CHAPTER 23
Amara
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At the long mirror I take the pins out of my hair one by one and decide to be greedy.
Six pins, laid in a row on the dressing table the way I lay them when I'm building something.
My chestnut falls heavy and warm over my shoulders.
Outside, sleet tries to be rain and fails, the way the year keeps trying to be something gentler than what it is.
December fourth. Two days from my mother's heart opening under a stranger's hands in a bright cold room across the Sound.
Twelve from a council of old men deciding whether the man I married is fit to keep a chair I never asked him to want.
There is a courier somewhere in this city who can put a name to my father-in-law's poison, and a man named Roman who has, I'm told, started saying my mother's name and mine in the same breath, like fabric he means to cut on the bias.
And here I am, calm clear through. That's the strange part. My fingers find my mother's thimble where it rides against my pulse, the steel gone warm now from my skin, and for once there's no fear under it — just the thing I keep turning over like a hem I can't believe lies flat.
I am not afraid, and I have decided to be greedy.
I built this room into mine over six weeks.
The four-poster I never slept in alone for long.
The workroom beyond, my machine still threaded with ivory, the gown I'm making myself standing half-finished on the form like a woman waiting to be invited somewhere.
And the velvet chaise under the window — deep moss-green, the nap so thick that every time someone sits on it they leave a print, a record of where a body has been, until I draw my palm across it and erase them.
I bought it with the first money I made under Bea's name, back when the only thing I owned was my own refusal to disappear.
It is the most honest piece of furniture I have ever met.
It keeps the record. It does not pretend nothing happened.
My father's whole ruin came dressed as paper that pretended — forged manifests, a seizure that was a lie in a federal coat, a bargain that called itself peace.
I have learned to distrust anything that won't hold a mark.
The chaise holds every mark. That is why I love it.
I want it covered tonight in the press of three men I was supposed to hate.
This is mad, I tell the mirror, and the woman in the mirror — soft full breasts under the dark silk robe, round belly the robe doesn't try to hide, wide hips, thick thighs, hazel-green eyes steady as a held needle — that woman does not look mad.
She looks like a designer who has finally stopped sketching and picked up the shears.
So I send the texts. Three of them. The same three words to each, because I am, when it comes down to it, a woman who chooses her words.
Come to me. It reads as exactly what it is, an invitation issued in my own house, on my own chaise, with my own name still signed in full under their seal.
Costa. A refusal set in ink, a door I built and get to open.
Then I wait, and I close my fingers once more over the warm steel at my collar, and the sleet ticks down.
Mateo comes first. Of course he does. He arrives in the same unhurried certainty he brings to everything, the brass watch a small dull gleam in his hand, and he stops just inside my door and looks at me until I feel it on my skin like a hand dragged slow against the grain.
"You sent for me," he says. Storm-gray eyes, black hair gone silver at the temples in the lamp's low gold. Few words. Each one a stone set in a wall.
"I sent for all three of you," I say, and I watch it land. He goes very still — not the dangerous stillness, the other one, the one that means I've surprised the man under the Pakhan. The watch closes in his fist with a single quiet click.
"You're sure."
"I am the surest thing in this house tonight, Mateo. Don't insult me by asking twice."
A muscle works at the corner of his jaw, the deep root a smile grows from before it ever reaches his lips.
Emil is second, and he doesn't knock so much as appear in the doorway, ash-blond and exactly dressed even at this hour, steel-rimmed glasses catching the light, the black ledger nowhere in sight — which from Emil is a kind of nakedness.
His ice-blue eyes flick once around the room, cataloguing it, the chaise, his brother, me in the silk robe with my hair down, and I watch the equation run behind his face and watch it, for once, refuse to balance.
"I had assumed," he says slowly, "given the proximity of the surgery and the council date, that tonight would be spent on contingencies."
"It is. " I hold his gaze. "I'm contingent on this."
His glasses come off. He cleans them, slow, with the cloth from his breast pocket, which is what he does when he can't model the next thing, and I file it like a pin between my lips.
