The Art of Vanishing

Chapter 8 #3

Then the moment passed, and I continued.

I pushed the shirt from his shoulders. His body was lean and hard, the body of a man who does not sit still, who walks and climbs and exerts himself in pursuit of what he wants.

The scar on his jaw had companions: a faded mark on his left forearm, another, older, across his ribs.

I traced the one on his ribs with my fingertip and felt the muscles in his abdomen tighten.

"A knife," I said. It was not a question.

"Whitechapel. Three years ago."

"And you survived."

"Obviously."

I smiled. Not a performance. A genuine expression of something that might, in another person, have been admiration. "Then you are harder to kill than most."

I stepped back and began to undress myself.

I did not do it with the theatrical slowness I had applied to him.

I undressed efficiently, practically, the way one removes a costume after a performance.

The dress came first, unhooked at the back, stepped out of and laid across the chair.

The petticoats followed. The corset cover.

The corset itself, loosened and set aside.

I was left in my chemise and stockings, and I watched him watching me, and his face held an expression I recognised from the interrogation room: the look of a man who is seeing something he cannot explain and is trying, desperately, to catalogue it.

I was not beautiful in the way the paintings in the Royal Academy are beautiful.

I was beautiful in the way a weapon is beautiful.

My body was slender and white, the skin unmarked, the lines long and clean.

My collarbones were sharp above the lace of the chemise, and my waist was narrow, and my hips curved beneath it in a way that I knew, from long experience, men found disorienting.

I have used my body the way I use everything else: as an instrument.

I have studied its effects with the same precision I bring to the study of poisons, and I know exactly what it does to men when I stand before them like this, half-dressed and unashamed and looking at them as though they are the ones who are exposed.

I reached for the hem of my chemise and drew it over my head.

He made a sound. Not a word. A sound, low in his throat, and the rawness of it pleased me more than any compliment could have.

I stood before him in nothing but my stockings, and I watched his hands clench at his sides, and I knew that if I told him to kneel, he would kneel, and if I told him to leave, he would leave, and if I told him to do anything at all, he would do it, because I had not merely invited him into my bedroom.

I had invaded the architecture of his self-control and rearranged it to my specifications.

"Sit on the bed," I said.

He sat. The mattress dipped beneath his weight.

He looked up at me with those dark, angry, desiring eyes, and I could see in his face the full magnitude of what he was surrendering.

He was not a man who surrendered easily.

Every line of his body spoke of resistance, of the effort of remaining still, of the war between what he wanted to do and what he knew he should do.

The war was over. He had lost. He simply had not yet admitted it.

I stepped forward and stood between his knees.

I was taller than most women, and standing like this, with him seated, I looked down at him, and the reversal was absolute.

He was the detective. He was the man with the authority and the warrant and the power of the state behind him.

And he was sitting on my bed, looking up at me, waiting for my next instruction.

I cupped his face in both hands. His jaw was rough under my palms, and the warmth of his skin was a pleasant contrast to the cool air of the room.

I tilted his face up toward mine and kissed him again, and this time the kiss was deeper, more thorough.

I used my tongue deliberately, tracing the line of his lower lip, and I felt his hands rise to my waist, and his fingers pressed into the skin above my hips with a force that bordered on bruising.

I broke the kiss and placed my hand flat against his chest and pushed, gently but firmly, until he was lying back on the white linen.

I climbed onto the bed and straddled him, my knees on either side of his hips, my weight settling onto his thighs.

The wool of his trousers was rough against my bare skin.

I could feel him beneath me, hard and straining against the fabric, and I pressed down with a slow, deliberate movement that made him gasp.

"Look at me," I said.

He looked at me. His eyes were very dark, almost black, and in them I could read everything: the desire, the fury, the self-loathing, the confusion.

He was experiencing a conflict of such totality that it had short-circuited his ability to resolve it.

He had no framework for this. His entire life was organised around the principles of right and wrong, evidence and conclusion, justice and injustice.

I existed outside all of those frameworks.

I was the thing his principles could not accommodate, and the impossibility of me had broken something in his reasoning.

I reached between us and unfastened his trousers. He lifted his hips to help me, and I drew the fabric down, taking his smallclothes with it, freeing him. He was fully erect, the skin flushed, and I wrapped my hand around the shaft and held him, feeling the pulse of blood beneath my fingers.

"You are very beautiful when you are defeated," I said.

He made a sound that was half laugh, half groan. "You think you've defeated me."

"I know I have." I stroked him slowly, base to tip, and watched his face contort. "You are in my house, in my bed, with no witnesses and no alibi. Your career is in my hands. Your reputation is in my hands." I tightened my grip slightly, and his hips bucked upward. "You. Are. In my hands."

I lowered my head. My hair fell forward, a curtain of auburn that shielded his view, and I took him into my mouth.

He cried out. A raw, unrestrained sound, the kind of sound a man makes when he has been holding himself in check for too long and the holding has become unbearable.

His hands flew to my hair, not pushing, not pulling, just grasping, as though he needed something to anchor him to the world.

I took him deep, using my tongue, using the flat of my palate, applying the kind of slow, thorough attention that I knew from experience would reduce a man to incoherence.

I was not performing enthusiasm. I was performing control.

Every movement was calculated to produce a specific response, and when I felt his thighs begin to tremble, I stopped.

He groaned. His hands tightened in my hair. "Don't stop."

I raised my head and looked at him. His face was flushed, his lips parted, his chest heaving.

He looked wrecked, and the sight of him like this sent a jolt through me that I did not expect and did not welcome.

This was strategy. This was tactics. This was not supposed to feel like anything except satisfaction at a well-executed plan.

