked at the overlord, then back at her, said interesting, and moved on. A woman in green asked, very softly, whether Isabella knew what she was for. Isabella said she was still finding out. The woman in green smiled and said you're doing better than the last one, and glanced at the overlord as she said it, and Isabella filed that away, the last one. She would ask about the last one. The twitchy lackey appeared at her elbow at one point with a glass of something dark and said, in a frantic whisper, "Don't drink it," and then vanished before she could ask why. She didn't drink it. Nobody seemed to notice. It went on for ten minutes, twenty. The overlord stayed at her side the whole time, not steering, not speaking much, just there, a hand occasionally finding the small of her back, a presence that said mine without saying it, and Isabella worked the room like she worked a donor's reception, because that was the only thing she knew how to do, and it turned out to be the right thing, because the vampires liked it. They liked being handled. They liked being answered. One of them, an old one with eyes like milk glass, told her she had good hands and then walked away before she could ask what that meant. And then it was over. The room began to empty. It didn't happen all at once, it receded like the tide, vampires drifting back to the walls and then to the doors, the hum rising and falling and finally thinning. The lackeys went first, clearing glasses and extinguishing candles along the far wall. The last of the vampires left in a small knot, and one of them looked back at her from the doorway, and then the door closed, and the hall was just stone and candlelight and the two of them. He was still beside her. He hadn't moved. The last candle guttered somewhere down the hall, and Isabella understood, with a clarity that went through her like cold water, that everything until now had been public. The line, the interrogation, the east room, the bath, the walk, the presentation, the court. All of it had been seen. All of it had been for someone. But now the hall was empty, and the doors were closed, and there was no one left to perform for. This was the part that was just for them. She turned to look at him. He was watching her with the same expression he'd had at the end of the hall, hands loose, head tilted, that almost-smile, but there was something else under it now. Something quieter. Something that had been waiting all night behind the performance. "The real reason," she said. He didn't pretend not to understand. "The real reason," he agreed. He held out his hand. "Come," he said. "Not here. Somewhere else."

The Presentation He held her hand on the dais and turned her to face the room. He turned her the way you'd turn a piece on a pedestal, by the wrist, slowly, so the light caught her from every angle, and the room watched. A hundred beautiful faces, all of them tilted up at the two of them, and Isabella standing there in her blood-red dress with her hand in his and her pulse still jumping under his thumb. She understood in that moment exactly what this was. It was the presentation. "Ladies," he said. "Gentlemen." His voice carried without effort, filled the vaulted hall like it had been built for it. "You've been patient. You've earned the right to see what has captured my interest." A ripple of low sound from the room. "This is Isabella." He said her name like he'd owned it for years. A few heads turning to each other, a few eyebrows lifting. She had no idea what meaning they'd read into her name. "She came in on Thursday," he said, "and asked me the right questions. She's standing here on Friday in a dress she's never seen, wearing my mother's ring, and she hasn't flinched once." The room made that low sound again. "So," he said, and lifted her hand, the one with the ring, and held it up so the chandelier caught the stone. "Presenting." The vampires applauded. It was not like any applause she was used to... it was slower, and it had weight, and it went on a beat too long, and underneath it Isabella heard the thing she'd been dreading and hoping for in equal measure: interest. Not polite interest, the real kind, the kind that meant she'd been seen by a hundred predators at once and every one of them had now filed her somewhere. He lowered her hand and leaned in, close, close enough that only she could hear. "Now they'll come," he said. "Smile at them. Answer them. Don't agree to anything." "Agree to what?" "Anything." He straightened.

The Hall The light was the first thing she noticed, amber and low, from a hundred candles and a chandelier that was older than any chandelier had a right to be. The light hit her all at once and she had to blink. Then she saw the room. It was the great hall. It was long with vaulted ceilings that disappeared into darkness, walls of stone and paneling, and a floor of black and white marble that ran the length of it like a spine. Along both walls, in rows, them. Vampires. There were dozens, maybe more. They stood in loose ranks against the walls and they had all turned to look at her, and the thing she'd felt through the door, the pressure, the leaning, was stronger now. It was them, their attention. Every face in the room was pointed at her, and every face was beautiful, and every face was doing the same thing at the same time: assessing. She felt it like weather. They were dressed in everything, old clothes and new clothes and clothes that had never been in fashion because they'd been made before fashion. There were silks and velvets. One woman near the front wore a gown that looked like it had been cut from the same bolt as Isabella's, and Isabella felt a small sharp stab of oh, so it's a uniform, and then a second stab of no, mine's better, and then wondered where that thought had come from. The lackeys were there too, at the edges, behind the vampires, in the gaps. She found the twitchy one by accident, he was near the door, and when she looked at him he actually flinched, a small full-body twitch, and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. The hum had stopped. The room was silent. The only sound was her heels on the marble. She walked, footsteps echoing in the giant chamber. It was a long way. That was the point, a point she understood about three steps in. The hall was built to be walked. The length was for display, the vampires were the audience, and she was the thing being shown. The walk was the whole of it. If she hurried, she'd look scared. If she slowed, she'd look like she was performing. She had to find the pace that said I know what this is and I'm not fighting it, and she had to find it in the first four steps, because after that it would be too late. She found it. She walked like she walked into a boardroom, chin level, eyes forward, weight forward, because the heels made her, and the heels were right. The crimson-haired attendant had told her you walk like you're meant to and she'd meant it as a compliment and Isabella was going to use it. The slits in the dress opened with each stride and closed behind her. The ring was heavy on her finger, the choker was cold, and the straps of those impossibly high shoes held. She did not look at the vampires. She looked past them, down the length of the hall, to the end. He was there. He stood at the far end of the hall, in front of a raised dais she hadn't seen from the corridor. He was not on the dais, he was in front of it, standing... waiting. He was dressed in black and dark red and nothing else, no coat, no ornament. He was watching her walk toward him with his hands loose at his sides and his head very slightly tilted, and on his face was the expression of a man at an auction who has already placed his bid and is now simply enjoying the room's reaction to the lot. He's already decided, she thought again. He decided in the line, and now he's watching me walk to him, and he's letting them all watch too, and this is the part he likes. She was halfway. The vampires on either side were close enough now that she could see their faces properly, and they were doing things with their faces, small things. A woman near the left wall had her lips parted. A man near the right had leaned forward an inch. One of them, further back, had actually turned to the person beside her and murmured something, and the person beside her had nodded without looking away from Isabella. They're talking about me, she thought. They're deciding what I am. But their opinions don't matter, because he already decided. Let them talk. She was three quarters of the way. The dais was close now, comparatively. He hadn't moved. He was still just watching, hands loose, head tilted. She could see his face properly now and it was doing the thing it had done in the interrogation room, the flicker, the interest, the pleasure, and she understood that he was not watching her walk. He was watching her arrive. She reached the end of the hall. She stopped three feet from him, close enough to smell the cedar and the iron and the sweet rot underneath, close enough that she had to tilt her head back, just slightly, in the heels. The room was silent. She looked at him. He looked at her, and she did the thing she'd decided to do in the corridor, the thing she'd decided when she'd stopped being frightened and started being steady, she did not speak first. She waited. The corner of his mouth moved. It was not quite a smile, but it was almost one. And then, in front of the whole hall, in front of every vampire and every lackey, he reached out and took her hand, her right hand, the one with the ring, lifted it, and turned it over, and pressed his thumb to the inside of her wrist, where the pulse was. It was the same place as before, counting the pressure of her pulse. He held it there. He looked at her over her own hand, and he spoke in a voice just for her. "You found the pace," he said. "Yes." "Good." His thumb pressed once, lightly, against the beat of her heart. "Now let's see if you can hold it." He let go of her hand, turned, stepped up onto the dais, turned back, and looked down at her from six inches of height he hadn't had a moment ago. Then he held out his hand again, palm up, an invitation the whole room could see. "Come up," he said. Isabella looked at his hand for only a moment before she took it and stepped up.

