CHAPTER 23 #2
Mateo kneels at the head of the chaise, my hair spilling back into his lap, and his mouth comes down on mine upside-down, slow and certain, while his hands move over my breasts, weighing them, worshipping them, his thumbs unhurried at my nipples until I arch up off the nap.
Emil sits at my hip, glasses still on, fingertips trailing down my belly with a focus that should be clinical and is instead the most undivided attention I have ever been given.
And Gael — Gael has gone to his knees on the floor at the foot of the chaise, between my thighs, and he is talking already, he never stops talking, his hands sliding up the soft inside of my thighs and pushing them wide.
"There she is," he murmurs, mouth against my inner thigh, against the soft give of it. "There's all my girl. Look at these thighs, malyshka, I could live right here, I'd die happy right here—" His teeth, light, just enough. "You're already so wet for us. Soaked. That's it. That's my good girl."
"Gael—"
"Color?" Even now. Even mid-filth, the question, reflexive as breath.
"Green, green, don't you dare stop—"
He doesn't. His mouth comes down on my cunt, slow, his tongue dragging flat up the length of me and settling on my clit, and I cry out into Mateo's mouth, and Mateo swallows it like he's been waiting for it his whole careful life.
Emil's voice threads through it, low and exact, his fingers tracing the round soft swell of my belly the way another man might trace a coastline he's decided to love.
"I am going to tell you," he says, "precisely what is about to happen to you.
My brother is going to make you come with his mouth.
I am going to feel it move through you under my hand, here—" his palm flattens warm over my belly "—and I am going to count it.
And then we are going to keep going. I have calculated, given three of us, considerably more than three. "
"That's not — fair," I gasp, half a laugh, half a moan, and Gael hums against my clit and the vibration of it arcs up my spine.
"Fair," Emil says, and there's the dry irony, but it's already fraying, his syntax already losing its starch, "is not — the operative — variable.
Hold her," he says, not to me, to Mateo, and Mateo's hands come down firm over my shoulders, pinning me gently to the chaise, anchoring me.
"She's close. I can feel it. Her belly's tightening. Gael—"
"I know, I feel it, I got her—" Gael's tongue flattens, presses, two of his blunt fingers sliding into me and curling, and that's it, that's the end of me, that's the whole house coming down.
I come apart on the chaise with three men's hands on me and Gael's mouth working me through it and Mateo's quiet that's it, look at me, look at me when you come and Emil's palm reading the wave of it off my belly like a man taking a pulse, and I do look — I look at Mateo upside-down above me, storm-gray and undone — and I shatter, and it is loud, and not one of them flinches from the size of me coming, the give and shake of all my soft places, they feast on it.
"One," Emil says, ragged. "That is one. Kotyo—" He stops himself. He doesn't quite manage it. "That is one."
"You're keeping count?" I pant.
"I am keeping," he says, removing his glasses with a hand that is not quite steady, folding them, setting them aside on the dressing table without looking, which means he's stopped modeling and started feeling, "everything. I keep everything about you."
Gael surfaces with his mouth slick and his grin wrecked and presses his face for one second to the soft swell of my belly — just rests it there, the way he did in his rooms in the dark, the way the blade does when it forgets to be a blade — and I put my hand in his auburn hair and hold him there and feel him shudder.
"Up here," I tell him, because I'm learning to give the order before he can decide he doesn't deserve to be asked.
He comes up over me, shirt gone somewhere, the falcon dark over his heart, the blackwork down his left arm, the old knife scar pale across his right palm where he caught a blade for his brother at nineteen and called it Tuesday.
He braces over me, careful of his weight and not careful enough of his mouth.
"You want me, malyshka?" Filthy and soft at once. "Say it. Say you want the spare, say you want the blade, say—"
"I want you, Gael," I cut across it, fierce, holding his face in both my hands. "I want the man I chose, the whole of him, past the spare anyone settled for and the blade anyone aimed. Now get inside me before I lose my patience, which you know I have very little of."
He laughs — wet, undone — and shifts, and Mateo's hands ease off my shoulders to slide down and lift my hips, presenting me, holding the weight of me up for his brother without a flicker of anything but devotion, and the two of them keep their hands wholly off each other, every palm only and ever on me, and Gael lines himself up and pushes into me slow.
"Oh — fuck — that's it, that's my girl, look at you taking me, taking all of it—" He sinks deep and goes still and drops his forehead to mine and for a second the cocky blade is just a man in the dark, breathing me in. "You picked me," he whispers, only for me. "Months ago. You said."
"I did," I whisper back. "I do. Now move."
He moves. And Emil — Emil who has been waiting, who has been murmuring his own restraint into the soft slope of my hip — bends and takes my nipple into his mouth, slow, and his fingers find my clit where Gael is moving in me, circling, exact, and Mateo's mouth comes back to mine, and I am the center, I am the held thing, I am the altar and not the offering, and somewhere in the unbearable braided heat of it the thing rises in me that I came here to say.
"Wait," I gasp. "Wait — stop — I need—"
Everything stops. Instantly. Gael goes still inside me. Emil's mouth lifts. Mateo's hands gentle. Three men gone motionless on a word, and not one of them sulks, not one of them pushes, the stopping itself somehow as hot as the rest because it means I hold this, the whole storm of it answers to me.
"Color," Gael breathes, suddenly serious, scanning my face. "Talk to me, malyshka, you good?"
"I'm good. " My eyes are wet with the other thing, the good thing, the one with no name that the forbidden phrases can't touch. "I'm — green. I just need you to hear me. All of you. Look at me."
They do. Three faces in the lamp-gold dark. The sleet ticking down the black window, hissing across the glass, and the chaise under me holding the press of every hand and knee like a ledger of touch, like the one honest record in a house full of contracts.
"He thinks he sold me to you," I say, and my voice doesn't shake, because I built this room and I get to say true things in it.
"Lev. He made a bargain. A peace marriage.
A Costa for the waterfront. He thinks I was the price.
" I draw a breath. "But nothing about me was ever on offer, and I was never the bargain anyone struck.
Do you understand me? You didn't buy this.
I chose it. I chose all three of you, on my own terms, with my own name still signed under your seal, and that is the only reason this is sacred instead of just survival. "
Mateo's hand comes to my face. "I know," he says, low. "Moya. I have known since you struck the obedience clause with your own pen."