“Yeah? You good?” he asks against my ear.
“Yes,” I murmur.
He works me open with his fingers first. Slow, slick, careful, even with his heart hammering against my back and Armen moving inside me in long, steady strokes. And when Sting replaces his fingers and pushes himself into my ass, inch by inch, the fullness is so complete that every thought in my mind goes completely, blissfully silent.
There is nothing but this. Two of them inside me, Rogue’s hand in my hair, and an audience on the other side of the mirror.
The guys find their rhythm together. Armen and Sting moving in counterpoint, one pushing as the other withdraws, a synchronized assault that builds and builds and builds until I can’t tell where one of them ends and the other begins.
And I don’t care, I just need them not to stop.
I come so hard I can’t see. It rips through me, not a wave, not a crest, but an earthquake. My whole body locks and shakes, and the sound that comes out of me is something I’ve never heard myself make, raw and wrecked and unrecognizable. Stingfollows me over the edge seconds later, his arms tightening around me, his face buried in my hair, a groan against my skull that I feel in my teeth. Armen lasts longer, but when he comes, his forehead drops and he breathes my name.
Rogue. I reach for him and pull him close. He’s been patient, which isn’t his nature, and the patience has made him desperate. It doesn’t take long. He explodes in my mouth and I do my best to swallow everything.
I glance at the mirror and see several approving nods. I nod back.
27
VI
I’m lying against Sting.I don’t remember deciding to take a snooze, my body made the choice for me. My back’s against his chest, his arm around my waist, his thumb tracing a slow line across my hip bone. Armen is on the couch beside us, his hand resting on my ankle. Rogue is on the floor, shoulders against the couch, head tipped back, eyes closed.
“The heron,” Sting says.
I go still. “Huh?”
“The city seal. The bird. You told Mara it was a heron. Your father told you.”
I didn’t tell Mara that in front of him. I told her in my room, behind my closed door, during one of a dozen conversations he was not invited to.
“Right,” I say, deciding to let it go. “Herons are patient. Eagles just have better PR. That’s what my dad says. Or used to say.”
Sting’s thumb keeps moving on my hip bone. Slow circles.
“That sounds like him,” Sting says. “Your father. That sounds like something he’d say.”
I don’t respond. I can’t. Because what he just said is the first time Sting has referred to my father as a person rather than a case file. A man who said things, who had a sense of humor, who existed beyond the memos and the contracts and the corruption he was surrounded by.
I press my back against his chest. Just enough that he’d feel it, and he pulls me closer.
28
STING
Something is off with Armen.
It’s not a big thing. That’s what makes it interesting. A big thing I’d have caught immediately, like a missed meeting, an unexplained absence, a deviation from routine significant enough to register. Armen doesn’t do big deviations. He does small ones. Subtle adjustments to his schedule that most people wouldn’t notice because most people don’t track Armen’s movements.
But I do. It’s my nature. And for three days now, shit hasn’t been adding up.
He’s taking longer on his afternoon rounds. Twenty minutes, sometimes thirty, in a section of the Rot that shouldn’t require more than ten. He’s been stopping by the archive room on the first floor, a converted stockroom where the Rot’s older records are kept in filing cabinets that smell like mold and must. I know he’s been there because I checked the log. His name, three times in three days. Don’t know why.
And yesterday, he sat with a mid-level Rotter who’s been here since the early days, unremarkable in every way that matters, except for one—before the collapse, he worked in Rothwell’s municipal planning office. He would have overlapped with Vi’s dad by at least four years.
What’s he doing now, here in the Rot? Same as the rest of us. Surviving.
Armen and this guy don’t normally talk. They’re not in the same circle, don’t share responsibilities, don’t have a history that would explain a twenty-minute conversation at a corner table in the neutral zone. But there they were. Low voices, heads inclined, the body language of two people sharing information they don’t want overheard.
