CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
?
MARY
Six days after the docks, I set my eleven-page copy on the dining table before dinner.
“Tonight,” I told them. “Bring me the whole one. Not when I’m less tired.
Not after you’ve decided what I can bear.
” Nicolas went to the Aurelio Building himself.
I left my copy where all of them would have to pass it.
On the seventieth evening the elevator settled somewhere under the floor, and Nicolas Varela came out of the dark end of the room with the rain still on his shoulders. He laid a paper folder under the one pendant light and opened it flat. He turned it around so the type faced me.
“Mary Corinne Warren,” Nicolas said. “That’s how it reads. Whole name, my brother’s hand, ninth page.”
The cold came up through my fingertips before I had read one word of it.
Rian was at the table already, both forearms on the wood.
Luca came in last out of the vestibule and stayed on his feet.
The terrace door was working its one low note against the seal, and the coffee had been dead in the pot since four.
“You drove across town in this weather, Nicolas, to tell me my own name,” I said.
“No.” Nicolas moved a finger down the stack and fanned it out. “Your copy has eleven pages stapled into it and no numbers on them. Mine has twelve, and the ninth is why I’m standing here.”
The top corner of the folder was warm where his thumb had been. I put two fingers on it before I decided to, and took them off again, and Rian watched me do both.
“AVC 4 is the company on page one,” Luca said. “The buildings, the license, the leases. Your bakery is no longer among them. The Accord seats that company as a whole, not Nicolas as a man.”
I did not put a hand on the paper.
“And the ninth page?”
“One quarter.” Nicolas had not sat down either. “Undilutable. It vests on day ninety and there’s nothing at that table that reaches it.”
“A quarter of what?”
“Of the company,” Luca said. “Of the license and the leases and the buildings and the ground under them. The protected quarter blocks them from executing a forfeiture of the seated company, and I could put that in Latin if it would—”
“It wouldn’t help either of us,” I said.
Nicolas gathered the twelve pages with the side of his hand and pushed them the last inch across the wood, slowly. It was the only unsure thing I have ever watched that man do.
“Twenty days left of it,” Nicolas said. “You can be downstairs before the street dries, and nobody follows you. I’ll see to that myself.”
He put the whole of it in my hands—twelve pages, no staple, warm where he had carried the folder against his coat—and told me I could take it and walk.
He could defend the seat with that page.
He could not order me to stand beside him while he did it.
The paper stayed in my hands, and for once he let the silence belong to me.
“He’ll see to it. I won’t.” Rian put both hands flat on the table. “I’d be parked outside whatever door you picked and you’d know it.”
“That isn’t a promise. It’s a threat.”
“It’s both,” Rian said. “I’m not going to dress it up for you.”
Nicolas did not contradict him and nobody apologized for it.
“Rian killed a man in front of me on that dock,” I said, “and not one of you had told me what his father stood to lose by letting me live.”
“This,” Nicolas said, and put one finger on the page in front of me.
I had to breathe out through my mouth to get my chest working again.
“What did it cost you to carry that down here?”
“Twelve minutes. And the last reason I had for pretending you needed to stay.”
He answered the question instead of the one underneath it. My hands were shaking on the paper. I put them flat to stop it.
?
“Why did you write the page, Luca?” I asked him across the dining table.
“I wrote it because I thought we were going to lose, and I wanted one signature nobody could take off the table,” Luca said.
He came off the wall then and sat on the edge of the table, which is where Luca sits when he is about to be honest and would rather not be.
“That’s the version I’ve been telling myself. The short one is that I wasn’t protecting the family. I was protecting you, and I hadn’t earned it.”
“Esperanza notarized this. She’d had the stamp in her purse. She—”
“She knew the grant was there. She thought I’d given you a complete copy. She’s been telling you to read a page I kept out of your hands. That was me, Mary. Not her.”
The strength went out of my legs from the sternum down, and I sat down hard. The wall caught the chair’s back. Across the table the doorway stayed clear, and none of the men filled it. Esperanza told me twice in that bakery. Both times I asked her for the short version.
I pulled the light toward me and started reading the alliance contract to them, page one, from the top.
I read the definitions. I read the recitals and the exhibit list and the whole paragraph on notices, which says a letter counts as delivered on the day somebody signs for it.
“You can skip the definitions,” Rian said.
“You’ve had seventy days to rush me. You’re out.”
Rian laughed once and put his hand over his mouth to stop it, and Luca watched him do that instead of watching me.
“How long’s this going to take?” Rian said.
“As long as it takes. Sit down, or go stand in the hall. There’s an elevator out there.”
“Fine. I’ll sit down.”
Nobody hurried me again. When I got to the ninth sheet I read page nine twice, and the second time my voice went somewhere in the middle of the sentence about the Class B unit, and I had to start that sentence over.
The ninth sheet gave me one protected Class B unit at the opening of day ninety.
A quarter of the company, held in my name alone, beyond the other members’ power to dilute, transfer or forfeit.
The grant had been binding since the first signing and survived the end of the alliance.
It did not depend on my staying in their house.
Ownership would vest at midnight beginning December second.
I read my name twice. Then I put a fingertip on the date and made Luca wait until I could ask the next question.
“And the other three quarters?” I asked.
Luca opened the Accord rulebook beside my contract.
One seat, indivisible; no transfer of territory while an independent protected holder remained.
I made him show me where. Then I made Nicolas read it too.