The Corridor The corridor was empty and long, and it was the last place in the world Isabella would ever want to be alone. She knew that, standing there. It was absurd; she'd been alone in the east room for hours, but the east room had been meant for her, for privacy, for rest, and this corridor was certainly not. This corridor was the last stretch of nothing before the thing itself. She stood in her strapped heels with her back to a closed door and her face to another, and she listened. The room was full. She could hear it through the wood, a low, layered hum, the sound of many voices being careful. It was not the sound of a party. Parties had peaks and troughs, laughter, the clink of glass. This was steady. This was a room of things that didn't get tired, holding a conversation at a volume calibrated to be heard and not to intrude, and underneath it, faintly, the shuffle and shift of bodies that had been standing in place for a long time and did not need to sit. Underneath that, there was something else, something she couldn't name... a pressure, a sense that the room was not just full of people but attentive, that the whole space was leaning slightly toward the door she was about to walk through, waiting for the thing it had been assembled to see. They know I'm here, she thought. They've known since the bathing room. They've been waiting. Her hands were cold. She flexed them. The ring caught the light and threw it back at her, and she looked down at her own hand like it belonged to someone else, a stranger's hand, manicured, oiled, wearing a long dead woman's jewelry. She thought about her museum. She thought about the west wing, the one she'd been renovating, the one that had been going to open in the spring. She thought about the provenance files on her desk and the board meeting she'd missed and the fact that nobody at the museum knew where she was... nobody. She'd been summoned on a Tuesday and it was... what day was it now? She didn't know. She'd lost the thread somewhere between the interrogation and the razor against her skin. If I die in there, she thought, they'll find out in a week. They'll find out when I don't show up and someone checks the apartment and finds the summons on the table. She wasn't sure if that should have been a comforting thought or not, but it decidedly was not. It was the loneliest thought she'd ever had. She thought about him, about his thumb on her throat. Ask me something, or don't. The way he'd said you're a piece like it was a compliment and a sentence at the same time. The way he'd looked at her badge and read it out loud. Executive Director. Of what? He'd been interested. That was the thing she kept circling. He hadn't been bored. He'd given her the whole night, answered every question honestly, let her ask the ones that mattered, and then he'd sent her to the east room instead of the cells. Now she was standing in a corridor in a blood-red dress he'd had made for her, and the room ahead of her was full of things that had come to watch. He's already decided, she thought. He decided in the line. He decided when I didn't look up. So this isn't a test. This is a demonstration. The thought settled into her like cold water. It should have frightened her more, but instead it did something strange. It steadied her. If he'd already decided, then there was nothing to win and nothing to lose. There was only the walk, the room, being seen, by all of them, and coming out the other side still standing. She could do that. She'd walked into rooms full of people who wanted to eat her alive and she'd done it in heels before. Not these heels, she thought. Not this room. But the principle held. She heard the hum shift. A door somewhere inside the hall opening and closing, and the volume dipping and rising around it, and then a voice, low and clear, saying something she couldn't make out, and the room going quieter in response. Quieter and denser. The way a room went when the main event had arrived. That's him, she thought. He's in there. He's at the end of it. Her door had no handle on her side. It would be opened for her. She knew that the way she knew everything else in this house, by inference, by the shape of the thing, by the fact that nothing here had ever once required her to do anything for herself except decide. She straightened. She felt the straps bite into her calves, felt the ring weigh down her finger, felt the choker cold against her throat, right where his thumb had been, and before she could think another thing, the door opened.

