Chapter 3: The Drift

She left New Orleans the morning after the shotgun-house argument with nothing but a duffel bag, three hundred dollars in crumpled twenties, and the echo of her mother’s final crack of pecan shell still ringing in her ears.

Twenty-three felt ancient. The power had already aged her in ways no mirror could show.

First stop: Biloxi. The casinos were low-hanging fruit. She sat at a blackjack table for an hour, rewinding every dealer bust, every bad draw, until the pit boss comped her a suite and a steak dinner she barely touched. She left before dawn with eleven thousand in cash and the vague nausea of someone who had cheated gravity and knew it would notice eventually.

Miami came next. South Beach in late summer 2005. She rented a studio on Ocean Drive with ocean-view windows she rarely opened. By day, she slept. By night, she hunted. A Cuban bartender with gold teeth and hands that knew exactly how hard to grip her throat. She paused him mid-thrust—cock buried deep, veins pulsing against her walls—and spent what felt like forty minutes grinding her clit against his frozen pubic bone, coming three times before she let time slip forward. He finished in four violent pulses, eyes wide with confusion and bliss, whispering in Spanish that she was a bruja. She laughed, kissed his stunned mouth, and left before he could ask her name.

Power refinement happened in fragments, stolen moments between cities.

Selective isolation was the first breakthrough.

In a Reno motel room in 2007, she discovered she could pause just one part of a lover’s body. A stockbroker named Paul—thick, eager, terrible at dirty talk—had her bent over the dresser. She focused the prickle, narrowed it like a spotlight. His cock froze inside her—rigid, throbbing, locked at maximum depth—while the rest of him kept moving, hips jerking helplessly, breath ragged, voice begging. She rode the motionless shaft like the world’s most perfect dildo, clenching and rolling until she squirted so hard it splashed the mirror. When she released the pause, Paul came instantly, collapsing over her back with a broken sob. She never saw him again.