This time I was not accepting a man’s summary of what I owned.
“There she is,” Luca said.
I read the last page and squared the twelve of them and pushed the stack back across the wood.
“I was bought at this table,” I said. “For a debt somebody wrote onto my brother with a pen. I’m not going to be sold back across it because one of you found me a door.”
“Then take the door and keep the quarter,” Nicolas said.
“I’m not taking the door. I’d rather be yours than safe, and I’ve decided I don’t have to pick.”
“Plenty,” Luca said from the end of the table. He had made me say it at a black window in September and I had said it to the floor. Nobody had to make me now.
Nicolas pushed the stack back at me with two fingers, until the edge of it touched my knuckles.
“It’s yours whether you stay or go, Mary. That was true before I drove back here. I brought it so you’d know it,” Nicolas said.
I stood up. I took Nicolas’s right hand off the table and turned it over and put my mouth on the burn across the back of it, and I did not ask him one thing about it. Rian’s chair went back hard enough to bark on the limestone.
“Come to bed,” I said. “Nicolas. Rian. Luca. All three of you.”
I put the folder under my arm and carried it down the hall with me. In the bedroom I set it beside my bag by the door, somewhere I could reach it in the morning without asking any of them.
?
I took my own clothes off in the master bedroom with the lamp on, in front of Nicolas and Rian and Luca, and I did not put my right hand over the scar, and I did not say one apologizing word about any of it.
“Perfect,” Luca said. “Every pound of you, and I’ll name them in order if you make me. Breasts. That belly. Those thighs. That ass. Your nipples are up already and nobody has laid a hand on you yet.”
“Magnificent,” I said, before he could get there himself.
“Again,” Luca said. “On the record.”
“Magnificent.”
“Louder,” Luca said.
“You’ve had it twice, Luca. That’s all you’re getting out of me for free.”
Nicolas came around the end of the bed and put his mouth on the burn on my left forearm first, the way Nicolas does it every time, and said nothing about it at all.
Rian took me by the hips and got me onto the bed with no ceremony in it whatsoever.
“Christ. Look at you, Mary. Your pussy’s wet already and I haven’t touched it yet.”
Then Rian’s mouth was on my cunt and his thumb was working my clit, fast and filthy and not interested in being thanked for it. Rian ate my pussy like the twelve pages on that table had never existed. My hips came up off the mattress before I had agreed to anything with any part of me.
Luca knelt at the head of the bed and I turned my face and took Luca’s cock in my mouth, and he told me about it the entire time.
“There. That’s my cock in your mouth, Mary, and your eyes running and you humming around it. I’m going to be useless in front of a judge for a month.”
Luca’s cock was heavy on my tongue and his hand was on the top of my head, not pushing, just there.
Nicolas took me from behind, slow, his cock filling my pussy by inches, one hand spread over my belly to hold me where he wanted me. Luca had my hands. Rian’s mouth came down on my nipples and stayed.
“You’re beautiful, Mary,” Nicolas said. “Hold still. I’m saying it twice.”
“Twice isn’t enough,” Luca said from down by my hands.
“Nobody asked you, Luca.”
“Nobody ever has to. I’m the one who writes it all down.”
Nobody’s hand in that room found anybody but me all night. Rian’s mouth kept coming back to my nipple and Luca’s fingers kept coming back to my clit.
Nicolas’s cock went into my cunt slower than I could stand it, and Rian’s teeth were on my nipples, and Luca was talking somewhere above my head about my thighs, and that was where I lost the thread of it.
I stopped knowing whose hands were on which part of me and I never got it back. The room came apart into a mouth on my nipple, a thumb on my clit, weight and a voice and the low note of that terrace door, and nothing in it explained itself to me while it was happening.
I came the first time with Rian’s fingers on my clit and Nicolas’s cock still moving in my pussy, and I heard myself make a sound I would never have made in front of one man.
“Mine,” I said, at the ceiling, at all three of them, with Nicolas’s cock in my pussy and Rian’s mouth on my nipple. Nobody argued about it.
“Repeat that,” Luca said, “and put one of our names in it—”
“Mine. All three. Talk about my thighs again and I’ll bite.”
The second time I could not be quiet at all. Nicolas’s cock was in my cunt to the root and Luca had two fingers on my clit and Rian had my nipple in his mouth, and whatever control I had been keeping went out of me and cost me something I did not get back that night.
“I’ve got you, Mary, and I’m not going anywhere,” Rian said into my shoulder.
Rian finished first, on my belly, with his thumb still working my clit and his forehead against my shoulder and my name coming out of him like it hurt him to spend it.
Nicolas finished second, deep in my pussy, his hand still spread over my stomach, and he made no sound at all, which from Nicolas is its own kind of noise.
They changed places before Luca finished last, narrating every second of it—where his cock was, what my cunt was doing to him, what my mouth had done to him twenty minutes before, and what he was going to write down about every minute of it and never file anywhere.
Then Rian wrapped me in the sheet without being asked, the way he wraps my hands, and the cotton dragged over my nipples and I swore at him about it and he did not apologize for that either.
Luca went for water and came back and put his mouth on my pussy once more, and then on my clit, and nobody in that room was going to stop him.
Nicolas gathered the twelve pages off the floor by the door and squared them against his knee and looked at my bag.
“Put it in my bag. The next time anybody hears page nine out loud, there’ll be eleven men in the room.”