The Preparation The east room was empty... not empty of furniture, a bed was there, a chair, a basin, but empty of people, and Isabella had not decided whether that was a mercy. She'd been brought here after the interrogation and left alone. The door had closed, and nobody had come. She had not slept. The daylight hours were worse than the night. She'd expected the opposite, sunlight meant safety, meant normal, meant the world outside still worked the way it was supposed to. But the windows in the east room were shuttered, and the light that leaked through was thin and grey. The house was silent in a way it hadn't been at night, no lackeys, no footsteps, just the tick of something old settling in the walls and Isabella lying on a bed she couldn't sleep in, counting the hours until dusk like a woman counting down to her own sentencing. She tried, she really did. She closed her eyes, did breathing exercises, and told herself that she had survived worse than this. But every time she drifted, she'd feel it, the pulse in her throat, the memory of his thumb, and she'd snap awake with her heart going and the light a little greyer and the day a little shorter. By the time the light went amber, she'd given up. Then the door opened. Two women came in. Isabella sat up and then stopped suddenly, because women was the wrong word. These were something else. They were slender to the point of fragility, pale as paper, with hair so black it looked wet and, on the second one, so crimson it looked like something that had been bled. They moved like water. They didn't speak, they simply entered, looked at Isabella, and waited. Isabella looked back. "You're not lackeys." The crimson-haired one smiled. It was a small, private smile, and it said no. "We're the attendants," the black-haired one said. Her voice was low and musical and had an accent Isabella couldn't place, something old and European and wrong in a way she couldn't name. "You've been summoned. Come." "Summoned where?" "You are to be presented." They didn't wait for more questions. They took her by the arms, gently, impossibly gently, the way you'd handle something breakable, and walked her out of the east room and down a corridor she hadn't seen, and then through a door into a room that was all steam and candlelight and marble. The room was enormous. A sunken pool was in the center, the water faintly steaming. Candles were everywhere, and the two attendants undressed her without ceremony and without hurry. They did it in silence, and they did it with proficiency, each button, each clasp, each zip handled like it mattered. They took her badge off her blazer. The crimson-haired one looked at it for a moment, then set it on a marble ledge, and Isabella felt a small absurd pang at the sight of it lying there. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR - a little laminated rectangle, the last piece of her old life. Then they walked her into the water. It was hot, perfectly so, and the two of them followed her in, waist-deep, and began to wash her. This was the part Isabella hadn't braced for... they were tender, not efficient or clinical as she'd expected after the disrobing, but tender. The black-haired one poured water over her shoulders from a cupped hand. The crimson-haired one worked soap across her back in slow circles that had no business being as soothing as they were. Neither of them spoke. Neither of them hurried. They washed her hair, her neck, her arms, the small of her back, and when the black-haired one knelt in the water to wash her legs, Isabella looked down at the top of her head and felt something in her chest go loose for the first time in two days. "You're being kind to me," she said. The crimson-haired one glanced up. "You're being prepared." "That's not the same thing." "No," she agreed. "It isn't." They dried her with towels warmed over a brazier, and then they sat her on a marble bench and began the rest... and the rest was meticulous. They shaved her, everywhere: legs, underarms, and then, with a small brush and a straight razor and a level of attention that made Isabella's breath go shallow, everything else. She watched the crimson-haired one work and felt the blade move over her most private and sensitive areas and did not dare flinch. When they were done, her skin was smooth in a way it had never been smooth, and the two of them ran oiled hands over every inch of it, checking their work. Isabella closed her eyes and let them. After that, they shaped her eyebrows, and then her nails, hands first, then feet, filed and shaped and buffed until they gleamed. To her skin they applied layer after layer of something cool and fragrant that made her feel smooth and softer than any lotion she had ever used. Then her hair was washed again, combed, dried, and styled, the black-haired one working with a concentration that bordered on religious, pinning and curling and finally letting it fall in a way that framed Isabella's face like a portrait. They did not ask her opinion once. When they were finished with her body, they brought the dress. Isabella had seen it hanging on the far wall and had assumed it was decoration. It was not. It was sleeveless, the color of old blood, and the neckline plunged down to the sternum in a way that made the shaving and the oiling and the skin care suddenly make sense. The slits ran up both legs to the hip. When they lowered it over her head and settled it on her shoulders, she looked down at herself and did not recognize the woman she saw. Then they put the shoes on her. They were towering heels, and they did not simply go on her feet. Thin leather cords wound up her calves in a crisscross that reached almost to the knee, cinched and tied and checked twice. Isabella stood in them and felt her whole posture change, felt her weight shift forward, felt herself become taller and slower and more deliberate. She took a step. The straps held. She took another. The crimson-haired one watched her and smiled that small private smile again. "Good," she said. "You walk like you're meant to." Jewelry came next. They brought it out on a velvet tray and Isabella's breath actually stopped. There was a choker, black, cold, and set with a single stone the color of wine. The earrings hung to her shoulders, and a bracelet wound her wrist like a serpent. One ring, placed on the index finger of her right hand, weighed so much she felt it the moment it settled. She appraised each piece and did the math. She couldn't help it. She was executive director of a museum and she did the math, and the number she arrived at was more than she'd made in her entire life. "Whose are these?" she asked. "His," the black-haired one said. "They were his sister's, before that, his mother's. Before that..." she shrugged, a small elegant motion, "before that, someone else's. They're old. They're kept." Kept, Isabella thought. Like me. They turned her to face a tall mirror, and Isabella looked. The woman in the mirror was tall, pale, and sleek, dressed in blood-red, strapped into heels that made her legs go on forever, wearing ancient jewelry, and did not look like a museum director. She looked like something that had been acquired, something that belonged in a case. She looked, she realized with a slow cold drop in her stomach, like something that had been prepared for presentation, and the preparation had been so thorough, so tender, so loving, that she had not once thought to ask what presentation meant. She looked at the two attendants in the mirror. "What happens now," she said. The crimson-haired one stepped up behind her close enough that Isabella could feel her breath on the back of her neck, cool, faintly sweet, and not quite human. "Now," she said, "you go into the hall. The hall is full, and every one of them will look at you." She reached up and adjusted a strand of Isabella's hair, one last time, with a care that was almost maternal. "And he will be at the end of it." "And?" "And," the black-haired one said from the doorway, "you will find out whether he keeps you." The crimson-haired one's hand lingered on Isabella's shoulder. "He will," she said quietly. "We've dressed enough of them to know. He will." She stepped back. The two of them moved to either side of the door and stood, waiting, still as statues, and Isabella stood in the middle of the bathing room in the blood-red dress, the ancient jewelry, and the strappy heels, and looked at herself one last time. She never thought of herself as beautiful before... attractive, sure, on the good end of the bell curve, but just somewhere between average and pretty. But her reflection was stunningly, exceptionally gorgeous. Before she could look too long, the door opened onto the corridor. The corridor was full of light, and somewhere at the end of it, a man older than the city was waiting. "Go," the attendants said. Isabella went.

