Velvet Trigger

Ilias Vale had his mouth on the inside of my thigh and no intention of hurrying, and I lay there across a hotel bed above the Riviera with the balcony doors open and the sea making its noise below, letting a man I had sworn off take his time.

“You’re thinking,” he said against my skin.

“I do that.” I didn’t bother opening my eyes. “People pay me for it. Very well, as it happens.”

“Not in here they don’t, Sable.” He lifted his head just enough for me to see his eyes. “The door is locked. I locked it. You checked it.”

“Twice,” I corrected him.

“Three times.” He kissed the crease of my hip, unhurried about it. “I watched you do the last check on your way back from the bathroom.”

“Occupational hazard.” I got a hand into his hair to keep him where he was. “I walk people out of buildings that want them dead, Ilias. Journalists, nurses, a bishop who prayed out loud the whole way down a fire stair. You don’t stop checking locks because somebody kissed you.”

“You used to. For me.” He said it to my thigh, like a small technical point. “You’d come in and kick your shoes off and not look at the window all night.”

He was right, and that was the whole problem. The only place I ever put the job down was under this one. I’d spent a long stretch of nights alone proving I didn’t need the place.

Then he called. That was the part I couldn’t put down. Ilias did not call, not since the night I told him where the door was. Then his voice came on my phone out of a clear sky, saying he missed me, saying come to France. He said it the way a man reads a sentence somebody else has written for him.

His tongue went flat and slow up the crease of my thigh, and the thought went wherever thoughts go.

“There she is,” he murmured against me.

“Don’t be smug.”

“I’m being attentive.”

“You’re being smug and attentive.”

“I’ve always been capable of both.”

He smelled like the night coming in through those doors and the red he’d ordered with far too much ceremony. Under that he smelled like himself, soap and the warm iron smell his skin always had, as if he’d spent the day leaning on machinery. He probably had. His hair had gone all the way silver while we were apart. I’d noticed it on the platform at the station and pretended I hadn’t. I noticed it again on the stairs when I got both hands into it, and now it was between my legs and I didn’t have to pretend anything at all. “When did you go silver?”

“While you weren’t looking.” He kissed the inside of my knee. “All at once, the winter you put me out. My barber asked whether somebody had died. I told him more or less.”

“Don’t make me feel sorry for you. It’ll slow you down.”

I was wet. I’d been wet since the elevator, since he stood behind me in that mirrored box with one hand flat on the small of my back. He did not do one other thing the whole ride up, while a couple from Lyon argued about a dinner reservation.

“You’re soaking,” he told me, pleased about it.

“Since the elevator. One hand, all the way up.” I pulled his hair, not gently. “That was cruel. I was annoyed with you the whole ride, and now I’m too busy to be annoyed.”

“That was manners.” He bit the inside of my thigh, softly, for emphasis. “The couple from Lyon had enough problems.”

“Ilias.”

“Mm.”

“Use that mouth for something besides talking.”

He laughed into me, a sound I felt more than heard, and then he did exactly what I asked. He licked my pussy the way he used to, slow and wide first, like a man checking a drawing he’d made long ago to see whether he still trusted his own lines. Then narrow, his tongue finding my clit and circling it, leaving it, coming back, in no rush to be anywhere else. His hand spread flat on my belly and held me down when my hips came up off the sheet. I grabbed the headboard. I grabbed his hair. I said his name in a voice I’d forgotten I owned, the one that doesn’t sound like anybody’s agent.

“Right there.” My heel slid on the sheet and found his back. “Don’t you dare move off it.”

“I know where it is, Sable.” He said it into me, and the words went through me like the rest of it. “I drew the map.”

He knew which side, how much pressure, when to lift his head and blow cool air across me so I’d cuss at him, and when not to stop for anything.

He lifted his head. “Don’t,” I warned him.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t stop. Don’t make me ask nicely.”

“You have never once asked nicely.”

“Then don’t make me ask at all.”

He slid two fingers into me, slow, curled them, and put his mouth back where it belonged. I came with my heel dug into his back and the curtains blowing in over the end of the bed like somebody had left a door open on purpose. It went on longer than I was ready for. It went through me and came back around and went through me again. When it finally let go I was laughing, flat on my back with my forearm over my eyes, that stupid helpless laugh of a grown woman who’s just been reminded of something she’d decided to forget.

He had come up beside me and was propped on an elbow watching me, his mouth wet, entirely pleased with himself. “That’s a good sound. I’d been trying to remember it exactly.”

“You still don’t need directions.” I said it from under my arm, to the ceiling. “Do you know how rare that is? The men since needed a map and a running commentary. I gave it to them, too. I like sex, and I’m not shy about getting what I came for.”

