CHAPTER 15
Ana
◆
My right hand stayed closed the whole night and I never once wanted to open it.
Inside it was a spent nine-millimetre case, brass, with the primer struck off-center, and it was warm because I was warm.
I had held it in other rooms before that one.
I had never held it in a room with all four of them standing in it.
The kitchen came before my room and I crossed it ahead of them with my hand dragging along the counter as I went.
That steel is colder than the rest of the floor at every hour and my hand came off it damp.
Matteo drew a hard wooden chair out from under the counter and carried it after me. Nobody asked him what it was for.
In the long corridor the screen beside the door was still awake. The last thing on it had come in from Sasha while we were in the elevator, and Cassian read it off the tablet without moving anything in his face.
“Read it out to me now,” I said, “because I will pick at it all night if you do not.”
“Bridgewell has issued a litigation hold,” he said. “It names the records custodians on the thirty-ninth floor, it went out this evening, and Desmond Thorne is on the distribution list.”
“A hold like that freezes every document I have ever touched at that firm,” I said. “It also puts my name on a list in front of the one man who already knows where to look for it.”
“It does, and it is tomorrow’s problem, and I am not handing it to you tonight.” He turned the tablet face-down on the ledge under the screen and left it there.
“The floor is on hold,” Matteo said from behind me. “Nothing gets in or out of this level tonight.”
Then my door shut and the corridor went out of my head entirely.
The bed stands with its head against the north wall and its foot open to the room.
The long padded bench runs parallel with the footboard, one stride off it.
The door is in the east wall and the low table sits beside the door.
One floor lamp stands in the north-east corner and there is no other light.
Somebody had been in ahead of us. On the low table there was a jug of water and two glasses, a bowl of salted oat crackers, a cluster of green grapes, a stack of folded towels and a shallow white basin.
Matteo set his chair against the west wall facing the bed and walked it back until it stood three strides off the foot.
Then he sat down on it and laid both hands flat on his knees.
The window in that room is sealed and there is nothing out there worth looking at, and I looked anyway.
The cloud had been down over the city for days and it was breaking for the first time, in long pieces, with nothing behind them.
Luca reached past my shoulder and brought the blind down, and that was the end of the weather.
The room held its usual smell, starched laundered cotton with the paper of my stacked legal pads under it.
Cassian stopped a half-step short of where he was going, set his weight and did not move again.
“You said the order and I am going to keep it,” he said, “so nothing in this room happens before I say it does.”
“That is agreed,” I said.
“You said it downstairs and I am going to give it back to you in your own words. Then you are going to tell me whether it is still true.” He did not soften a syllable of it.
“I want the four of you in one room, and I want Luca’s mouth first and you last, and I want Matteo where he can see all of it and does not have to do a single thing. ”
Mine came back as an instruction instead of a request, which is a different act performed with the same words, and I let it be that.
“That is the order I asked for and I still want it, in that order, starting now,” I said.
“Then here is how it runs.” He turned his head a little toward the other three. “Luca is first and he uses his mouth, and he does not stop until she has come. Rian is second and he takes her at the foot of the bed, and he checks her out loud while he does it.”
“Understood,” Rian said.
“Luca is third and she sets the pace of that one and he keeps his hands where she puts them. I am fourth and last. Matteo sits in that chair and he stays in it, and that part of it is his.”
“I have taken worse orders off you than that,” Rian said, “and not one of them ever finished with me being allowed anywhere near her.”
I laughed, which I had not planned on doing, and the dimple on the left side of Luca’s mouth came out.
Matteo came off the chair once, and that was the only time.
He crossed the three strides with the casing already in his fingers.
He put it into my right palm and closed my hand over it himself, one finger at a time, the way he had done it the first time down on fifty-nine.
His left ring finger is crooked and it is the one I feel first, every time.
He tapped twice on my sternum with two fingertips and waited.
I tapped twice on my own, and he took his hand back and went to the chair and sat and put his hands flat on his knees.
