CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
?
MARY
The faucet dripped into the steel sink long enough that I heard a metronome instead of a leak. Behind me, Artur Sokolov set his cup on the folding table.
“Mary Corinne Warren. Still standing up. You’ll sit down eventually.”
My shoulders came up off my ribs before I decided anything. I put them down.
“There aren’t any chairs,” I said. “They’re stacked in the garage. I looked.”
“You’ve been looking all night.”
“It’s a small house.”
“Sit on the counter, then.” He moved my apron strings along the laminate and left them crooked.
“I’m fine standing.”
He had not slept either. It was in his voice, thinner than at midnight.
The paper lay face-up where he had put it, my name typed under the one line at the bottom.
At two in the morning I had poured his water. Pouring made me smaller, and he took the smaller version.
“So when’s it actually happen?” I asked in the voice I use on a customer who cannot choose.
“Tuesday the second of December.”
I filled the same cup an hour later. “How many have to vote for it before any of it is real?”
“Three of four. Your husband is one man at a table of four.”
I kept the date and the count, and somewhere in the night I worked out that I was good at this and did not mind it.
At six he rolled his sleeves down and buttoned them.
“You’ll want to be finished before your father wakes up,” I said. “Is he on the boat, or at the house?”
“Sign it and find out.”
He put the pen in my hand and closed my fingers on it without asking. I set it back down.
“Tell me who else you bought and I’ll think about the pen.”
Artur stopped with the second cuff half done. “You’ll think about it.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Not to yourself. To me, first. Then I’ll tell you.”
“No. You go first.” I dried my hands down my floured apron. “You’ve got a car running out there. I’ve got all day and no chairs.”
“You’ve got until my father wakes up, and after that I stop being the polite one—”
“You’re not the polite one. You’re the one who says please.”
“Marchetti,” he said. “He’ll call it listening, like he hasn’t picked a side. Under the old rules that goes with the motion. My father paid for a man to sit still.”
Third family, third seat. My stomach dropped a floor before I could do anything with it.
“Then you’ve got nothing left I want,” I said, and left the pen where it was.
“Your brother is still the price.”
“He is the price.”
“So sign.”
“You’ve said that four ways since last night.” I turned back to the sink. “Try a fifth and see if it takes.”
I hummed four bars of Cielito Lindo into the running water. My hands went quiet. He never heard it.
“Answer me one thing.” I said it to the shutter over the sink, because there was no window behind it. “Has your father read all twelve pages?”
“Of what?”
“The alliance contract. The one you keep calling a receipt.”
Artur put his head back and laughed, warm, and that was the moment I got it.
“My father has one page and it’s enough. Whatever else those men wrote to each other, he’s never seen it and he doesn’t care.”
“He’s never read the rest and you let him walk in like that.”
“He doesn’t need the rest of it. He needs a wife who puts it in writing that she was bought.”
A wire went hot behind my sternum and stayed. I wanted him dead and let myself want it.
At twenty past six he pushed his sunglasses up.
“Nobody touches her,” he said to the man in the doorway. “She’s worth more without marks, and she’s already got two.”
At the door he turned around. “There’s coffee in the car. I’m sorry about your face, honestly. That wasn’t what I asked for.”
The garage door went up and came down, and it was me and one man and a table with no chairs.
?
I spent the last of that night in the middle bedroom doorway of Artur’s rented house, reading the only handwriting in the place not on the table.
At half past six the door came off its hinges.
It came in flat with the frame around it, and a pizza menu skidded across the tile to my foot.
Rian was first and filled that doorway, both hands up where I could see them. The man from the kitchen got one word out and Rian said two.
Nicolas stopped dead in the hall with his jacket open. Luca crossed the tile, went down on his knees and put both hands on my face.
My legs quit.
“You’re on the floor and that’s my coat under you. Keep talking. I don’t care what it is, just make noise.”
“There are height marks on the bedroom door,” I said. “Some kid, four of them, the last one says June, and then they moved out and left him on the frame.”
“Good. Keep going, don’t stop for me.”
“That’s all I’ve got. How long have you had this address?”
Rian answered from the doorway without turning around. “We got the address at six-oh-five. Six men when the car left the garage, one left inside. We came through the moment our men had the others away from your door.”
“Twenty-five minutes,” I said. “You came in twenty-five minutes.”
“We came,” he said.
Nicolas came last, crouched, looked at the cut over my right eyebrow, and did not touch it.
“You’re ours,” Nicolas said. “We’re going home.”
Luca picked the paper off the folding table and folded it into the inside pocket of the coat beneath me before wrapping it around my shoulders.
?
The drive back took an hour. By eight Nicolas had walked me to the island in the Perch’s kitchen, coat still on, the black stone warm under my palms.
Yelena came out of her galley with ice, a towel and a butterfly closure, and went back through the swing door.
Luca cleaned the cut, thumb under my jaw to hold my head still, and talked about nothing.
Rian reached over and took my left hand.
“Wrong wrist.”
He let go of it like it had come off a burner. “...Give me the other one, then.”
“You had two to choose from.”
“I’ll get it right by Christmas.”
I did not sit down.
“Marchetti will abstain. It counts with the motion, and he’s been paid for it. Tuesday the second of December. And Vasily’s holding one page out of twelve.”