“I’m not certain I want to hear about the men since.” He rested his cheek on my hip.

“You don’t. I’m telling you anyway.” I moved my arm and looked at him. “Wipe your face.”

“No.”

“Then kiss me with it.”

He did. I tasted myself on him, salt and something sweeter, and pulled him down over me by the back of his neck. His weight came onto me, and the shirt he was still wearing for some reason, and the belt I’d gotten open on the stairs and never finished with. I finished with it. “Why are you still dressed?”

“You were in a hurry on the stairs.” He was already kicking out of the rest. “I didn’t like to interrupt you. You had a plan for the belt.”

I worked his shirt buttons with fingers that had been steady through worse and were not steady now. He caught my wrist. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m in a hurry.” I took my wrist back and went on with the buttons. “It looks the same from where you are.”

His hand came up toward my left shoulder and stopped just above the scar, where they’d put the joint back together the second time. “May I?”

Nobody else had ever asked. They found it in the dark and said oh, or said nothing and moved their hand away like they’d touched the stove. He asked, the way he always had, as if the scar were somebody’s front door and he’d been raised right.

“Yes.” I turned the shoulder into his palm so he’d know I meant it.

He kissed it. Then his mouth went lower, to my breast, his tongue slow on my nipple until it went tight and aching. I reached down between us and found his dick, hard and hot and heavy in my hand, and he made the noise in his throat I had never managed to forget, not even on the worst nights.

“I missed that,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Which part?”

“That noise. Like I’ve caught you at something.”

He went still for half a breath. “You have caught me at something.”

“At what?” I tightened my hand around him, slow, and watched his breath go.

“Ask me that again,” he managed, his head going back on the pillow, “when you aren’t holding it.”

I put him on his back. He went, the way he always went, like it was his idea. I got over him and took him in my hand and held him right there against me, wet and slick, not letting him in. I watched his face while I did it, because I wanted to see him want it. His hands came up to my hips and I took them off and pressed them down onto the sheet beside his head.

“Sable.” He said it to the ceiling, through his teeth.

“Ask me.” I rocked against him once, just the once, and still didn’t let him in. “Nicely, this time. You owe me that for the elevator.”

His jaw worked. “Please.”

“Please what?” I leaned down until my nipples brushed his chest. “You’re an engineer. Be specific.”

“Please let me inside you before I lose my mind in a hotel I can’t afford.”

I sank down onto him slow, all the way, and stayed there with him buried in me, both of us breathing like we’d taken the stairs. He filled me up so good my eyes closed on their own. It had been a long time. My body hadn’t forgotten one inch of him and I resented that and loved it in the same breath.

“Fuck.” His fists had closed on the sheet where I’d put them. “Sable. My hands.”

“You can have them back.” I took his wrists and put his palms on my ass myself. “Right there. You’ve earned that much. Hold on like you mean it. I want to feel it tomorrow.”

Then I moved. Slow at first, rolling my hips, feeling every bit of him drag in and out of me. Then not slow, my hands on his chest and his hands on my ass, pulling me down onto him harder. The headboard knocked the wall. Somebody on the terrace below laughed at something, and I didn’t care who heard what. The sweat ran down the middle of my back.

“Look at you,” he breathed, and he was looking, the whole time, like he’d been told to memorize it. “I used to think I’d made you up.”

“I know what I look like. I’ve got a mirror and a memory. Keep up.”

“Why now?” I asked him. I was riding him when I asked it. I wanted to see what his face did.

“What?”

“Your phone call. All that time, nothing, and then come to France. Why now?”

He sat up under me, wrapped one arm around my waist and put his mouth on my throat. Then he rolled me under him without coming out of me, and fucked me deep and slow into that expensive mattress until I forgot I’d asked him anything.

Ilias answers questions with his mouth when he doesn’t care for them. I let him do it anyway, because the answer felt so good I came again with my nails in his shoulders. He came right after me, my name in my ear like something he’d been holding in for a long time and couldn’t anymore.

When I could talk again, I lifted my head off his shoulder. “That wasn’t an answer.”

“It was a very good one. I put a great deal of thought into it.”

“It was a very good way of not giving any. I know the difference.” I pushed the hair off my forehead and left my hand there. “I’ll ask you again when I can feel my legs. Don’t think I won’t. I’ve waited out better liars than you in worse rooms.”

Afterward we lay crosswise on the bed with the sheet halfway to the floor and the sea breathing outside. He traced little lines on my hip with a fingertip, the way he used to sketch on napkins in restaurants while I talked. I let him. I was happy. Plain, simple, stupid happy, the kind I didn’t trust and didn’t care to examine, with his leg over mine and the taste of him still on my lips.

