CHAPTER SIX
?
VICTORIA
The van was gone before Luca reached the fence. Marcus copied its plate from the gate camera; I described the green backpack until he had every buckle. Corinne said Teddy was asleep upstairs and his schoolbag was red. I made her check the window locks anyway.
Somebody had put a child’s bag where we would look at it. That was worse than a camera.
The door of the room over the shop had no lock in it, so when it moved I was already on my feet.
Marcus filled the frame and did not come through it. He leaned in, only his head, and said my name into my hair.
“Victoria.”
He had a bottle of water in one hand, sweating cold, and three gold rings on the other catching the yard lamp. He smelled like cold cigarette smoke in wool, and under that, clean skin.
“Half this building can scent you through a door, little courier. Me included.” He stayed exactly where he was. “Can I come in? I’ll go if it’s no.”
I didn’t answer him. Under the floor the compressor kicked on, ran its cycle, and shut off with a knock in the pipe. He stood through the whole of it with his weight on the frame and his eyes somewhere polite.
The silence went on long enough to be rude. He let it.
“You always do this,” I said.
“Every time. It’s the only good habit I’ve got.”
I stepped back, and he came in two steps and stopped. He set the bottle on the crate beside the lamp and stayed standing.
“I checked Luca’s account against the old file,” he said. “Crane can’t open it himself. Not when your grandmother was alive. Not now.”
I heard it, and then I heard it again, the way you do with something heavy you have to carry down stairs.
“Say that again.”
“The book will not open for Elias Crane. It never has. It never will.”
Since Tuesday morning I had been standing on nothing at all. That was the first floor anybody had put under me. I took a fistful of the blanket to check that the blanket was still under me too.
“Then what does he need me for?”
“Hands, little courier. That’s the whole list.”
My legs sat me down on the bed before I had voted on it.
“Sixty-four years is a long time to want somebody’s hands,” I said.
“He’s got nothing but time. He spent eleven years on paper just to get a Russo onto a manifest, and the paper was beautiful. I read it. I signed off on the—”
“So you knew.”
“I knew a job was coming through a firm we’ve used for years. I didn’t know whose hands were on it until I saw you in that elevator.” He didn’t soften any part of that. “You want to be angry at somebody in this building, start with me. I’m at the front of the line and I earned it.”
“I’m angry at all of you.”
“Sure. But you’re allowed to rank us.”
That almost got a laugh out of me, which at that hour was a kind of assault.
Under the anger, sitting where I could feel it, was the part of me that was glad he had signed the run off himself. Somebody had chosen me on purpose. Nobody had done that since my grandmother died, and I would have taken it off a worse man than him.
“You could have told me the book won’t open for him in the yard,” I said. “Marcus.”
Something went out of his shoulders. I had used his name before. Not like that. Not as a request to stop making it easier on himself.
“I could have,” he said. “I wanted you fed first. Bad news travels fine on a full stomach. Good news doesn’t travel at all.”
“That isn’t a real rule.”
“It’s mine and I like it. Come back tomorrow, I’ll have three more.”
He reached for the lamp switch, and his arm came past my shoulder to get there.
I flinched. Not a small one. My whole back went into the wall and my elbow cracked against it and I made a sound I have never made in front of another person.
His arm stopped. Then it came back, slow, the way you take a hand off something you have startled.
“My fault. I’ll come the other—”
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“It’s not a thing.” He shrugged one shoulder. “It’s just how I walk now.”
I did not explain it to him. He did not ask me to.
He went the long way, around the foot of the bed, and killed the lamp from the far side. After that the only light in the room was the yard through the beaded glass, with a ring around it.
I stood up. I could not have told you why.
He was between me and the window, and I walked into the space in front of him and stopped with a hand’s width left, and neither of us did anything with it.
“Can I put my mouth on you?”
I didn’t answer fast enough. Half a second, maybe less, and he took his weight back off the balls of his feet and gave me the air again.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
He pushed the door shut behind me and the latch was loud. His mouth went in under my jaw and stayed there.
His other hand came up under my shirt and lay flat on my belly, warm and dry, and did not move at all.
The rings were cold against my hip. Then they were not cold. Then they were exactly as warm as I was, and I could not find the line where they stopped and I started.
My breathing got away from me first. Everything else came after it.
