CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
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VICTORIA
Monday evening, and the Forge smelled of soup, wet coats, and the ordinary woodstove Pike had carried into the shop. Not the ward-forge. That corner was still ash.
I had eaten, showered, and slept for an hour with somebody else watching the door. Mara had checked my hand twice and Adrian’s neck until he learned that saying fine did not make her go away.
She had stayed with Mireille at Sparrow Point until the funeral van came. Her name was on the paperwork. Her own name, not facilities, not assistant, not a thing held in someone else’s account.
Crane’s ring was empty. The last hollow had fallen. The people we left at the yard had photographed Bell’s rifle where it landed and kept the camera running while he tried to explain it.
A report described something that had actually happened. That had not been true since the tower.
I stood in the church doorway with the book in its canvas bag. Daniel was putting Teddy’s drawings up on the wall beside the timetable. Bex held the tape in her good hand and gave instructions neither of them needed.
One dinosaur had a woman beside it. Short dark hair, glasses on a chain.
Teddy looked up when I stopped.
“That’s Mom.”
“I know.”
“She didn’t draw very good feet.”
“Neither did I.”
He considered that, then pressed the corner down himself. Daniel put an arm around him. Nobody took the picture away because it made the room sad.
Bex set a dish of butterscotch on the bar. Same gold wrappers. Not Corinne’s old dish; she had asked Daniel before she bought it.
“People can have one,” she said. “That’s what they’re for.”
I took one. Unwrapped it. Let it go sweet on my tongue.
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Luca waited at the bottom of the inner stairs. The canvas bag hung from my right shoulder, clear of the bandage on my left palm.
“Trouble. Come look what your floor’s got in it.”
Pike and Ellis had moved the iron box from the shop recess to the space under the inner room’s floor. Same box. Same hinges. New brackets bolted to the joists under Luca’s direction, with no wounded hands asked to prove themselves on a drill.
The room had its inside lock. A chair faced the door. Marcus had put the lamp where I could reach it without anyone leaning across my shoulder.
Adrian stood beside the bed, dressed in a clean shirt with the collar open around the dressing at his neck. No presidential patch. Still the man everybody in the building looked for when something needed doing.
I knelt and set the closed book into the box. I did not open it again. The second binding and the three witness names were already there, each written by the person who had chosen it. Nothing else needed my blood tonight.
“Let me see the lid,” I said.
Marcus held it up. Cut into the inside, beneath the salt channel, was a name.
RUSSO.
I looked at Luca.
“Before Thursday,” he said. “Before I knew what the hands were going to cost. I left that part under the cloth because I didn’t want you thinking the box had made up your mind for you.”
“You made this for me.”
“Yeah.”
“Not for the book.”
“The book needs a box. You need a place where you’re the one who has the key.”
I ran one finger along the deep, ugly letters. Not a title. Not an appointment someone had entered before I was born.
My name, in a home I was choosing.
I laid Rosalba’s capped pen in its cloth sleeve beside the book, then closed the lid. Locked it. Put the key on the ring with the old apartment key I had not decided what to do with yet.
Nobody asked me to give that one up.
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Marcus sat on the bed. Luca took the chair. Adrian stayed where I could see him.
The pull under my breastbone had changed after the writing. It was no longer a question I could mistake for danger. Three distinct places in a room, as certain as knowing where my own hands were.
The distance would still cost us. We would learn it carefully. They had signed knowing that, and I was not going to insult them by asking the same question until they gave me an answer I could carry more easily.
“I want a future that has work in it,” I said. “Real work. Not just guarding that box.”
“Good,” Marcus said. “We’re going to need somebody who reads the second page.”
“And dinners where nobody’s bleeding.”
Luca glanced at his hands. “Ambitious.”
“And all three of you in it. Not taking turns pretending you don’t mind.”
Adrian looked at the other two. Marcus nodded once. Luca leaned back as though something heavy had finally come off his shoulders.
“We mind plenty,” Luca said. “We can do it at the same table.”
I laughed. I had not expected to, with the book still warm beneath the floor and two funerals in the week ahead.
Marcus held out his hand. I went to him, then stopped where I could see all three faces.
“I love you,” I said. “All of you. I’m not making that smaller so it fits somebody else’s idea of a good woman.”
Marcus stopped smiling.
The change frightened me for half a second. Then he took my unhurt hand and laid it against his chest, where the careful man was not nearly as calm as he looked.
“I love you, Vic. I keep looking for a clever way to say it. That’s what I do when I’m frightened of giving somebody the real thing.”
“You can stop looking.”
“Working on it.”
I went to Luca next. He moved his knees to make room for me and kept his hands where I would not knock them.
“I want you when the glass falls too,” I said.
His face went still.
“I heard you,” he said, much too quietly.
“Then say something.”
“I love you, trouble. Even when you’re mean enough to make me talk about it.”
I put my forehead against his. He closed his eyes and stayed there.
Adrian did not call me over. I crossed the last of the room myself.
He looked at the ring of keys in my hand, then at my face.
“I love you,” he said. “You don’t have to be useful, or brave, or easy to keep. You can just come home.”
I had carried things for six years without once believing I was allowed to put them down. I stood in that room and finally did.
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Later the rain started on the tin roof. My jacket hung beside the door. The keys were on the crate, within reach. Nobody was waiting downstairs to tell us what the night would cost.