There was a pale band around his left wrist where the watch used to sit. I put my thumb on it. “You stopped wearing it.”

“I left it beside your sink. On purpose, so you’d have to decide what to do with it.”

“I know. It’s in a drawer. I decided.”

“You kept it?” He lifted his head off the pillow to look at me.

“I keep everything. It’s a professional failing.” I pressed the pale band again. “I kept your card, too. A pencil drawing of a hull on the front.”

“The hull.”

“And not one word inside it, Ilias. I turned it over looking for a word.”

“The hull was the word.” He said it into my shoulder, as if it were obvious. “I didn’t trust the other kind.”

“That’s a very elegant way to say you didn’t write anything.”

“Why did you keep it, then?” His fingertip had stopped on my hip. “If there was nothing in it.”

“Because you drew it. You don’t draw things you don’t care about.” I turned my face into the pillow so he’d have to work to see it. “Don’t make me say it twice. I’m naked and I’m tired and I’ve got nothing to hide behind.”

He rolled toward me and kissed me, lazy this time, his hand sliding back up my ribs like he had all night and planned to spend it there. And maybe he did. I was already kissing him back, already pulling him on top of me again, already wet and wanting him as if we hadn’t just finished. But the question hadn’t gone anywhere. It was sitting on my chest like the job always does.

I pulled my mouth an inch from his. “Ilias. Before we start this again. Tell me why you...”

Somebody knocked on our door.

“If that’s your wife,” I whispered against his mouth, “I’m going out the window.”

Ilias kept his hand at my waist. “I haven’t acquired a wife since you last asked.”

“People accomplish all kinds of things when I’m not looking.” I pulled my mouth away from his, although the rest of me seemed willing to negotiate. “Answer the door.”

“I’d rather hear what you were about to say.”

“It wasn’t going to improve your evening.”

“My evening has improved considerably already. I’d like to keep it.”

The knock came again, uneven this time. “Did you order something?”

“Only the wine.” He was watching the door now too. “And I tipped the boy who brought it, so it isn’t him coming back to complain. You chose the hotel.”

“I chose it for the balcony.” It stood open to the water behind us, wide enough for breakfast. “I didn’t order visitors. Nobody knows I’m here except Nomi and Jules.”

He let me go and found his pants on the second try. I got into my pants and pulled his shirt on because it was nearest. He dug a spare shirt out of his bag and put it on, then buttoned a cuff over that pale band on his wrist.

A man’s voice scraped through the door. “Sable? Jules said you’d be here.”

Ilias stopped reaching for the handle. “Ask him which Jules,” I told him quietly.

“The one who can’t cook,” the man answered. “He burns rice. He told me to say so. Please. I can’t stay out here.”

I moved out of the direct line of the doorway and took the small pistol from my overnight bag. Ilias saw it and looked at me over his shoulder. “Really?”

“I was hoping not to need the toothpaste either, and I packed that too.” I thumbed the safety off where he could see me do it. “Open it.”

The man fell against Ilias before the door was halfway back. Blood soaked the lower front of his shirt. He held a folded sheet of paper in one fist and kept the other pressed against his stomach, as if somebody had told him he could hold himself together by refusing to move.

“Close it,” he breathed into Ilias’s collar. “They came up behind me. In the elevator, then the corridor.”

Ilias pulled him inside. I caught the corridor in the narrow gap: cream carpet, a service cart, a woman at the far end wearing a hotel jacket that didn’t fit across her shoulders.

“Ilias, down.” She raised her arm while I was still saying it.

I slammed the door into Ilias’s back. The first shot hit the wood beside the lock, loud enough to leave my ears ringing. He dragged the wounded man behind the bed while I dropped beside the wall and fired through the widening break near the hinge. The woman moved out of sight. Somebody screamed down the corridor.

“Bathroom,” I told Ilias, without taking my eyes off the door. “Get him behind the tub. It’s cast iron. It’s the only thing in this room worth what they charge.”

“Sable...”

“Go.”

He went. That had always been among our better qualities in a crisis. We could argue for an hour over dinner and still understand each other when a door came apart.

The next shots struck lower. Splinters skipped over the rug where my knees had been. I backed behind the heavy wardrobe, keeping the entrance in view, and got my phone up. “Jules. Your friend is here.”

Jules’s voice went thin. “Eren? Is he with you? Is he standing?”

“He brought company. A woman in a staff jacket that belongs to somebody bigger.” Something struck the door hard enough to shake the frame, and Ilias appeared at the bathroom entrance with a towel already turning red between his hands.