"I will stop when I choose to stop," I said. "You do not give orders here."

I released him and rose onto my knees. I reached down and removed my stockings, rolling them off one at a time, and then I was bare, and the firelight touched my skin and turned it gold.

I reached between my own thighs and touched myself, briefly, spreading the wetness that had gathered there, and I was surprised by it.

This was not supposed to happen. I had expected to perform arousal, as I performed everything else. I had not expected to feel it.

I did not examine the surprise. I set it aside, the way one sets aside a tool that has malfunctioned. There would be time to consider it later.

I positioned myself above him. I took him in my hand again, guiding him, and I lowered myself onto him with a slow, controlled descent that drew a long, shuddering breath from both of us.

He filled me completely, and I sat still for a moment, adjusting to the sensation, feeling the stretch and the pressure and the heat of him inside me.

I planted my hands on his chest, my fingers spread against his skin, and I began to move.

I set the pace. I controlled the rhythm.

I chose the angle and the depth and the speed, and he lay beneath me and let me, his hands gripping my hips, his eyes locked on my face, and I could see in his expression that no woman had ever done this to him before.

He was accustomed to being the one in control, the one who decided, the one who led.

In this room, on this bed, in this act, he was being led, and the surrender was absolute.

I rode him with deliberate slowness. I wanted to draw it out.

I wanted him to feel every second of it, to register every movement, so that later, when he tried to reconstruct what had happened, the memory would be so vivid that he would be unable to pretend it had not happened.

Evidence. I was constructing evidence, the same way I constructed everything else: with care, with precision, with an eye toward the future use of what I was creating.

"You are mine now," I said. I did not say it loudly. I said it quietly, almost conversationally, as though I were commenting on the weather. The words fell into the silence between the sound of our bodies and the crackle of the fire. "Do you understand that?"

He did not answer. He could not answer. His breathing was ragged, his jaw clenched, his eyes shut, and I could feel the tension building in his body, the coil of it in his thighs and his abdomen, the tremor in his hands where they gripped my hips.

"Look at me," I said again.

He opened his eyes. They were wild, almost desperate, and in them I saw something that gave me pause.

It was not desire, or not only desire. It was recognition.

He was looking at me as though he saw me, not the performance, not the mask, but the thing beneath the mask, and the thing beneath the mask was looking back at him with an expression I could not name and did not like.

I tightened my internal muscles around him and moved faster, and his control shattered.

He came with a force that surprised us both, his hips driving upward, his hands pulling me down onto him, and I felt the heat of him inside me and I let my own release follow, a wave of sensation that I had not planned and could not account for, and for a single, disorienting moment, I was not performing.

I was not calculating. I was not strategising.

I was simply a body, in a bed, with a man inside me, and the feeling was so unfamiliar that it was almost frightening.

I collapsed forward onto his chest. My hair fell across his face.

I could feel his heartbeat beneath my cheek, rapid and slowing, and his breathing was loud in my ear.

His arms came up around my back, and he held me, and the embrace was so unexpectedly tender that it took me a moment to understand what was happening.

He was holding me. Not grasping, not clutching.

Holding, the way a man holds something he values.

I lifted my head and looked at him. His eyes were half-closed, his expression slack with the aftermath, and in that slackness I saw the full extent of what I had taken from him and what I had, inexplicably, allowed him to take from me.

"You have ruined my investigation," he said. His voice was quiet, almost abstracted, as though he were commenting on something that had happened to someone else.

"No," I said. "I have ruined your certainty. The investigation was never certain. You simply believed it was."

He closed his eyes. I watched the muscles in his jaw work, and I knew that behind those closed lids, he was replaying everything, the interview and the wine and the stairs and the bed, and he was calculating the damage.

He was a calculating man, in his way. Not as good at it as I am, but competent.

He would spend the rest of the night and most of tomorrow reconstructing the sequence of his own capitulation, and he would emerge from that reconstruction knowing two things: first, that he could not testify against me without exposing himself, and second, that he did not want to testify against me.

The first was practical. The second was dangerous.

I climbed off him and stood. I did not feel ashamed. I have never felt shame, and I do not expect to begin now. But I felt something, a residue, a faint tremor in the fabric of my control, and it irritated me.

I pulled on my chemise and crossed to the dressing table.

I could see his reflection in the mirror, sprawled on my white linen, half-undressed, his chest rising and falling with the slowing rhythm of a man who has spent himself completely.

He looked beautiful in a ruined way, like a building after a fire, the structure still standing but the interior laid bare.

"Dorothea returns at seven," I said, pinning my hair back into some semblance of order. "You should dress."

"Cecilia."

I met his eyes in the mirror. "Yes?"

"What is this?"

The question was too large for the room.

It encompassed the act we had just committed, and the investigation that had preceded it, and the attraction that had preceded the investigation, and the pattern of death that had preceded all of it.

I could have answered it honestly. I could have told him exactly what this was.

I chose not to, because the truth would have told him more about me than I was willing to reveal.

"This is whatever you need it to be," I said.

I turned from the mirror and left the room.

I walked down the corridor to my study and closed the door behind me and stood in the silence for a long time, listening to the house settle around me.

In the bedroom above, I could hear the sounds of Sebastian dressing, the creak of the floorboards, the soft thud of his boots.

I pressed my hand flat against the desk and felt the wood grain beneath my palm, and I breathed.

It had worked. He was compromised. The investigation would continue, but it would continue with a man who could no longer claim objectivity, and that made it survivable. I had turned the most dangerous variable in my equation into a known quantity. I should have been satisfied.

I was not satisfied. I was something else, something for which I had no name and no precedent, and the absence of a name troubled me more than I wished to admit.