Claimed, Loved, Kept

by DevotedSub

Chapter 1: The Screen Between Us

The apartment was dark except for the blue-white glow of her laptop, and Vesper liked it that way. Two in the morning had become her favorite hour of the day — the hour when the rest of the world finally shut its mouth and she could hear herself think, and feel herself feel, without apology.

Rain scratched at the window in thin, needling lines. She had lit the black candles on her desk — three of them, their flames shivering each time the old radiator kicked on — and the wax smelled like clove and something darker, something she couldn't name. Her hair, violet-black and loose down her back, kept falling forward over her shoulder, and she kept pushing it back with an impatient hand, too absorbed to be annoyed.

The forum was called Midnight Bound. She had been a member for four years under the name little_raven_88, though the name was a lie she told out of habit — she was twenty-eight, and the only thing the 88 stood for was nothing at all, a number she had picked at random because the blank field had stared at her and she had panicked. Four years. Four years of thread titles like unpopular opinion: the hero should never apologize and recs for possessive heroes who actually deliver and her own posts, long ones, the kind she wrote with her heart hammering because someone out there might read her and know her — might recognize the shape of her hunger the way you recognize your own face in a mirror you didn't expect.

Nobody ever had. Not really. People liked her posts. People quoted her posts. Nobody had ever looked straight through the screen and seen the woman behind them, alone at 2 a.m., candles guttering, chest aching with a want she had no name for.

She was rereading a thread about The Trinity of Night — her favorite book, the one she had read eleven times, the one with the hero who claimed his woman the way gravity claims the sea — when the private message window opened.

Corvin Vale: Your post in the Trinity thread. The one about the claiming scene in chapter nineteen. I've read it four times tonight.

Vesper sat up straighter. The handle meant nothing to her — no post history she recognized, no avatar, just a black square with a raven's silhouette cut into it. A lurker, probably. Or new.