“Tell me,” Jules said, very calm. “Where is he hit, and is he talking?”

“Gunshot to the abdomen.” I watched the red climb through the towel. “Dark blood, steady, not pumping. Conscious. He knocked like a man who knew my name, and he said yours like a password. We’re coming out.”

“Do not take him through reception. Keep pressure on it, and nobody lifts that towel to look, whatever he says. I’ll call the emergency number and arrange...”

“Call whoever you can. Then call Nomi. Tell her fast, not careful.”

“I gave him your hotel.” Jules’s breath went out of him down the line. “I thought you were the safest door in France.”

“I was, until he knocked on it.”

“Sable, you’re on vacation.” He said it the way he says you’re not eating, as if it were my fault.

“Tell that to the woman shooting through my door.” I put the phone on the floor, speaker up.

Ilias was already dragging the little dining table toward the door. A chair leg snagged the rug. He kicked it free and looked toward the balcony.

“The adjoining room shares the terrace. There’s a partition, waist height, with a planter in the way.” He said it like a man reading a drawing. “I looked at it when we came in, while you were checking the lock. The partition is stone. It’ll take his weight if we don’t rush it.”

“Occupied?”

“I heard people arguing through the wall. About whose turn it was to call his mother. They were very committed to it.”

“Good. They can argue with us.” I kept the gun on the door. “Over the partition, through their room, out their door. Then the stairs.”

“Not the elevator. They’ll be watching the elevator.”

“Never the elevator with company. You can’t shoot your way out of a box with music in it.” The man in the bathroom made a noise that didn’t belong in a room with fresh flowers.

Ilias abandoned the table and returned to him. I stayed long enough to see the handle jerk down, then ended the call, pocketed my phone and followed them.

Eren was young enough that the fear made him look younger. Sweat stood on his upper lip. He tried to give me the paper before I could get an arm beneath him. “The names,” he breathed. “They aren’t donors. Some of them aren’t donors. I circled them.”

“Tell me downstairs.” I closed his fingers back over the paper. “Whatever it is, it’ll still be true on the ground floor.”

“He’ll put them on the wrong boat.” His hand wouldn’t let go of mine.

“Then we’ll discuss boats downstairs. I need you to help us move.”

He stared at me. I put my hand against his cheek, making him look away from his wound. “Eren. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Sable. Ilias has you on that side. Put your arm over my shoulder. Don’t spend what you’ve got trying to explain. You can tell me all of it on the ground floor, and I’ll listen to every word.”

“It hurts.” He said it like an apology.

Ilias pressed the towel down with both hands. “Yes. That means you’re still here to complain. Hold this where my hands are. That’s your whole job.”

He obeyed. Ilias passed me the paper, and I shoved it into the back pocket of my pants. We got Eren upright between us just as the bedroom door broke against the table.

Cool air hit my damp face on the balcony. Below us, people were eating on a terrace above the beach, still looking toward the hotel entrance instead of up at us. “Mind the step,” Ilias told Eren. “It’s higher than it looks. They always are in these old buildings.”

“There’s a woman shooting at us,” I reminded him over my shoulder.

“He can fall and be shot.” Ilias didn’t look around. “I’d prefer one problem.”

I almost laughed. That irritated me more than the gunfire.

We crowded along the balcony. Ilias moved the planter with his foot while I held Eren against the railing, trying not to put pressure on the wrong place. The wounded man watched the water. “Don’t look down,” I told him.

“I’m not. I’m trying to see my car.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t have a car.” He laughed, or tried to. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“That’s all right. Stay with me.” I shifted my grip under his arm. “You can buy one after. Something with a big back seat.”

“For lying down in?”

“That’s the idea.”

Ilias climbed over the partition and reached back. We passed Eren between us in a slow, ugly lift. His breath came out in a cry he tried to swallow. I kept my knee pressed against the stone until Ilias had his weight, then swung after him.

A shot punched through the glass behind us. I felt a sharp sting across my neck and dropped beside the planter. Ilias pulled Eren toward the neighboring door. Inside, a woman in a yellow bathrobe had both hands over her mouth.

“Open it,” I called through the glass. “Please.”

She didn’t move. Her companion, barefoot and red-faced, came up behind her and started yelling in French. I answered him in the same language, less politely than I intended. “There is a wounded man on your balcony. Open the door or get away from the glass.”

The woman pushed past him and turned the handle. We stumbled into their room together. He kept talking. She took one look at Eren and stripped the cover from the bed.

She handed it to Ilias. “Here. For the blood. Is it safe in the hallway?”

