CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
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VICTORIA
“Victoria.”
“Trouble.”
“Vic.”
Adrian first. Then Luca. Then Marcus. Past midnight on Saturday, and all three at my door. Adrian stood at the threshold, Luca a pace behind him, Marcus on the landing. None of them came in until I moved the chair out of their way.
The hall bulb burned behind them. Luca held his forearms clear of the jamb. Marcus kept his weight off his left side; Mara had checked his stitches before she went to bed. Adrian looked at me rather than at the room he wanted to enter.
The room smelled like wet brick and the cut-onion sweetness of the gauze on Luca’s palms. Under it, bear, warm and close, the way it comes up off Luca when he has been standing still.
Thunder went off out past the water with no rain under it. The building ticked as it cooled. My sheet was damp already and nobody had put a hand on me.
I wanted them there. All three. I also wanted to keep them after Monday, and I was afraid I would confuse those two things if I did not say the price aloud.
The chair stood turned away from the wall. I got hold of its back and hauled it out of the floor between us and set it down facing the painted-shut window.
Then I said the thing I had carried up the stairs.
“Two days.”
Not one of them handed me a number back. Adrian’s jaw moved and stopped. Luca looked at the boards. Marcus watched my mouth the way he watches a man’s hands.
“I can cross him out or I can write him down again. That’s the whole list.” My voice came out flat, the voice I sign manifests in. “And neither one is free. Don’t any of you stand there and tell me one of them is free.”
“We weren’t going to,” Marcus said.
“Strike the name and he comes out wearing the shape he went in wearing. Out here. On Rosewood Street, in the dark, and I’m the one who let him out.”
“And write it twice,” Marcus said, “and it holds harder. Witnessed.”
“Witnessed ties the witnesses.” I made myself say the rest of it plainly, because plainly was the only way it was going to fit in the room. “Not held. Tied. Whoever stands over me while I write can’t go far from me after and stay well. That’s the price and it isn’t mine to pay.”
“Then we talk about the distance,” Luca said. “We don’t pretend it isn’t there.”
“You have a business. A life.”
“I know. I’m the man who has to decide what I do with it.”
Marcus came a half step forward. “He’s right. You don’t get to choose the cost for us any more than we get to choose it for you.”
I looked at Adrian. He had been standing still through the whole of it.
“And tonight?” I asked.
“Tonight you tell us whether you want us here,” he said. “It doesn’t sign a thing.”
Adrian came in one step. Only one.
“You don’t get handed around in here,” he said. “You get kept.”
Adrian does not repeat himself and he did not repeat that. He said it once, to me, at the height of my face, and then he stopped talking.
I turned my own phone face down on the sill. The gate team had the landline. For a little while, the rest of the world could use it.
Luca came in after him, sideways, the way he goes through anything. He held his wrapped hands up off his hips like a man who has just washed them.
“Nobody’s giving anything up tonight. Not one of us.” His beard moved. “Say it back.”
“Nobody’s giving anything up—”
“Louder than that.”
“Nobody’s giving anything up.”
Marcus was the last one through the door and he shut it behind himself with two fingers, softly, the way he does everything. He scented the room on the way in, once, the panther doing it before the man could stop him.
“Nobody in this room is losing anything,” Marcus said. “That’s the deal, and it’s not up for a vote.”
Something under my ribs came loose before I had agreed to it, and my knees got the news first, and I sat down on the iron bed because standing had stopped working.
Three sentences. Nobody looked at anybody else while they said them. Nobody checked with anybody, and nobody stepped back, and nobody put it to me as a question with two doors in it.
Nobody asked me to choose. That was the moment I understood I’d been waiting my whole life for a room where nobody would.
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Luca got to me first, because Luca is the slowest thing in this building.
“Hands are useless,” he said. “Mouth isn’t.”
He hooked the back of his wrist under my arm and stood me up with it. Then Luca went down the front of my shirt with his knuckles only, button by button, saying each one out loud as it gave.
“Two more. One more. There.”
Luca pushed the shirt off my shoulders with the heel of one wrapped hand. Luca took my bra strap down my arm with his teeth, and Luca’s beard dragged the length of my throat on the way back, and my nipple was tight before his mouth got anywhere near it.
“That,” Luca said, and put the nipple in his mouth and worked it with his tongue, unhurried, telling me what he was doing around it. The other nipple he got with the back of a knuckle, because a knuckle was all Luca had left.
“Look at you,” Luca said off the nipple, wet-mouthed and delighted about it. “Christ. You’re beautiful from down here, trouble, and I haven’t got the hands to be decent about it.”
