CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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VICTORIA
The knock came at half past midnight on Tuesday. One knock, then no handle turning, no weight against the wood.
“Victoria — yes or no,” Marcus said through the door.
“Marcus.” I got both bare feet flat on the floor. The boards were still holding the day’s heat. “Yes.”
He came in with a manila folder and pushed it across the table into the ring of the shop lamp, and then he laid his hand on top of it, the gold of it flat against the paper.
Everything past the lamp was black. Under us the shop was cooling, tick by tick, the way iron does once the doors are shut on it.
“You’re not going to like the shape of this,” Marcus said.
“I haven’t liked the shape of anything since Thursday.”
“Fair.”
He opened the folder one-handed.
It was our paper. Marchetti & Ward, the gray header, the bonded-transit stamp, the routing block I have filled in more times than I have written my own name.
Marcus turned the page around so it faced me and set one fingertip under a line of print.
Bonded drop cage. Sealed, client-owned, climate-held. Under that was the code I had recognized in Marcus’s car on Sunday. He had spent Monday tracing the return through two depots and a clerk who wanted every question in writing.
“That’s this building,” I said.
“Behind the bar in the Sable Room. Front of house. The public side of the iron.” Marcus tapped the page once. “It came back from the tower on Thursday. It’s been forty feet below and to the street side of your bed.”
The cold got into my hands before it got anywhere useful.
“Forty feet.”
“Forty feet of floor and one bonded lock,” Marcus said. “That’s all that’s been between you and it since Thursday.”
“It rode in on my own manifest.”
“It rode in on a manifest with your signature at the bottom, which isn’t the same sentence, and I want you to hear the difference.”
“Say the difference, then.”
“A courier signs for freight,” Marcus said. “A Warden signs for what’s inside it. He didn’t need a thief. He needed a woman who’d write her name on a line without being asked twice.”
“And you all let it sit in the front of house.”
“A sealed crate came under a standing storage agreement. The clerk accepted it on the public side. The reservation notice came to us.” He turned the sheet over.
“Your code got us to the depot. The depot gave me the return weight. Nineteen kilos, case and packing included. Your original consignment.”
“I said it in a car.”
“You said it once and you said it flat and you were right,” Marcus said. “That’s the only reason I’m standing here at this hour.”
“The clerk opens for collections at four,” Marcus said. “I’ve got a man watching the cage until then. We take it out on paper or the alarm goes straight to Crane.”
“Six days to the equinox.”
“Six. Tomorrow we start using them instead of letting him spend them for us.”
He put a clean shirt from the depot tote on the chair. “Yours is on inside out.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.” He left the shirt where I could reach it and went back to the file.
I sat down in the chair that faces the door. My coffee had gone cold hours before and I drank some of it anyway, black, bitter as a battery.
There was no sugar beside the cup. Luca had stopped bringing it upstairs after the night I told him about my ex.
My jacket hung on the back of the chair with the photograph still in the pocket, face down, where I had put it in the car.
The third tread has complained about Luca since the day it was cut. He came up sideways with a plate in one hand, bear-shouldered, because he does not fit that stairwell any other way.
“Eat the eggs, trouble. I’m not carrying you down those stairs.”
“I’m not hungry.”
He came the rest of the way in and put the plate down beside the folder anyway, square in the ring of the lamp, close enough that the steam off the eggs came up into my face.
“Didn’t ask you that.”
“Luca.”
“There’s eggs, there’s bread, there’s a knife,” he said. “Three things. You can be angry at all of them from a chair.”
Bread, eggs, a knife laid down flat with the handle turned toward me. Then Luca went back to the door frame and ate standing, tearing his own bread with his fingers.
I picked the knife up because he had put it that way around, and I ate about half of it, and Luca watched the yard through the window the entire time and never once looked at my hands.
Gas and throttle grease came off his hands. Warm bread under that. Off the harbor, through the open window, the wet-stone smell of low cloud sitting on the water.
Luca lifted the cold cup. “You drinking this or punishing it?”
“Take it.”
He set it outside the door for the tray and came back. “Mercy. Didn’t know you had it in you.”
Down in the yard the northeast gate light flickered twice and held. A patched man walked the weakened corner. Luca had bolted a plain reinforcing plate over the damage, but the new ward name would not take there. Each attempt dulled before it was finished.
Somewhere under us the pack was awake and pretending to be asleep.
