CHAPTER 23 #2
Helene is two doors down in her own small room with the medical kit unpacked on the side table and the cobalt enamel pin she wears now (the spare; she had to replace the original after Ines died on the lobby floor at floor 35) freshly polished on her cardigan.
Sebastian is at the door of this suite, in the corridor, standing two paces from the threshold.
Henrik is at the head of the stair at the landing.
The Hinckley is moored at the Tessellate's small private dock, dark, waiting.
I have changed out of the black wool dress.
I am in the dove-gray silk gown I brought for tonight.
The gown is long and ties at the side with a silk sash the color of slate that came folded inside the gown's garment bag this morning and that I unfolded and laid across the chair while I dressed because tonight the sash is an instrument.
The gown opens at the side from the hip.
I have only a pair of pale silk briefs on underneath, and they have a short tenure tonight.
My hair is loose at my shoulders. I have taken the brass pencil out of my hair and set it on the marble of the writing desk in the sitting room of the suite, beside my leather memo cover, because tonight the pencil also stands down.
The door of the sitting room opens at 19:28. Julian comes in alone.
He has changed his shirt. He has kept the suit.
The white shirt is fresh and the collar is open at the throat now, and the silver cufflinks are off, and his hands are bare in the candlelight.
He sees me at the window of the sitting room with the gown long around my ankles and the slate sash loose at my hip and the small Tessellate-staff supper tray on the low table by the fireplace untouched, and his pale gray eyes go from me to the tray to me again.
"Quinn. " His voice is the voice of the council chamber an hour ago and the voice of the corridor an hour ago and the voice of the boat yesterday. "Eat first."
I eat first. We sit at the small Federal table by the fire and I eat the half-portion of poached chicken and the small cup of broth Helene has approved and a heel of bread and a single glass of Sancerre — one only.
He keeps his hands folded and watches me.
He has fed this morning at 09:00 from a donor cup per the seventy-two-hour pre-Tessellate medical advice that has just expired at noon today.
His last live feeding was on the fourteenth, the night in the master bedroom at Vance Tower when he put his teeth at the carotid line and I shouted yes and then basis-point and he stopped within two beats.
He has been hungry for me for six days. I have been hungry for him for six days.
We have both kept it under the surface. We have both said so by the simple arithmetic of him keeping the brand against my sternum every night while we slept beside each other and keeping his hands in their own quiet places.
He sets down his water glass. He says: "Tonight, with the council under the roof, with everything else still on the board, I want to know what you can take."
I set down my wine.
I look at him across the small table at the firelit corner of the corner suite at the Tessellate on Beacon Bay, with the audit on file and the public claim on the formal register at 11:32 this morning and the brand under his sleeve and the slate sash at my hip, and I say: "Show me."
He rises.
He walks the two paces to my side of the table. He holds out his hand. I put my hand in his. He draws me up from the chair. He leads me through the open doorway of the sitting room into the bedroom of the corner suite and closes the door behind us.
The bedroom of the corner suite at the Tessellate is the Tessellate's iron-canopy room, kept for principal guests since 1798, and the canopy is exactly what it sounds like: four massive iron posts at the head of the bed, two at the foot, an iron crosspiece overhead, a frame that has held the linens of council elders since the chamber upstairs was built.
The leftmost post at the head of the bed is the post under the window over the garden; the window's shutter armor is closed against the night.
A small fire in the iron grate at the far wall. The Waterford in the corridor outside the door stays beyond the threshold; the room is firelight only, low gold and the slow shift of the fire on the white linen.
He stops me in the middle of the room. He turns me to face him.
"The sash is yours. " He says it carefully. He says it the way he has said every contract clause he has read me since I was extracted out of floor 28 at 16:00 on a Thursday in November. "Color?"
I have read the heat_guidance file in my own head a hundred times in the last week. I have read his voice card. I know the protocol. "Green."
"Yellow if you wish to slow. Red if you wish to stop. The safeword is basis-point; that overrides everything. Color?"