Nobody said anything. The espresso machine hissed and quit.
“Say the last part again.” That was Nicolas, from across the island.
“He has one page and he thinks it’s the whole contract. He’s been telling his son so, and his son believes him.”
“Who told you that?” Nicolas said.
“Artur did, and he was enjoying himself while he said it, which is how I know it’s true.”
Luca did not wait to find paper. He took the black fountain pen out and wrote Marchetti on the back of his hand.
“He’s writing it on his hand,” Rian said. “That pen’s worth more than my car and he’s writing on his hand.”
“Buy a better car,” Luca said, without looking up.
“It’s a good car,” Rian said.
Nicolas looked at Luca, and Luca looked at the back of his hand, and a decision crossed that island neither handed to me.
I had been asking questions all night and I was done.
“You need a doctor,” Nicolas said.
“I need a shower and I need the three of you where I can see you.”
The doctor came before either. She cleaned and closed the cut properly, examined my eyes and wrist, and made Nicolas listen while she explained the wrap.
A sprain, not a break. She left instructions for the night.
I ate, showered with my left arm kept out of the water, and slept until the light had moved across the bedroom.
When I woke, all three were still there.
Nobody had tried to turn what happened into a meeting while I slept.
“Who shut my shop?”
“I did,” Nicolas said. “Last night, from the study. You weren’t in it. It stays shut until we know who let Artur onto your block.”
By evening I was in a clean T-shirt and jeans, and could hold a cup without the floor shifting under me. The left wrist still hurt when I turned it; I kept it supported. I had eaten twice and slept, and I was tired of having every sentence addressed to the cut above my eye.
My nipples were up under the clean shirt, and it was not the cold, and I wanted it anyway. I walked down the east hall to the master and all three of them came after me, and I turned around in the doorway.
“Don’t ask if I’m all right. Just don’t any of you let go of me.”
I took Nicolas’s right hand off his side and put it flat on my belly and held it there under mine until he stopped being careful with it. Then I moved it down over the denim until his fingers were on my clit, and got my other hand on Nicolas’s cock through the wool.
“You’re going to keep your eyes open and you’re going to let me look at you.”
Nicolas kissed me standing up, his other hand under my jaw and well away from the cut, and I got the jeans open myself and put his hand back on my pussy, his thumb on my clit.
“You’re the most beautiful thing in this house and you’ll hear it from me every day you’re in it.”
Luca got me down on the floor at the foot of the bed, got my shirt over my head, put his mouth on one nipple, and talked.
“Your thighs. Your belly. That mouth. I’ll name every part of you till you stop flinching, then I’ll start again.”
Luca named my thighs, the crease under my belly, my breasts, my nipples, my clit, my ass and my cunt, in the voice he uses on a judge. Somewhere in the second pass I stopped flinching.
Rian came down behind me on his knees, mouth on the back of one thigh then the other, hands full of my ass, working up toward my cunt.
“Look at you. Christ, you’re so wet already.”
“Then put your mouth on my pussy.”
“I’m getting there,” Rian said. “Hold still for one minute and let me have this pussy.”
Three of them in that room, none of them ever touched each other, and nobody had to say so.
They moved me onto the bed. Luca’s mouth went to my pussy, his tongue flat over my clit and staying there. Nicolas pinned my right wrist over my head and laid the bruised left one on his chest, where it had nothing to hold up.
Rian’s hand found my nipples and stayed rough on them, Luca kept his tongue moving on my clit, and I came on his mouth with my name somewhere in my hair. I could not have said whose hand was where. I lost the thread and did not get it back.
Nicolas had me first. On my back, slow, his cock all the way into my pussy, his palm went down on my sternum so I felt my heart counting under it. Rian’s mouth was at my nipples.
Luca stayed at my ear. “That’s his cock in your pussy and that’s his hand and he has not looked away from your face since the hall. Don’t close your eyes—”
“I’m not closing them.”
I got my hand around Rian’s cock, then took his cock in my mouth as deep as I could, and Luca talked me through that too, and Rian did not say one word for once in his life.
Then Rian turned me over and put his cock in my pussy from behind, fast, in to the hilt, one hand spread over my belly and the other hard on my ass. His fingers came around and found my clit.
“Good girl.”
Luca went last, on his back with me over him. I put Luca’s cock in my pussy myself, so the pace was mine and my thighs did all of the work.
“One more time, and let me hear the whole of it.”
“I said it.”
“You said it like a woman being polite. Again, and mean it this time.”
I came the second time with Luca’s cock in my pussy and my own hand on my clit, and then I cried, and none of them asked me why. Nicolas held my face in both hands until it stopped.
Rian checked the wrap against the doctor’s instructions and eased the part that had begun to pinch. He watched my fingers while he worked, and I stopped making a joke when I saw how carefully he was holding his own hands.
Luca checked the dressing over my eyebrow, then put his mouth on my nipples once more, unhurried, because he could. Nicolas came last with a plate and stood there until I ate.
By midnight the light beyond the glass had thinned and none of them had left that room. I slept between them with Luca’s arm over my waist and my wrapped wrist resting on a pillow. Rian had left his hand open beside mine.
Before dawn I woke to Rian on the end of the bed, shirt on, lacing his second boot.
“When you find him, I’m coming with you, and none of you gets a vote.”