He took my shirt off over my head, unhurried, like a man clearing a table he intended to use. My bra followed it onto the crate.
“Hands on the wall, little courier. Leave them there.”
I left them there.
He put his mouth on one nipple and two fingers on the other and did not rush either of them.
“Look down,” he said. “Watch what I do to it.”
I looked down. My knees became his problem before he had gone anywhere below my ribs.
He said something into my skin about how long he had been thinking about doing that, and I lost the sentence, and what I kept instead was the flat of his tongue coming back over the nipple.
“You’re gonna have to stand up.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder. I’m not done up here.”
“You’re going to be up there all night,” I said, to the ceiling.
“That’s the plan. I like your nipple. I’m going to be unreasonable about it.”
He wasn’t. He worked that nipple until it hurt, then kept going after the hurt turned into something I would not say out loud, and when he changed sides he put his teeth in the other nipple, once, and my hips came off the wall to meet nothing at all.
He got my jeans open with one hand.
“Say it out loud or I don’t move.”
“Yes. God. Yes.”
His hand went down the front of them. Two fingers went into my pussy and his thumb found my clit on the first pass, which nobody has ever done, and he made a small pleased sound about it in the back of his throat.
“Well, there you go,” he said. “You’re already soaked, little courier.”
“Marcus.”
“That’s it. Right there on your clit. Don’t go anywhere.”
Then he changed nothing. That was the cruelty of it. He found the thing that worked and simply kept doing it at that speed while my legs went out from under me.
His forearm came across my ribs and took all of me. His thumb never left my clit. His fingers stayed in my pussy and my hands stayed flat on the wall where he had put them.
“Don’t you hold it. You give it to me standing up.”
His thumb kept working my clit in the same small circle it had started with, and my whole body went up on its toes for it.
I came standing up. He did not stop and he did not let go while it happened, and he made me finish the whole of it inside his hand.
“There she is,” he said into my hair.
He put me on the bed on my back. My jeans went somewhere. His shoulders came in under my knees and stayed.
He put his mouth on my clit like he had nowhere else in the world to be that night.
Two fingers in my pussy, curled, slow. Tongue flat and then not flat. Every time I got loud he backed off a half step and made me come up off the mattress to find it again.
“Nope,” he said, against me. “You come to me.”
Then he put his forearm across my hips and pinned them flat and went back to my clit, and after that there was nothing left in the room but his mouth and two fingers working in my pussy.
“You’ve got a filthy mouth for somebody with mine on her pussy.”
He put his tongue back on my clit and his fingers came deeper into my pussy and stayed. My heels were on his back. My hands were in the blanket. I said things I could not repeat under oath.
And then, right at the edge, with my whole body already gathered up for it, he stopped.
I made a noise like something being taken away.
He turned his head and spoke into the inside of my thigh, and I felt every word of it land on the skin.
“Once to hear you. Again so you know you can change your mind.”
“Then ask.”
He waited. He let my own breathing be the loudest thing in the room until I had to hear it.
“Can I have the rest of you?”
“Yes.”
He went back down and finished what he had started, and I came with his mouth on my clit and his fingers still in my pussy and the ring of light on the beaded glass swimming somewhere over his shoulder.
His coat went over the crate. He pulled off his shirt and let it fall beside the bed. After that I lost the order of it.
I know he came up the bed. I know he took my right hand and closed it around his cock himself and set the grip he wanted with his fingers over mine.
“Slower. There. Just like that.”
He was not shy about telling me what he wanted. He said it plainly, out loud, in a room with a door that did not lock, and every plain word of it went through me like a hand.
I know I had my mouth on him after that, because I remember the salt of his throat first and then the taste of him. I remember that his hand in my hair never pushed.
It kept time. That was the entire job it did.
I remember the weight of his cock on my tongue and the head of it against the inside of my cheek and his voice saying my name like a fact he was checking.
I remember saying yes. I remember his hands stopping until I did. The rest came back to me out of order.
His cock was heavy and hot in my fist and he was quiet in a way that was not calm.
“Open. Good girl — no, don’t move. I’ll do the moving.”
He told me exactly how much of his cock he wanted in my mouth and I gave him that much and no more, because he did not ask for more, and I have never in my life wanted so badly to be asked for more.