"Green."
"Tell me you understand what I am about to ask of you."
"You are going to tie me to the post. " I do not look away from him.
"You are going to use the blindfold. You are going to take me orally and you are going to bite the femoral region of my right thigh and you are going to fuck me.
You are going to give me three drops of your blood from a small cut on your right wrist after, and that is a taste, not a bond.
The bond is something else and it is not tonight. I understand. Color green."
His pupils blow wide. The pale gray of his eyes goes to the cold-sky thin ring at the edge of a wide black pupil. The cold radiating off his skin drops the air in the room a degree.
"Quinn."
"Vance."
He puts his hand at my hip. He works the slate sash loose at the side of the gown with his right hand, slow, the knot giving at his fingers; the sash slides out of the loop and into his palm.
The gown opens at the side from hip to ribs.
He slides the gown off my left shoulder, then my right.
The silk falls to the floor at my feet in a slow heavy pool.
I am in the pale silk briefs and nothing else. He kneels once to lift the gown out of the way against the foot of the bed; he lays it folded on the dressing-room bench because he is a tidy man who handles silk with care. He stands.
He hooks his thumbs in the waist of the briefs and slides them down my legs. I step out of them. He sets the briefs on top of the gown. He turns back to me.
I am naked at the foot of the iron canopy bed in a corner suite at the Tessellate on Beacon Bay Island at 21:14 on a Friday in December and I am not cold.
The brand under his sleeve has heated the room or my body has heated the room.
He looks at me. He looks at me the way he looked at me the first morning he came down to the Greybar in November, except slower.
He says: "On the bed. On your back. Wrists above your head together at the leftmost post."
I climb up on the white linens of the iron canopy bed.
The mattress is firm; the linen is cold; the iron of the leftmost post at the head, against my left palm as I reach up, is colder still.
I lie on my back. I put my wrists together above my head, the inside of each wrist together, the right wrist's chemical-burn scar against the inside of the left, and I curl the joined wrists around the iron post.
He follows me onto the bed. He kneels beside me on the linen.
He has the slate sash in his hands. He wraps it carefully around my wrists and around the iron post; he ties the quick-release knot at the top, the loop he has shown me before with the tail of the sash on the outside of my wrists so I can pull it free with one tug if I have to.
He tests the knot with two fingers against the loop. He says: "Pull."
I pull. The knot releases. The sash slides down my forearms.
"Again," he says.
I put my wrists back. He re-ties. I do not pull this time. He tests the loop. He says: "Color."
"Green."
He brings out the blindfold from the inside pocket of his jacket.
It is dark blue silk, doubled, the size of two folded handkerchiefs.
He lifts my head with his palm at the back of my skull and slides the blindfold over my eyes and ties it at the back of my head.
The dark is gentle; the silk is warm at the bridge of my nose.
He pulls back to look at me. He says: "Open your eyes. "
I open my eyes. I see nothing — only the dark of the doubled silk, the perfect black of the inside of a thing that has been made to keep light out. I close my eyes again. The blindfold is the same with my eyes closed or open; the dark belongs to me now.
"Color," he says.
"Green."
I hear him remove his shirt. I hear the cufflinks come off and onto the bedside table — small clicks of metal, one, two.
I hear the trousers come off and the trousers go on the chair where the gown went.
I hear his weight return to the bed at my left side.
I hear him take a slow breath, and then I feel his left forearm — the inside of his left forearm, the brand — slide carefully under my upper back and settle between my shoulder blades.
The cold of the silver brand against the bare skin of my upper back is unmistakable; the four-inch six-spoked wheel of the wound from 1547 Compostela has its own temperature, and that temperature is the temperature of a small piece of cold metal that has lain on snow for an hour.
I hold steady against it. I have kissed this brand in the rooftop greenhouse five days ago at 14:15 with Helene on the stair below; my body knows it as a thing of his.
He says, against my collarbone: "I am at your back."
"I know."
"I am at the front of you too."
"I know."