“Tell me the rule,” Cassian said.
“Rule Seven belongs to me, at any hour, to any of you, about anything at all,” I said. “And if my hand opens and that brass hits the floor, all four of you stop where you are standing, and nobody asks me one question about it afterwards.”
“That is the rule,” he said, “and it is the only thing in this room that outranks me.”
He put the lamp down to its lowest setting with his own hand, and the shine on the back of his right one went from white to almost nothing.
“I am counting down from three and then Luca is going to kneel in front of you,” he said.
He counted it out loud, one number at a time.
I undressed in front of all four of them and none of them moved to help, because I had not asked for help with that part and every one of them had heard me not ask.
I folded what I took off badly and put the pile on the low table by the door.
I laid the Rules card on top of it with the torn corner facing out.
The bootlace stayed where it was and the gray key stayed in the hollow of my throat.
Whatever the rope had put on my wrists had gone.
Cassian sent me to the bench and I sat down with my feet flat on the floor and my knees open, facing out into the room.
The footboard was behind my shoulders with a stride of floor between.
Luca went down onto the floor in front of the bench facing me.
Rian came around and stood behind it, so the bench itself was between the two of them and stayed there.
Cassian took the west end of the footboard, well clear of Rian, and from there he watched my face and nothing else in the room.
“I am going to describe every single thing I do to you and you are going to answer me while I do it,” Luca said. “You do not get to nod at me and you do not get to make a noise instead of a sentence.”
“I understood the arrangement the first time you explained it,” I said, “and I am not going to make you say it twice.”
“Your head goes back and it stays back until I move it,” Rian said. “Push against my hands as hard as you like, because I am not going anywhere and neither are they.”
He took a slow handful of my hair and tipped my head back until the only thing in front of me was the ceiling.
“I have two fingers on the inside of your right thigh,” Luca said, “and I am taking them up slowly, and I will stop exactly where you tell me to stop.”
“Do not stop anywhere on the way,” I said. “Put your mouth on me when you get there.”
He put his mouth on my pussy and his tongue went flat on my clit, and the sound I made was not a sentence.
“In words, tesoro.”
“I want your tongue where it is and I want it flat,” I said, “and I want you to stop being clever with it.”
“That is the best sentence anybody has said in this building.” He said it against me and I felt every word. “I can hear how wet you are, and your cunt is holding my fingers like it has an opinion about them.”
“Keep her talking, Luca,” Cassian said from the footboard. “I want to hear her get to the end of a sentence.”
Rian let my head come forward by the width of his fingers, and what I got when it came was Matteo. Three strides off, in the chair against the west wall, hands flat on his knees, watching my face and not one other part of me.
“I have three fingers in you and my tongue has not moved,” Luca said, “and I am not going to change either of those things until you come.”
“Then do not change them,” I said, “because I am close and I am going to be loud about it.”
I came on his mouth with my left hand on the edge of the bench and my right one shut and Rian’s hands still in my hair. I heard myself do it and did not care what the room made of it.
Rian took me off the bench with both arms as though I weighed nothing and put me on my back across the end of the mattress, hips at the edge, legs off the end. Luca went round to the east side. Cassian went to the west. Matteo did not move, and I checked.
“I am going to be rough with you,” Rian said, “and you are going to tell me the second you want less of it.”
“I will tell you and I will not be shy about it,” I said. “You should also know that I want it.”
He got his clothes off fast and without ceremony. His left hand went to the side of my throat under the jaw, over the bootlace and the key, and it stayed at the side and never once came across the front.
“Say my name.”
I said it.
“Say it again and put some fucking air behind it this time.”
I said it again with air behind it, and he put his cock into me in one movement and did not apologize for any part of it.
His right thumb went to my clit and stayed on it while the rest of him took what he had been given.
Luca came onto the mattress on his knees at my right shoulder, put his mouth on my nipples and two fingers into my mouth, and talked the entire time.