Submission

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 waited for me, hanging between 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 among the crates was rats. It was her, crouched in the darkness, and the moment she smelled my fear I knew I wouldn’t go home the same that night.

No one believed the beast existed. So he returned to the mountains to find her, even if it meant losing himself forever in the snow and her claws.

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

The paper robe barely covered me. When his hot hands slid down my back, I knew that session wasn’t going to end the way I’d imagined.

—You don’t have to believe you can —he whispered in her ear—. I do. Your only job tonight is to surrender and let your body obey.

His wife’s friend opened her legs in front of him, smiling, just to show him what he would never get to touch that night.

We had a pact and one word to stop everything. But as she slept face down, I knew that morning I wasn’t going to say it.

I’d spent three weeks swallowing dust and loneliness when the driver looked at me fixedly, without smiling, and said: “Come, my house.” It wasn’t an invitation: it was an order, and I followed him.

That night she would perform the ritual for the first time: naked, bound to the stallion, with a veteran warrior ready to wrench from her the pleasure that belonged to the goddess.