The lamp was in my eyes. I reached for it.
Marcus got there first. He did not reach past my shoulder to do it.
He went the long way, behind my chair, all the way around to the far side of the table, and turned the lamp’s throat down, and then went back to where he had been standing.
He moved the way the panther in him moves, which is to say I did not hear one boot of it.
Luca kept eating. Marcus went back to the page.
Neither of them made anything of it.
I did. It landed low in my chest and stayed hot there before I had a single sentence to put on it.
“You keep going around me.”
“Do I?” Marcus said, and did not look up.
“Forget it.”
“Already gone,” Marcus said, and turned the page over.
I stood. The floor was warm under my feet and the air was thick enough to drink and I could not sit still inside any of it.
“A whole week of men in a room deciding what I am, and not one of you has—”
Luca stopped chewing.
When Luca goes quiet it is the loudest thing in this building.
“Any man out there touches you, I take the hand off at the wrist and I don’t hurry,” he said.
There was something savage down under that, and none of it was pointed at anybody standing in this room. It was aimed out past the fence, at the whole world at once.
“That isn’t comforting,” I said.
“Wasn’t built to comfort you.” Luca shifted his weight and the door frame took it. “It’s just true.”
Marcus closed the folder and picked it up off the table.
“I’ll leave you the room,” he said.
He got two steps.
“Marcus. Stay.”
He stopped where he was.
And then the other one, which was the hard one. My throat did the thing it does before I cry, and I was not going to do that, and I had to take the breath twice before it would carry anything at all.
Neither of them offered. That was the whole of it, standing there — that if I wanted the second man in this room I was going to have to put him in the air myself, out loud, in my own voice.
Luca was still in the door frame with bread in his hand, waiting to be told to go.
“Luca. You too.”
The room did not move. Luca looked at me and did not put the bread down.
“Say that again,” he said.
“No.”
“Trouble.”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
Luca set the plate down the way he sets down things he does not intend to break.
“Ours. Not yours, not mine. There’s no version of this where one of us loses.”
He said it the way you read a claim off a manifest. Flat. Already settled. Nothing in it left to argue with.
Marcus laid the folder on the crate, closed, beside the plate. The table between us was bare.
“I want both of you,” I said. It cost more to put that in the air than any bargain I had made all week.
Luca’s face changed first. Not triumph. Relief.
“Good,” he said. “Because I’m terrible at losing.”
“You’re terrible at most quiet things,” Marcus said.
“Then don’t make this one quiet.”
I held out my hand. Marcus took it. Luca came to my other side.
“Then here’s the question,” Marcus said. “Yes or no, little courier.”
“Yes.”
Marcus crossed to the bed and stood at the edge of it with his hands still down at his sides, which he did on purpose, and which I felt in my knees.
“Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Ask me again in an hour and I’ll ask you again too.”
Luca stepped behind me and took my shirt up over my head from behind, and then Luca’s forearms came in under my ribs and lifted until my heels left the floor.
Marcus went down on his knees in front of me and worked my jeans off my hips, unhurried, one leg and then the other.
“I’ve got you. All of you. Whole weight, trouble — let it go,” Luca said into my hair.
Luca’s thumbs came up flat over my nipples. He rolled my right nipple slow under the pad of his thumb and then the left one, and Luca did not stop when I twisted in his arms. “Look at you,” Luca said into my ear. “You’re beautiful like this. Every part of you.”
Marcus put his mouth on my clit.
Not a kiss. Marcus went at my clit flat-tongued and patient, the way that man does everything, and my legs quit under me inside a minute.
Luca took my whole weight off the floor and did not let me fold. Marcus stayed exactly where he was, mouth still working my clit, riding the fact that I was shaking like it was information he had asked for.
“Stand up, trouble.”
“I can’t—”
“Didn’t ask you to,” Luca said. “I said stand up. I’ll do the standing.”
Marcus put two fingers up into my pussy without lifting his mouth off my clit, and Luca laughed low against the back of my neck and took my knees apart with his own.
“Table,” Marcus said.
Luca carried me there with one arm and Marcus lifted me up onto the cleared wood and pushed my knees apart with the flat of his hand.
Luca came around behind my head and spread one hand across my throat and held me down on the table for Marcus. Not squeezing. Just there, so I could not come up off it.
Marcus worked two fingers into my pussy and left them there, and brought his mouth down on my nipple at the same time.