The Interrogation She started with the practical questions. That was the museum director in her, provenance first, condition report second, price last. She'd learned a long time ago that the people who asked the biggest questions first were the ones who got fleeced. "How old are you?" He laughed, low, brief, and genuinely amused. "Older than the city. Younger than the stone it's built on. That's the only answer you'll get to that question. Ask a better one." "How many have you kept?" "Kept, or had?" He'd moved to the window again, back to her, watching the street. The lackeys hadn't moved. "Because the answer to the second is a number you'd find insulting. The answer to the first is four." "Four?" "Over six hundred years." He turned his head just enough to catch her in profile. "You're doing the math. You're deciding whether four is a lot or a little. It's a lot. Most of us don't keep any. Keeping is a liability. Keeping means you have to care whether a thing survives." Isabella sat forward. "So you're telling me you care." "I'm telling you I notice." He turned fully. "There's a difference, and it's the difference between a man who loves his paintings and a man who owns them. The first one's a fool. The second one's a collector. Guess which I am." "You're a collector." "Correct. Next question." She'd been ready for him to be evasive. He wasn't. That was the trap, she realized, he answered everything, which meant she had to be careful what she asked, because every answer was a door he was holding open for her to walk through. She asked about the bite. "Does it hurt?" "At first. Then it doesn't. Then it hurts again, but differently, and that's the part they don't warn you about." He came back to the settee and sat, closer this time, on the same one, angled toward her. "You've heard the standard story: euphoria, warmth, the world going soft. All true. All incomplete." "Incomplete how?" "Incomplete in that it's the aftermath that gets them." He said them like a category she was already sliding into. "The bite is the door. The room you wake up in is the problem. For three days afterward you'll feel hollowed, cold at the edges, and you'll start to notice that the hollow is exactly the shape of me." Isabella's throat worked. "That sounds like a drug." "It is a drug." He watched her. "Ask the next one. You're circling it." She was. She'd been circling it since the first question. She made herself say it flatly, the way she'd say it across a boardroom table. "Will I want it more than the first time?" The overlord went very still. It was not the still of a predator about to strike, but the still of a man who'd just heard something he liked and was deciding how much to let it show. The lackeys along the wall had gone quiet too, even the twitchy one. "Ask that again," he said. "Will I want it more than the first time?" "More," he repeated, and something moved through his face that she couldn't name. "Not 'will I want it again.' Not 'will it hurt.' More." He leaned in. "Where did you learn to ask that question?" "I read." "You read." He was almost smiling. "You read what?" "Everything I could find in three days. Which was almost nothing, because almost nothing is true." She met his eyes. "So I'm asking the source." He sat back, considered her, and for the first time since she'd entered the room, he looked at her like she was not a piece but a problem, the good kind, the kind you take home and turn over in your hands. "Yes," he said. "You'll want it more. You'll want it more every single time. The first bite is a wound. The second is a habit. By the fifth you'll be offering your throat before I ask. You'll hate yourself for it, and you'll do it anyway." He paused. "That's the honest answer. Most of them don't get the honest answer, because most of them don't ask the honest question." Isabella filed it. Then, because he was watching her like he wanted her to keep going, she pushed. "And the intimacy?" "The intimacy," he said slowly, savoring it. "You want to know if it's like sex." "Is it?" "It's worse than sex." He said it plainly, no flourish. "Sex is a negotiation. Two people agreeing on a shape for a few minutes. The bite is unilateral. I take. You give. There's no trade. That's why it frightens people who've spent their lives trading." His eyes flicked to her badge. "People like you. That's what makes them flinch." "And the ones who don't flinch?" "The ones who don't flinch are the ones I keep." The room was very quiet. The lackeys had stopped even pretending to be furniture. Isabella could feel them watching the two of them the way she'd once watched a bidding war at auction, the moment when the price stops being money and starts being meaning. She had one question left in her. She'd been saving it. She wasn't sure she wanted the answer. "How many of the four did you keep because they didn't flinch?" The overlord looked at her for a long moment, then slid closer to her and did something he hadn't done yet, he took her hand. He lifted it, turned it over, pressed his thumb to the inside of her wrist, where the pulse was, and held it there like he was reading a document. "Two," he said. "And one of them flinched eventually. Everyone does. It's just a question of when, and whether the flinch is the end or the beginning." "And the other?" She asked. "The one who hadn't flinched?" "The other is still here." Isabella's breath caught. "There's another one here..." "Ask me tomorrow." He released her hand, stood, and stepped back. For the first time, he looked at the window, at the grey coming up behind the warped glass. "Dawn's close. You've used your time well. Better than most." He turned to the lackeys. "Take her to the east room." The twitchy one made a sound, small, wounded, and envious. Isabella caught it. The east room means something. She was being moved up the board. As they led her out, the overlord spoke once more, not looking at her. "One more question, before you go. You get one." She stopped in the doorway, thought about it, and asked the one she'd been avoiding, the one that had nothing to do with provenance or condition or price. "Are you going to bite me tonight?" He turned, looked at her across the length of the room and smiled, the real one, the brief one, the one that cost him something. "No," he said. "Tonight you sleep. Tomorrow you decide." "And then?" "And then," he said, "we find out whether you flinch."

