Submission

When he pinned the man who had been harassing her, Mariela felt something she shouldn’t: the certainty that that boy could do anything he wanted with her.

I ran through the downpour to my door thinking I was safe. I didn’t realize he had come in behind me until I felt his hand on my back.

I know I shouldn’t, but every time I walk home alone in the early hours I look for him: that stranger who’ll pin me to the wall and not ask permission.

She crossed half the kingdom for a legendary relic; what she didn’t expect was to kneel before those guarding it, or to desire it with every fiber of her body.

“I live inside the lake,” she told him without blinking. Damián took her for an eccentric and followed her anyway. What he found at the bottom was no heaven.

When I opened my eyes I wasn’t at my desk: I was naked, tied to the teacher’s chair, and heels were beginning to circle me in the empty classroom.

I watched him from before his failure. He said I was too perfect to walk in the mud, not knowing that sentence condemned him never to leave it.

I followed a trail of blood to a clearing where something was waiting for me, hanging among the trees. I never imagined the forest creature would choose me as its prey.

When I opened the backpack he handed me in the lobby of that run-down hotel, I understood the meeting was nothing like I’d imagined. And it was already too late to turn back.

My whole life I believed I belonged only to him. The afternoon he walked into the dean’s office and found me on the desk, I discovered how much he liked seeing me with another man.

The will said my family’s fortune had been built between my mother’s legs. That very night I understood it was now my turn.

I slipped barefoot to the chapel at midnight to ask forgiveness for my dreams. I never imagined something waited coiled in the shadows, ready to teach me what my body had kept silent.

I tripped over a root, and before I could get up, she was already on top of me. Her cold skin brushed mine, and I knew that night I wouldn’t leave the forest unchanged.

I thought the noise between the crates was rats. It was her, crouched in the dark, and the moment she smelled my fear I knew I wouldn’t be going home the same.

No one believed him when he said the beast was real. So he went back into the mountains to find her, even if it meant losing himself forever in the snow and in her claws.

She expected a frail husband she could despise. When the king bowed to kiss her hand, the tip of his tongue brushed her skin and she knew she was wrong.

She ordered me to strip in her living room and start sweeping. I was just her toy that afternoon, and every slap on my ass reminded me who was in control.

He arrived at the den little more than a chained skeleton. The she-wolf promised to teach him what it meant to serve her... and he learned better than she expected.

I woke up certain it had only been a steamy nightmare. Then I saw the box on the living-room table, just like in the dream, and the coffee slipped from my hands.

She knew what they had agreed to, but no words prepared her for what she would feel when she crossed that door and the room closed behind her.