“No,” I told her, before Ilias could be polite about it. “Bathroom. Both of you. Call the police.”

“This is our anniversary,” her companion protested, in English now, as if the language might help.

“Then go and have it in the bathroom. Lock the door. Get in the tub if it’s iron.”

He opened his mouth again. She pointed toward the bathroom so sharply that he stopped. I hoped she’d remember that gesture after we were gone.

I opened their room door a crack and put my eye to it.

“Cart’s still there,” I whispered to Ilias. “She isn’t. There’s a man outside our door, dark clothes, his back to us. He’s calling to somebody inside. He thinks we’re still in there.”

Ilias leaned close. “Can we get past him?”

“We need the stairs. Past him, not through him, if he lets us.”

“Left.”

“I know.”

“You always go right.”

“Not tonight.”

The man turned at the sound of Eren’s breathing. I shoved the service cart hard into his legs and fired once as he reached beneath his jacket. He hit the wall and went down. I didn’t wait to learn whether he would get up.

We moved left.

The stair door resisted Ilias’s shoulder, then opened. Eren’s shoes dragged across the threshold. I pushed the door shut behind us and listened. Running feet came down the corridor. The stairwell smelled of cleaning solution and somebody’s cigarette. “How many floors?” Eren whispered against my shoulder.

I got my shoulder further under him. “Enough. One step at a time.”

He clutched my sleeve. “I know what she looks like. Serin Kade. She used to inspect us. Our hands, our shoes, our phones. If your phone rang on deck she took it away and gave it back when she felt like it.”

“At Orison?” Ilias asked from Eren’s other side.

Eren looked up at him. “How did you know?”

I turned my head just enough to see Ilias’s face. His mouth had tightened. “You two know something I don’t?”

“Not here,” he said quietly.

“You might want to try a different answer. It’s starting to sound rehearsed.”

“Not here, Sable.” He held my eyes over Eren’s head. “Please. I’ll give you the whole one.”

“The whole one.” I took another step down and made him take it with me. “Not the version with the corners filed off.”

“All of it,” he promised, and hitched Eren’s arm higher on his neck.

The door above us slammed open. I pushed Eren down against the landing and raised my gun. A hotel employee stood there with a phone in his hand. His face drained when he saw us.

“Close it,” I told him in French. “There’s somebody with a gun behind you. Lock yourself in something.”

He ducked back. A shot rang out beyond the door, then another. His phone struck the floor inside the stairwell and skidded to my shoe.

Ilias had Eren moving again. I didn’t move. “I’m going back for him.” I had my hand on the rail already. “He was alive when he saw us. I don’t know what he is now.”

“Sable.” Ilias waited below me. “We can’t hold both places. He has a door and a phone. We have Eren.”

“He doesn’t have a phone.” I lifted my shoe off it. “I’m standing on it.”

“Then give him one.” He didn’t let go of Eren to say it. “Use that one. Tell them where he is. That’s how you go back for him.”

I picked up the phone. The emergency call was still open, a woman’s voice asking the same question over and over in French. “I’m a guest,” I told her, low and fast. “There’s a shooter on the upper floor, in the corridor by the sea rooms. A staff member may be hurt behind the stair door. Keep this line open. You’ll hear us leaving.”

I set it face up on the landing, and we went down.

Eren sagged more heavily between us. My old shoulder began to throb, a familiar deep complaint I couldn’t afford to listen to. Ilias shifted his grip without being asked. “Better?”

“Don’t be observant at me.” I took the next step on my own. “I’m working.”

“I called you because of the Vesper,” he said under his breath.

“You called me because you said you missed me.” I stayed looking down the stairs. “Those were your words, Ilias. I wrote them down afterward so I couldn’t tell myself I’d dreamed them.”

“I do.”

“Those were supposed to be different conversations. You don’t get to hide one inside the other.”

“I know.” His breath had gone short under Eren’s weight. “I couldn’t find a way to have only one of them.”

“So which one is this?” I took the turn of the stair first and pulled them both around it. “On a staircase, with a man bleeding on us.”

“This is the first one.” He didn’t look at me. “The other one wants a bed and an hour and nobody shooting.”

Eren lifted his head off my collar. “She’s beautiful. The Vesper. Everybody says so.”

“Nobody asked you to review her,” I told him, hitching him higher. “Save your breath for the stairs. Keep your feet moving.”

The next landing had a door marked for staff. I tried it. Unlocked. Beyond it lay a narrow passage lined with folded linen and the smell of hot bread.

Ilias looked at me over Eren’s bowed head. “I was going to tell you.”

I stepped through first and checked the corners.

“Then stay alive long enough to do it.”