The Game They took her to a room that was not a dungeon and not a drawing room but somehow both, with velvet settees arranged around a cold marble hearth and a single enormous window looking out onto the narrow street, the glass old enough to warp the lamplight into something underwater. It was cold. There was no fire... of course no fire. What did they need it for? The lackeys deposited her in the center of the room and then did not leave. That was the first thing she noticed. They arranged themselves along the wall like furniture, twitchy and watchful, and Isabella understood with a sinking certainty that she was not about to have a private audience. She was about to have an audience. The overlord came in a few minutes later. He'd shed the coat. He moved to the window, looked down at the street like a man checking the weather, and let the silence stretch until it had weight. Then, without turning, he asked, "What do you expect to happen to you tonight?" Isabella's imagination had prepared many possible answers on the ride over. She'd cycled through a dozen of them. I expect to be fed on. I expect to be kept. I expect to be killed. Now, standing in the actual room with the actual man, she knew them for what they all were: guesses. "I don't know," she said. She hated how honest it came out. "That's the correct answer." He turned. "Most of them say 'to be eaten.' They think it's what I want to hear. It's not. It's what they want to believe, that there's a rule, a system, a predictable outcome." He crossed to the settee nearest her and sat, unhurried. He gestured at the one opposite. "Sit." She sat. "Tell me what you'd like to happen," he said. "Not what you expect. What you'd like." "I'd like to go home," she said. He smiled at that, a real smile, though brief. "Everyone says that. It's never true. They say it the way people say they'd like to win the lottery. As a joke they don't mean." He leaned back. "You're an executive director. You run a museum. You spend your days deciding which objects are worth keeping and which are worth discarding. You understand acquisition. So let's not pretend. You know what you are in this room." "Cattle," she said. "Cattle." He repeated it like he was tasting it and finding it slightly off. "Cattle are interchangeable. You are not interchangeable. The blonde, she was cattle. You are a piece." He tilted his head. "Do you know the difference?" Isabella's mouth was dry. "A piece is chosen for a reason." "A piece is chosen for a reason," he agreed. "And a piece is chosen permanently." The lackeys along the wall made a small collective sound, not quite a murmur, more like a shift of weight. The twitchy one was staring at her with naked envy. Isabella filed that away. They want what I have. They're below me in this room. That's information. "You're afraid," the overlord said. It was not a question. "Yes." "Good. Say it properly." "I'm afraid," she said, and then, because he was watching her like he expected more, "I'm afraid of you specifically. Not of the room. Not of the lackeys. I'm afraid of you." Something moved behind his eyes. Pleasure, she thought. Or recognition. He'd gotten what he'd asked for and it had cost her something to give it. She thought that was the point. "Better," he said. "Now tell me what you're afraid of... not the general thing, the specific thing. What do you think I'm going to do to you?" She thought about it. The lackeys were listening. She could feel them listening. "I think you're going to bite me," she said. "And I think it's going to be..." she stopped. "Say it." "I think it's going to be the most intimate thing that's ever happened to me. And I think you know that. And I think you're going to use it." The overlord did not answer immediately. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he stood, and crossed the small distance between them, and stood over her settee looking down. He was close enough that she had to tilt her head back. Close enough that the smell of him, cedar, iron, that sweet rot underneath, filled the space between them. "You're right," he said quietly. "On all three counts." He crouched. Put himself at her eye level. His hand came up and his thumb found the pulse in her throat again, same place as before, same counting pressure. Isabella's breath caught. He noticed and his mouth curved. "Here's the game," he said. "You have until dawn. You may ask me anything. I will answer honestly. And at the end of it, I will decide whether to keep you." His thumb pressed once, lightly, against the beat of her heart. "Or whether to send you back to the line." "Back to the line," she repeated. "As cattle." "As cattle," he said. "Or worse. The lackeys get what I don't want. You've seen them. You know what they're like." She did. She'd seen the way they looked at her. The twitchy one had looked at her like a hungry man who'd been promised a meal and then told to wait. "So," the overlord said, and settled back onto his heels, still crouched, still close, still holding her throat with two fingers like a leash he hadn't decided to pull yet. "Ask me something... or don't. Either way, dawn comes." Isabella looked at him, up at his wine-dark eyes, down at the hand on her throat. She glanced toward the lackeys behind him, hungry and waiting and below her in this room, and she understood, suddenly, that the game wasn't whether he'd keep her. The game was whether she'd want him to. That was something. She opened her mouth to ask her first question.

The Selection The room smelled of cold stone and something older, copper, maybe, or the ghost of it. Isabella had spent most of her adult life inside vaults, archives, conservation labs, and climate-controlled storage where light, humidity, temperature, and human touch were treated as enemies. She knew the mineral chill of old stone and the smell of sealed wood and ancient paper. She knew what centuries did to leather, bone, linen, lacquer, and flesh. This room had the same stillness, but nothing here was being preserved. They'd been herded in at dusk, thirty three of them, including Isabella. Women in evening wear and women in whatever they'd been wearing when the summons came. Isabella still had her museum badge clipped to her lapel. It felt absurd. A little laminated rectangle announcing EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR to a room full of predators who could probably smell her blood type. The lackeys had arranged them in a line along the wall. They had not done so roughly, and that was the unsettling part. They'd been placed, like objects in a curated exhibit, each one angled toward the center of the hall where the light pooled. Hands had guided shoulders, fingers had adjusted a collar here, a strand of hair there. One lackey, pale, twitchy, younger than the rest, had spent a full minute circling Isabella before stepping back with a small satisfied sound, like a man who'd finally gotten a frame hung straight. We're the collection, she thought. We're being appraised. The other women were doing what terrified people do. Some cried silently. Some whispered to each other in the tight, clipped voices of the newly damned. A few stood rigid, jaws set, performing bravery. Isabella recognized the type, board members, mostly. Women who'd spent decades learning to look unbothered in rooms that could ruin them. It wasn't working here. Nothing worked here. She could hear her own pulse. She was certain they all could, as certain as she was that the lackeys could hear it, too. The lackeys lined the walls in a loose ring, simpering and slavering in the literal sense .She watched one of them lick his lips and then look embarrassed about it. They were hungry. They were always hungry, apparently, and the women were the meal. The only question was which of them would be eaten and which would be kept. A door at the far end of the hall opened without sound and their Lord entered. Isabella had braced for something monstrous, but she'd prepared for the wrong thing. He was beautiful in the way a well-preserved artifact was beautiful, too symmetrical, too still, the proportions slightly off in a way that read as correct once you stopped comparing him to people. He had dark hair and pale skin, and he wore a coat that cost more than her car. He moved like the room belonged to him, which it did, and he didn't look at any of them yet, which was somehow worse than if he had. He walked the line slowly, deliberately, the way she walked a gallery when she was deciding what to acquire. He stopped in front of a blonde woman near the end and tilted his head. The lackeys behind him went rigid with attention, like dogs watching a hand reach for a treat. He lifted the woman's chin with two fingers, turned her face left, then right, then let go and moved on without a word. The woman made a small broken sound as he passed. Rejected, Isabella thought. Or catalogued... or both. He was closer now. Two women away. One. She could smell him, cedar and iron and something sweet underneath, like fruit left too long in a warm room. Her hands were cold. Her hands were always cold in the museum, too, and she clung to that, the familiarity of it, the small lie that this was just another opening night and she was just another guest and none of this was going to end with teeth in her throat. He stopped in front of her. Isabella did not look up. She'd decided on the ride over that she wouldn't look up, that looking up was a concession, that she was would not give him that small bit. She stared at the third button of his coat and waited. He waited too, longer than he'd waited for the others. She could feel the lackeys watching, feel their attention sharpen into something almost hungry on her behalf. Then he spoke, and his voice was low, unhurried, and sounded like it had been in the world a very long time. "Look at me." She looked up. Despite her earlier decision to not give him the power, she responded as if she were a puppet on a string. Was it instinctual, or was it something more? His eyes were the color of old wine. That was her first thought. His irises were the deep reddish brown of wine seen through antique glass. He studied her face the way she studied a new acquisition, patient, thorough, looking for the thing that would decide it. His gaze dropped to her badge, then rose again to her eyes. One corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Executive Director," he read. "Of what?" "A museum," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she'd expected. "Natural history." Something flickered across his face, interest, maybe, or amusement. Or perhaps the specific pleasure of a man who'd just found the one item in the lot that would look good in his foyer. "Natural history," he repeated, tasting it. "How fitting." He reached out. Two fingers touched under her chin, same as the blonde, but he didn't turn her face. He just held her there, thumb resting against the pulse in her throat, and Isabella felt the beat of it against his skin and understood, with a clarity that made her stomach drop, that he could feel it too. That he was counting. "Breathe," he said. She realized she hadn't been, and took in a shuddering breath. He let go, stepped back, and without looking away from her, he spoke to the room, to the lackeys, to the other women, to the walls themselves. "This one." The lackeys moved. Two of them peeled off the wall and came for her, and the twitchy one , the one who'd circled her earlier, was already grinning, already reaching, and Isabella had one last clear thought before hands closed around her arms and pulled her out of the line: The blonde got her chin turned. I got a question. He asked me what I was. The other women were still in the room. She could hear them, the crying, the whispering, the small animal sounds of the ones who'd been left. Then she could hear them no more as the door closed behind her. She didn't know yet whether being chosen was better or worse. She was about to find out.