Gael is last, because Gael is always last to arrive and first to fall, and he comes in already grinning that wide bright grin that I have learned — the way you learn the wrong side of a fabric from the right — means he is most undone when it's widest. Dark auburn hair wet at the ends with sleet, green eyes, the switchblade nowhere on him for once because he left it at the door of me, the ink under his shirt I can't see but always feel.
"Well, well," he says, and his eyes go down me and up, slow, hungry, reverent, no bracing in me to meet it now, none, that woman in the mirror burned her apologies weeks ago.
"Trouble's holding court. You gonna make us fight for it, malyshka, or—" He clocks his brothers.
Clocks the chaise. The grin doesn't drop, but something behind it goes soft and stunned.
"Oh. Oh. You're not making us pick either, are you. Clever girl. My clever, terrible girl."
"No one's picking," I say, and my voice comes out low and even and entirely mine. "I already did the picking. Months ago. I just hadn't told all three of you in the same room."
The sleet hisses. Three men. One chaise that keeps the record. My territory, my terms, my configuration.
"Here are my rules," I say, and I see all three of them go still to listen, which is its own kind of power, the kind no contract ever bought.
"You don't touch each other. You never have, you never will, and I'm not asking you to start.
This is about me. All of you, every hand and mouth of you, on me.
I'm the center of this. Is that understood? "
"Yes," says Mateo, grave.
"Affirmative," says Emil, putting his glasses back on, and his voice has gone slightly rough at the edges already.
"Fuck yes," says Gael, and laughs, and it's the realest sound in the room.
Mateo crosses to me first. He takes my face in both hands — the burn-scarred forearm warm against my jaw, that smooth pale place where the fire took him carrying his mother out twelve years ago, the place I've kissed and not been thanked for and not needed thanks — and he tilts my face up.
"Say yes, Amara. " Quiet. A verdict that waits on my word to become law.
"Yes," I tell him. "Yes. Green. All the way green."
He kisses me then, slow, with the devastating patience that took me eleven nights to forgive him for and now I'd burn the house down to keep.
His mouth is unhurried. His thumbs move on my cheekbones.
Behind me I feel the others draw close, the heat of three bodies in the lamp-gold dark, and I should be overwhelmed and instead I feel — held.
Surrounded. The center of a thing instead of the thing left over.
"I need the word. " Emil's voice, low at my ear, his breath stirring my hair. "Before I touch you. Yes or no."
I turn my head against Mateo's mouth enough to answer. "Yes, Emil."
"Color, malyshka?" Gael, on my other side, all filth and tenderness braided into one thread. "Tell me green, velvet, tell me right now—"
"Green," I breathe. "God, green, all of you, yes—"
And the robe comes open.
It's Mateo's hands that do it, deliberate, the silk parting, but it's Gael who makes the sound — a low broken curse against my shoulder — and Emil who goes quiet, which is louder.
The robe slides off my arms and pools at my feet on the deep nap of the chaise's footprint, and I stand there in the lamplight, all of me, soft full breasts and round belly and the wide give of my hips and my thick thighs, warm ivory skin going pink under three sets of eyes, and not one cell of me braces for the flinch.
I stand open under them and feel only steady, the way I always do with these three. That's the thing they handed back to me, the thing I didn't know was mine to want.
"Look at you," Mateo says, low, the words landing like a man reading scripture he already knows by heart.
His palm finds the weight of my left breast, lifts it, reverent, his thumb dragging across my nipple until it tightens and I gasp into the room.
"You are the only thing in this house I did not inherit as a debt.
Moya. " The word, grave, given like a man laying down a weapon. "I chose this. I choose it."
"On the chaise," I manage. "I want — the chaise."
They lay me down on it like I'm something being placed in a frame.
The chaise takes me, deep and cool against my back, the nap pressing into my skin, and I know without looking that I'm leaving a print, that the moss-green will hold the shape of my shoulders and my hips, that when I draw my hand across it tomorrow I'll feel where this happened — and I want that.
I want the record. I'm so tired of nights that pretend in the morning they never were.
Then there are hands everywhere, and not one of them is wrong.