“Bit down, that one,” Luca said. “Tell me if I’ve got it wrong.”
He did not have it wrong. Luca dragged his beard along under my breast and came back to the same nipple, and my whole spine went to water and my hand found the back of his neck and gripped.
Then Luca knelt on the boards and put his teeth on the button of my jeans.
“Button,” Luca said. “Zipper. Hips up, trouble.”
He took the jeans down my legs with his forearms and his mouth and no hands at all. Then Luca put a forearm between my thighs and pressed it up, slow, the whole hard length of it flat against my pussy, and my hips chased it before I had decided anything.
“You’re going to have to do the work.” Luca’s voice came up out of his chest like something being moved in a cellar. “I’m no use to anybody from the wrist down.”
Marcus had not come off the wall.
“Can I,” Marcus said.
I got a breath in and it came apart in the middle. Marcus waited. He is the most dangerous man in any room I have ever stood in and he stood there with his hands at his sides and waited.
“I said, can I. Say it out loud, Vic.”
“Yes.”
Marcus took the first one standing exactly where he was. He kept his injured side clear of the bed and let the word finish going across the room.
“Say yes again. I want it twice.”
“Yes.”
Marcus put me on my back on the iron bed the way he sets down a thing he has been paid to carry. Then Marcus’s mouth was on my clit and the three gold rings on Marcus’s left hand were cold along the inside of my thigh.
Two of Marcus’s fingers went into my pussy and stayed, curled, hardly moving at all, while Marcus’s tongue did every bit of the work. I came on Marcus’s mouth with my heel skidding on the sheet.
Marcus did not stop. He kept his tongue flat and slow on my clit straight through it, and my pussy clenched down on Marcus’s fingers twice, and the second one came up under the first one before the first one had finished with me.
“Perfect,” Marcus said against the inside of my thigh, checking it the way he checks a number twice before he says it. “You answer with your whole body. There’s no hesitation anywhere in you.”
“Again,” Marcus said into me, and that one was not a question, and I reached for him instead of answering in words.
Adrian had not touched me. Adrian stood at the foot of the bed where he could see the door, still in his cut, arms down.
“Hold onto the rail,” Adrian said. “Don’t let go of it.”
I got both hands over my head and both hands on the cold iron.
“Open your legs. Wider. Now stop moving.”
I stopped moving. My clit went on beating against Marcus’s tongue and I held still for it, and Adrian watched me hold still for it, and holding still was harder than anything anyone had asked of me all week.
“Good girl,” Adrian said. Flat. No warmer than an order, and it went through me like one. “Nobody else holds like that. That’s what you are in this room.”
“Wider, Victoria.”
I put my knees wider and Marcus’s mouth followed them out and my hands shook on the rail. Adrian had not come one step closer. Adrian had his boots planted and his eyes on my face and the door in the corner of them, both, all the time.
“Look at Luca. Not me.”
Adrian’s voice had gone down under the floor of what a throat is supposed to do. It came out savage and low and it stayed there. That is the wolf, and the wolf does not raise its voice; it lowers the room instead.
Then the gate alarm on the shop floor dropped one tone and came back.
All three of them were on their feet and between me and the door before the sound had finished arriving. Adrian at the hinge side. Marcus at the jamb with his weight forward. Luca square in the middle with his ruined hands open.
Bex called from the landing before anybody opened the door. “Street voltage. Ward’s steady. Camera’s clear.” She waited for Marcus to answer, then went back down. Nobody came back to the bed until we all had the same information.
Then they came back.
Luca sat down on the bed. Luca got me over one enormous thigh, and I rode it, and Marcus gathered my hair off the back of my neck in his fist and held it there like a rope. Luca’s cock was already out. Luca had gotten it out somehow with the backs of both hands and he was not proud of the method.
“Take hold of it,” Luca said. “Like a throttle. Not a rail. Turn your wrist when you get to the top.”
I turned my wrist on Luca’s cock the way he told me and Luca swore at the ceiling in two languages.
My clit dragged the denim over Luca’s thigh with every pass and my pussy was soaking the leg of his jeans and Luca said so, twice, because Luca says what his hands are doing even when his hands are not doing it.
“Slower at the top. There. That’s it, trouble.”
Marcus’s fist tightened in my hair and Marcus put his teeth just under my ear and left them there and did not close them.
“Vic,” Marcus said. “Can I.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“That’s twice,” Marcus said. “That’ll do.”