I went to Luca first. I opened my own buttons while he watched. The shirt and bra went over the chair. Then I took his face between my hands and kissed him. Marcus moved the lamp away from the bed. Adrian shut the inside door when I asked him to.
This was not a reward owed for a rescue. It was what I wanted after I had slept, and eaten, and told them the truth.
Then Luca put his mouth on my nipple and the rest of the shop talk went out of my head entirely.
Luca worked that nipple with his tongue until my knees quit under me, and then he went to the other nipple, slower, his beard dragging underneath it, his forearm braced behind my back.
“Luca—”
“I know. Both of them. I’m not in a hurry, trouble.”
Luca was not in a hurry. He stayed on my nipple until the wanting went from something in my head to something low and mean in my hips, and I heard the rain again only because I had stopped hearing anything else.
Marcus came off the bed behind me and got his hands under my arms and held me up, and Luca did not stop.
“I’m asking twice,” Marcus said against my ear. “My mouth or my hand, Vic.”
“Mouth.”
“Asking twice.” He waited. He always waits, and the waiting is the worst and the best thing anybody has ever done to me.
“Marcus. Your mouth.”
I stepped out of my jeans and underwear. Marcus laid me back on the bed and got my thighs up over his shoulders and his mouth on my clit, and he stayed with me and never went past me, the way Marcus has done since the first time.
He held my hips down with his forearm and worked my clit with the flat of his tongue and then the point of it. Marcus made a sound against my pussy like the whole thing was being done to him instead.
“Stay there,” Marcus said into my pussy, and would not let me close my thighs, and I came with his three cold rings pressed into my hip and both my hands full of blanket.
Marcus stayed where he was through the end of it, easing off my clit and not off me, until my heels came back down onto his shoulder blades.
Marcus watched my heels come down off his shoulders the way he reads a number twice. “Perfect,” Marcus said. “That’s what that is, Vic. Somebody should have told you a long time ago.”
“That’s one,” Marcus said. “I’ll ask you again for the next one.”
Rain. Adrian turning me onto my knees. Luca’s forearm against my belly, his wrapped hands kept clear of my skin.
Luca put his cock in my pussy slow enough that I heard the noise I made from a long way off, like it came from the stairwell.
Luca said it into the back of my neck. “That’s my arm on your belly and that’s my cock in you, and I’m gonna say both out loud till you stop thinking about that book.”
He said both. He kept saying them. Luca’s cock did not go faster for a long time, and my mouth stopped making words that were words.
“You’re beautiful, trouble,” Luca said, and Luca’s forearm rested against my belly when he said it. “Beautiful from this side and beautiful from every side I’ve ever had you.”
Then Marcus knelt up by my head. Marcus put his hands in my hair and nowhere else, and I turned my face and took Marcus’s cock in my mouth.
Luca kept his forearms alongside my hips. Luca’s cock stayed in my pussy. Marcus’s fingers stayed in my hair, and neither man lost track of me.
Marcus said my name once around the sound I was making on his cock, and then Marcus could not say anything at all, which I have wanted since the night he told me no.
Luca kept talking for both of them. Luca said where his cock was and what my pussy was doing around it and what he was going to do about that, and none of it was a question.
“She’s gone,” Marcus said, somewhere above me.
“Yeah,” Luca said. “That took long enough.”
I do not know the order after that. I know Adrian turned me face to face. I know I was on top of Adrian first, riding his cock with my hands flat on his chest and the rain going savage on the tin above us.
Then I was not on top. Adrian rolled me under him and got his hand against my jaw and his cock all the way in me, and Adrian took what he wanted and let me feel him decide to.
His thumb found my clit without looking. Adrian does not fumble for anything, ever, and I stopped being a person with a plan.
“Look at nothing else,” Adrian said. “Just me. Victoria Russo.”
I looked at nothing else. Adrian’s cock was all the way in me and Adrian’s hand held my jaw and there was rain on the tin, and for once in this whole book of a life I was not running from any part of it.
“Victoria,” he said, low, into my hair. And then, again, without a joke or an order to hide behind: “I love you.”
He came saying it. I felt every part of that.
Adrian did not get off me for a while after. He put his forehead down on my collarbone and stayed there, heavy, and I let him be heavy.
After, there was come drying on my thighs and salt on my own skin when I licked my lip, and rain on the tin roof, and four people in a bed built for two, and nobody on the floor.
Marcus went to sleep first, which I would not have bet on.
A panther in a warm room, out cold, with three doors between him and the street.
Luca did not go to sleep at all. Adrian lay with one arm across the pillow above my head, awake, listening to the yard through the rain.
He had already told Bex that nobody comes up these stairs tonight, and he told Bex, not me.
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Marcus woke long enough to take the three rings off his left hand. He set them on the crate beside my keys.
“Enough metal in the bed,” he said, and lay back down.
Luca’s forearm rested along my waist. His hands were cleanly wrapped and kept clear of the blanket’s rough edge. Adrian had let Mara finish with his neck before he ever came upstairs; the dressing stayed where she had put it. There was nothing left for any of us to prove by ignoring a wound.
“Tomorrow?” I asked into the dark.
“Breakfast,” Luca said.
“After breakfast.”
“Probably lunch. I’m not predicting farther than that.”
Marcus laughed against my hair. Adrian’s hand found mine beneath the sheet.
Under our floor, the book stayed shut.
Around it, a house went on being a house.