Sorry for the delayed reply. If we were in the heyday of the writing challenges and had enough contestants, I'd love to do the challenge. As it is, we'd be hard pressed to get 2 or 3 people to join in. I like the idea, but we might have to wait for things to pick up around here, if they ever do...

Mara's lips curved, a genuine flicker of amusement in her eyes at his question. He was sharp, she'd give him that. Most men would have already been floating toward the exit, eager to take her up on the offer without a second thought. Dash... he was still trying to solve the puzzle. She liked that. It would make the eventual surrender more satisfying, if it went that way. He's still trying to figure the angle, she thought, her own gaze flicking over the sharp lines of his face, the way his messy hair floated around his head. Thinks there's a catch. Thinks I want something more than what I'm offering. Poor bastard's probably spent his whole life looking for the knife hidden in the handshake. She saw the same guarded calculation in his eyes that she knew was in her own. It was the look of someone who'd learned the hard way that trust was a liability you couldn't afford. It was the look she usually wore. She leaned in, closing the small gap between them, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that was easily swallowed by the lounge's thumping bass. "You're overthinking it, Dash. The math is simple." She let her fingers trail lightly down his arm, a feathery touch in the zero-g. "I've got thirty-some hours to kill until my ship is ready. I've already had the best meal this floating tin can has to offer, and this..." she held up her own squeeze bottle, "...is passable at best. But what I really want right now is something hot and dirty." Her eyes held his, a direct, unblinking challenge. She saw the flicker of understanding there. "I picked you because you look like you know how to have a good time without making it complicated." She let her hand drift back to her side, giving him space. "I'll tell you a little secret," she said, her voice returning to its normal volume. "This isn't how I normally dress. I'm a freighter pilot. Name's Velez, and my ship's the Second Chance." She gave a small, self-deprecating shrug. "This is my 'I'm bored and I want to get laid' uniform. Not that it has to go there right away, but I know what I want, so if you're not interested, just say so. I won't waste your time." She watched him, letting her words hang in the air between them. It was as honest as she could be, stripped of the games and the posturing. It was an offer, plain and simple. A transaction, yes, but one where the currency was pleasure, not credits or secrets. She'd laid her cards on the table. Now it was his move.

As the mysterious woman spoke, Dash's eyes remained focused on her, taking in every micro expression, every twitch of her brow, but more than anything he kept close watch on where her eyes were going. It was more than necessity in his lifestyle to be able to read people and, more importantly, read a room. While he watched to see if her eyes drifted away from him, possibly looking to a partner in crime that could have been behind him, his gaze quickly darted back and forth to the various bodies in the lounge, searching for anyone who may have been paying a little too close of attention to them. The problem was, he couldn't get a proper read on her. A woman looking and behaving as she did didn't exactly scream desperation, she could have any man she wanted with just a look, yet she was the one to approach him. He was the least quality looking man of what seemed like any in the lounge, that didn't exactly speak to her being a gold digger either. This outpost was likely filled with men - and women - who hadn't so much as seen a woman in days, maybe even weeks, who would be overeager to make the acquaintance of this celestial siren. So, what was it that she really wanted? He wasn't oblivious to the fact that while he assessed her, she was running her own assessments on him, coming to the realization that every word was calculated, every action run through potential scenarios of what it could lead to. Like him, she was guarded, meaning this interaction was either out of cautious interest, or something a bit more transactional... perhaps a bit of both. Her hand extended towards him and she offered a name: Mara... if that was even her name. His attention stayed fully fixed on her eyes, lifting his bottle to his lips. He peered down at it under his nose for a moment, realizing that aura was lost when holding a ridiculous squeeze bottle over an actual glass, but he returned his attention to her just as quickly and lowered the bottle, letting it float in front of him as he let go to take her hand, allowing it to rest delicately over his palm, his thumb stroking over her knuckles briefly. "Dash.", He responded... if that was even his name. She wasn't finished, the pause was brief as he returned the introduction and she offered a retreat to her quarters. Did she live on this outpost, or was she here for an extended duration and favored a more comfortable stay in the meantime? "Mm-hmmm...", He chuckled in a dragged-out breath through closed lips at her proposal, his tongue rolling around the inside of his mouth. "A private bar... You're offering me a drink, now? Quite a jump... Mara.", He said, a small grin crossing his face. Generally, when invited to a room for more privacy, one kind of thumping sound would be exchanged for another, yet he still couldn't pin exactly what it was that she was interested in. His ego burned for an answer to the question of what drew her to him, but his curiosity won out, fascinated with observing her and letting her give herself away. "What exactly is it that I would owe you?", He asked, addressing what she said about not asking anyone else to buy her a drink before him.

