MORVEN
The house is full. I have never known Crag Manor to feel full before – even with three men in it. Now there are seven of us and the rooms have a different quality. Like a building waiting to be used this way.
Seven. Lachlan, Al, Ewan, me, Rona, Catriona, Niamh. Seven people in a house built for generations and occupied, until the Wager, by one. The house responded to the fullness. The rooms were warmer. The corridors carried sound – voices, footsteps, the domestic noise of a household functioning as a household, which was a thing Crag Manor had not been for decades and was now, on the eve of the most dangerous night of my life, becoming.
The dining room. Evening. The table was set for seven. Lachlan had opened the good wine – not the fourteen-pound supermarket Rioja that Rona had critiqued, but a bottle from the cellar, a 2015 Bordeaux that had been Lachlan’s father’s and hadbeen waiting for an occasion that was either celebration or last supper, and tonight it was both.
Al managed the stove. The big pot. Pasta – the simple kind, the kind that fed a household without requiring performance. Al at the stove was Al at his most gentle – the man who handled heavy things lightly, who chopped onions with the same precision he applied to security perimeters, who salted water with the careful attention of someone who believed that the details of feeding people were worth getting right.
Ewan made coffee for afterwards. He was at the counter grinding beans and explaining, to nobody who had asked, his theory about water temperature and extraction time, which was the Fixer’s version of pre-operational anxiety – the channelling of nervous energy into expertise about a subject that was entirely unrelated to the thing making him nervous.
Rona critiqued the Bordeaux. “Better,” she said, reading the label. “Significantly better. Still not what I’d choose, but I respect the intention.”
“High praise,” Lachlan said.
“From me, it is.”
Niamh and Catriona sat at the end of the table. They were talking about Isobel – not the hospice Isobel but the studio Isobel, the teacher who had shaped both of them. Cat was describing a class from fifteen years ago – a partnering exercise that had gone wrong when her partner dropped her, and Isobel’s response, which had been to look at the partner and say, in the tone of a woman who had witnessed the fall of standards: “In my studio, we catch people.”
Niamh laughed. The laugh was bright and warm and carried the memory of a studio where catching people was both a dance instruction and a life philosophy.
Lachlan sat at the head of the table and he ate his pasta and he drank his Bordeaux and he listened. The listening wasLachlan at his most present – the strategist suspended, the man engaged. He asked Catriona about the Glasgow productions. He asked Niamh about the chip shop’s quarterly figures. He asked Rona about the wine – not the quality, the region – and Rona responded with a ten-minute analysis of Rioja terroir that was the most animated I had ever seen her in a social setting.
The table was noisy. Conversations overlapped. Al passed the pasta. Ewan served the coffee. Rona refilled her glass. The noise was the sound of a house at capacity – full, warm, the stone walls absorbing the voices and the warmth and holding them the way old buildings hold everything, with patience and permanence.
I sat at the table and I watched. Tomorrow night, Catriona would walk into the Merchant Villas with a forged document. Tomorrow night, Ewan would be in a van monitoring signals. Tomorrow night, Al would be on the perimeter. Tomorrow night, Lachlan and I would be at the dinner as guests, visible, performing our role in the society that Mackie was trying to dismantle.
Tonight, we were eating pasta.
Catriona and Ewan disappeared after dinner. The library. The door was closed. I passed it on my way upstairs and I heard their voices – low, overlapping, the sound of a brother and sister who had been apart for six years and were rebuilding the conversation that had been interrupted. I did not listen. I kept walking. Whatever they were saying to each other in that room belonged to them.
Late. The study.
Lachlan locked the door. Ewan was already there. Al was already there. I was standing by the fire and the room was warm and the night was cold outside and the house was quiet – Rona in her room, Catriona in Niamh’s flat, the manor emptied of everyone except the four people who belonged in it.
“Come here,” Lachlan said.
The command was the signal. I crossed the room. The fire was amber on my skin and his hand found my chin and tilted my face up and the kiss was slow, thorough, the unhurried kiss of a man who had all night and intended to use it.
“Sit,” he said. Not to me. To them.
Ewan sat on the rug. Al lowered himself beside the fire. Two men, settled, watching. Waiting for instruction.
Lachlan undressed me. Standing. By the fire. He took his time – the zip at the back of my dress, his fingers tracing my spine as the fabric opened, the dress pooling at my feet. He stood behind me and I stood in the firelight in nothing and three men looked at me and I was not ashamed and I was not performing. I was present.
“Ewan,” Lachlan said.
Ewan came to me. On his knees on the rug, his hands on my waist, his face level with my stomach. He kissed the skin below my navel. His mouth was warm and his voice was at my skin – “You’re beautiful, Christ, you’re so–” – and the Fixer’s eloquence disintegrating against my body was its own kind of gift. His hands slid down my legs and back up and his mouth followedand I put my hand in his hair and gripped and he groaned against my hip.
“Al,” Lachlan said.
Al stood. He came up behind me the way weather arrives – gradually and then all at once. His chest against my back. His hands on my shoulders, sliding down to my hips. He was still clothed. The fabric of his shirt against my bare skin was a contrast that made my skin prickle. He lowered his mouth to my neck and bit, gently, and my head fell back against his shoulder and Ewan’s mouth was between my thighs and Al’s teeth were on my neck and Lachlan was watching from the armchair with the specific intensity of a man who had orchestrated exactly this.
The handcuffs. Chrome. Cold. Lachlan rose and crossed to me and put them on my wrists. Both wrists. Both cuffs. The click was loud and final. He held my cuffed hands above my head – the chain between the cuffs looped over his fist – and looked at me.
“Colour?”
“Green.”