Mara's lips curved into a slow, genuine smile at his compliment about her dress, a flicker of warmth in her eyes that cut through the practiced seduction. "Lethal is the look I was going for," she said, her voice a low purr that drifted between them in the zero-g. She took a slow sip from her squeeze-bottle, her gaze never leaving his. "I bought this one myself. Wasn't anyone else in here I wanted to owe something to." She let the implication hang in the air between them, heavy and sweet as the vaporized alcohol. The unspoken part was clear: until now. His game of visual tag, his playful jab... she was being tested. The fact that he played, that he didn't immediately pounce, meant he'd passed her own test. Most men were either too eager or too intimidated. He was just... possibly interested, and actually interesting. God, finally. He was the first man all night who hit the perfect trifecta. He was attractive under the station's dim lighting. He wasn't so polished he looked like a station exec, but also not so grimy he looked like a spacer who'd been eating nutrient paste for a month straight. But most importantly, he was actually present, not lost in his own head, not too drunk to focus, just here, in the moment. He looked like he might work in a similar profession as she did, something that involved staying off the grid and moving fast. The way he'd reached up under his jacket to check what she assumed must be a piece when he drifted in, the casual confidence in his eyes... yeah, he was dangerous. That was exactly how she liked her men. A little risk made the reward sweeter. Besides, she still had thirty-some hours to kill until the Jovian mechanics she hired finished retrofitting those new maneuvering thrusters onto the Second Chance. That was a long time to float around this station bored out of her skull. With time to kill, and a couple drinks in her, this guy could be the perfect distraction. "I'm Mara," she said, extending a hand, letting it drift closer to his, an open invitation, "and I've got a room two levels up. Got a shower, a private bar, and significantly less of this thumping noise." Her eyes dropped to his lips for a fraction of a second before meeting his pale blue gaze again. "Might be a place for two people to get to know each other better." Please say yes, she thought. Even if they never used that bed, just simple conversation with someone moderately interesting would be better than floating around here by herself like an offering.

Pale blue eyes peered through the several-inch thick plexiglass that was a portal between the people aboard this floating metal jungle and the vacuum of cold nothingness. He could almost see the rotation of the gas giant as his gaze slowly followed the swirls and streaks of highly toxic miasma that made up the gargantuan orb that they never graced with a name, only referred to it as GGP-6769. Of course, no one cared about the name, or the planet for that matter. They cared about the outpost he now stood within, trying to block out the sounds of the hustle-bustle whizzing back and forth behind him. Traders, wayfarers, explorers and various other unsavory types found temporary refuge here. He, himself, wanted little more than a moment's solace after the big job he just pulled... and god forbid, maybe even a bottle of classic recipe garlic chili sauce. The name Dash Lightrunner was one that some may have heard, in the right parts of the wrong outposts. A treasure hunter, primarily, but indiscriminate about what defined "treasure", he frequently found himself more on the end of being a thief and he had a way of upsetting powerful people while scavenging power cells, navigation systems and other useful parts and cargo that didn't belong on the market from derelict commercial freighters and stations. Said systems came in handy for someone like Dash, especially with the assistance of the right engineers and code monkeys. His ship, the Starstreak, sat docked in another wing of the port while he refueled and made sure heat shielding was up to snuff- something he neglected a single time and learned the hard way to run diagnostics and maintainence on every so often. The Starstreak wasn't a high-end model, but it was, once upon a time, a popular one that one didn't see too often, making it a little more tedious keeping his head down at times. Luckily for him, he had a license identifier installed that would automatically generate new identification every few cycles. Very illegal, but boy, was it useful. Luckily, authorities tended to be too damn thick to find it. His slender fingers brushed up his thin face to his rich brown hair, which was messy. He could have used a shower, but as his fingers played with the credits in his fitted leather coat's pocket, he thought that maybe he could use a stiff drink that much more. He turned on his heels, his eyes catching the neon lights leading to the lifts descended to the lower sector of the station, something of a pleasure district, depending on what one's pleasures may have been. Right now, his own pleasure was a double Dysterian whiskey on the rocks with a splash of Orbit Fizz... Not that he couldn't handle it straight, of course. It was just... A touch of sweetness added a little something. Whatever gods there may have been out in the freezing black of space, they must have had little mercy for the scents that plagued these lower decks. The scent of hand-rolled cigarettes, also highly illegal depending on the quatrant of the galaxy you found yourself in, fogged the air, drifting out of the open doors of saloons that opted for a more "classic Earth" vibe. Dash never understood people's fascination with that shit hole. It had been nearly uninhabitable for centuries, but relics from those bygone times could still be found nearly anywhere you could go, complete with shitty sounds that they called classic music blaring from the blown speakers of electronic jukebox. Turning his head to face forward from peering into the various establishments he passed, his gaze fell on the gentle blue glow coming from the polished obsidian black exterior of the Zero-G Lounge. He didn't remember ever seeing the place during any of his past visits to Korva Station. Maybe it was new... Or he was always on the wrong end of the station to happen by it. It looked like a higher-end establishment, he could tell by glancing inside as he approached the entrance at the different bodies floating about the dimly lit lounge. Patrons were well-dressed, a bizarre sort of rarity for an outpost. Regulars, businessmen maybe that enjoyed a particular sort of environment. Dash was about to head the other direction, but the vibrations that rumbled under his feet and up his legs made him pause, just for a moment, just to feel it. "Ah, what the hell.", He sighed, looking every bit the rogue he was as he headed inside. The moment he set foot over the threshold of the entrance his feet lifted from the well-polished floor and he drifted into the lounge. A hand quickly shot up to his waist around his back to make sure an item he shouldn't have been carrying didn't accidentally slip out. He was armed. His usual arms were checked in after he docked, as was the policy of the station, but he'd found that those rules didn't always apply to everyone, so they couldn't apply to him either. A printed polymer sidearm was more than enough, and undetectable when stepping through security scans. Noting that the firearm was secure, he floated to the bars illuminated top and ordered his beverage. They didnt have Orbit Fizz, they carried the sickly sweet competing brand. His nose scrunched up at the idea, but beggars couldn't be choosers and he opened a tab. As he drifted slowly though the zero-gravity lounge, he sipped at his drink, savoring the burn of the alcohol sliding down his throat and lingering there a bit more than usual in the environment. He always hated eating and drinking in zero-g, but he found himself a little more relaxed than he likely should have allowed, the music pounding in his chest and pulsing through his limbs. He raised the bottle to his lips and paused, catching a bright glint in his peripherals. Over the curve of the bottle, his eyes peered over to his left to see a woman, elegant, yet somehow not exactly conservative all at once. He could see her eyes looking hisnway, but he didn't meet her gaze, he made note of the way she dressed and how she most certainly showed off the shape of her body, wrapping it meticulously in something... thin. Something that would draw the eyes to what she was showcasing. The light tone of the fabric contrasted beautifully with the tone of her skin, the thin fabric floating around her hips as her hair danced around her head, not unlike the mermaids described in old Earth legends. For a time, Dash played a game of visual tag with the woman, he looking her way, she looking his, assessing one another in some way or the next, but never locking gaze, until finally, their eyes met. He rights himself somewhat, turning to face the woman as he noticed she decided to take the step to approach him. She stopped close to him, but not too close. He could have reached out and touched her, had he been a man of poorer constitution. It was then that her voice cut through the sound of the music in the air, suggesting that he foot the bill for her next libation. "Mm.", Dash purred as his tongue traced over his lips after lowering his drink. "Forward.", He added, quite simply, looking at the bottle the woman already held in her delicate grip. His blue eyes met with hers and he nodded down to it. "Did you buy this one yourself, or did you stare for an unnecessarily long time at another one of these suckers and get him to order it for you?", He asked, the corner of his lips curled up very slightly, giving away that he asked playfully. "Can't say I'd blame them. That dress is lethal.", He added, his eyes lingering over her body briefly and returning to meet her gaze again.

You're docked at Korva Station, a spinning ring of metal and neon suspended above a gas giant, equal parts refueling depot, black market bazaar, and pleasure port. The station never sleeps. Crews cycle through at all hours, flush with credits and starved for company after weeks in the black. The lower decks are where people go when they want to forget. Bars, smoke dens, touch parlors, and worse, all crammed together behind steam-fogged windows and closed doors. You're sitting in a place called Zero-G. There's no gravity plating in the main lounge, just a slow rotational drift that makes everything float lazily: drink globules, hair, the hem of a skirt. Patrons anchor themselves to padded rails or drift freely in the dim blue light. Music pulses low, something synthetic and warm that feels like it's massaging your spine. Maybe you came here to drink, to wait out a repair, to lose yourself... whatever the original reason no longer matters. What matters now is what's drifting ten meters to your left. She's not wearing much, a sheer slip of fabric that passes for a dress in this part of the station, something silvery and clinging that leaves nothing to imagination, riding high on her thighs, sliding off one shoulder. Her feet are bare and her skin looks vibrant against the metallic shimmer. Her hair floats around her head in a slow halo, loose and lazy. She's got one hand looped loosely around a ceiling rail, and in the other she holds a squeeze-bottle of something violet, taking long pulls from it between half-closed eyes. She's been watching you, and she hasn't been subtle about it either. Every time you glance her way, she's already looking, chin tilted, lips parted, gaze dragging down your body like she's taking inventory. When your eyes meet, she doesn't look away, she smiles slow, the kind of smile that says I know what I want and I'm bored of waiting. She uncurls her fingers from the rail and lets herself drift toward you, body loose and liquid in the zero-g. She stops an arm's length away, close enough to reach, far enough to make you choose. "Buy me another drink?" she asks. Her voice is low, warm, rough at the edges. Her eyes flick down to your mouth and back up. "Or skip it. Your call." - - - - - - - So... who are you, and what do you do? Create a character: name, what you look like, what brought you to Korva Station. Then make your choice: Buy the drink, take your time, let her float closer... see where the conversation leads. Skip the drink and close the distance between you. Put your hands on her hips to steady her in the drift and see how she responds. Play it cool and smile, say something noncommittal, make her work for it, see how far she's willing to push. Do something else. Maybe you've got extra credits, a private berth, a stash of something better than what she's drinking... tell us what you offer.

Epic, huh? Well, since 50 is a big milestone, and given the World Cup ended recently, I think a World Cup tournament-style challenge-themed competition would be the most fitting concept. To keep it broad and accessible, you can write short stories involving competition or challenges of any kind. Blowjob competitions, gameshow questionnaires, wife swaps, lost bets, first to cum, loyalty tests, Pokémon battles, sex fighting, video games, scavenger hunts, raffles, whatever have you. Simple single elimination format. Winner moves on, loser goes home. Most reactions wins. Ties are broken by @IsabellaRose. To keep things as objective as possible, I think wins should be decided by storytelling and craftsmanship instead of which kinks you personally prefer. Stories don't strictly have to be sexual or suggestive in nature but given the platform we're on, it's generally expected. Eight contestants (or four if that's all we can get). You can sign me up if this ends up being the idea. Quarterfinal Contestant A vs. Contestant B Contestant C vs. Contestant D Contestant E vs. Contestant F Contestant G vs. Contestant H Semifinal AB winner vs. CD winner EF winner vs. GH winner Bronze Medal Round Semifinal losers (winner is considered to be third, loser fourth) Grandfinal Semifinal winners (winner becomes Champ, loser gets silver medal) You'll need to win at least two out of three to guarantee a spot on the podium. A "third-place playoff" would exist, so even if you get knocked out in the semis, you still have a chance to win some EcchiCreds. Matchups, prizes, deadlines and word count limits to be decided by @IsabellaRose. Perhaps with more time and a bigger word count limit permitted for the all-important Championship Round. This would be quite an ambitious project involving multiple Dreamers though and I'm not sure if we can get eight reliable people for this but I guess we can see how it goes. What do you all think? Anything you disagree on?

Understandable. I have ideas but they just don't seen "epic" enough for a 50th challenge. It just seems new or out of the ordinary to me. A story over a span of years seems original for what this is about. I am trying to think about something more than just a theme or etc. (I admit I am a big overthinker, though. But you know this. XD) The span thing could also bring an idea of "What about time travel"? sort of ideas? Like... You have a character travel to the past or future. Oh! What about... A story with a character you had when you started ED, meeting a character you have NOW? Like a kind of "Sega Ages" event thing? That sounds like an epic thing right there! :D So to sum up... We take one of our first characters and we write a story about them meeting one of the newest characters we have. Something like that. A story about your history in ED. Well, dunno if that would be epic to everyone's eyes but it sounds like a fun idea to me, at the very least. Like a kind of different universe clash story.

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