Price of a Vote - Twelfth Seat 07

HOUSE XII -- DOSSIER

The Authority vacancy. Three votes not yet counted. Prepared for the Holder. Assessments in the hand of the responsible Confidante.

DEPUTY DE SMET: Greens, Economic Affairs, second term. Votes her conscience and has been right often enough that her party lets her keep the habit. Margin: Offer her nothing. Show her the file and let her arrive at us on her own legs. She trusts her own conclusions the way Hannah trusts a balanced ledger. L.

DEPUTY LEFEBVRE: coalition backbench, third term, has wanted the junior portfolio at Justice audibly for a year. Margin: The easy one. He will name a fair price and take it without theater. A phone call. Don't make him ask twice, he'll remember the courtesy longer than the favor. L.

DEPUTY VAN DAMME: coalition's right flank, two donors deep in a holding company Corvin's client controls, convinced neither has noticed her noticing. Margin: Not for sale, and would be insulted by the offer, correctly. She is afraid of something specific and I haven't finished learning what. Give me the week, not the day. L.

* * *

On the first of July the kitchen of the private wing smelled of coffee and toasted bread, and held, for the length of the last of the three steps down into it, no rank at all.

Noor sat sideways on her chair with one foot tucked under her, a bowl of coffee held in both hands, a roll torn into pieces she was eating out of order. Constance sat with her back to the copper, the gray fastened all the way to the throat, and by her hand stood a cup that matched nothing else on the table. The cup was empty.

"Seventh," Noor said, before his foot was off the last step. She had Sunday's supplement folded against the milk jug and read from it without looking up. "The summer list of the Kingdom's eligible men. You placed seventh, Twelfth, between a footballer and a widowed brewery heir. Console yourself. It's five places better than your seat."

"I can live with the footballer," Julian said. "The heir worries me."

He took a cup from the open shelf and poured his own at the range, because that was the whole of the law in this room and he had learned it on his first morning. He did not take the chair opposite. He took the one beside her, and set his coffee down, and said, "Constance."

The answer came as her answers always came, complete and in her own order. It came half a second late.

"Good morning, Mr. Reeve." She turned her head enough to include him in the morning and no further. "Past this table I am the First, and you are still the guest."

Nobody at the table moved. Noor did not look up from the bowl. "Then the guest can pass the butter. Guests get butter in this House. It's in the Protocol somewhere."

"It is not," Constance said.

"It should be. I'll draft it."

Julian passed the butter. Constance watched the dish travel across the pale scrubbed wood, and something in the set of her shoulders paid out perhaps a quarter of an inch, and she said, "The calendar, then," and recited it, from memory, without a book anywhere near the table.

"Livia has been in the small office since six. There is a dossier for you in the salon. It has been there since she stopped improving it, which will have cost her something. She has the week. Whatever hours she names are hers, and nothing she sets is to be moved on my account or yours. The post can wait until the dossier can't. I have the Register until ten and the household after it, and I am not to be interrupted for anything smaller than fire." Somewhere between the dossier and the post he got up, fetched the pot off the range, filled the empty cup, and set it back by her hand. She took it inside a sentence, drank, set it down on the same ring it had left, and did not stop. "The salon at eight, Mr. Reeve."

Noor watched the pot go back to the range over the rim of her bowl, and buttered another piece of the roll, and did not eat it.

He finished his coffee standing, washed the cup at the stone sink as Hannah had taught him without ever once instructing him in it, and set it on the rack. At the steps he looked back. Constance was exactly as he had found her, upright in the gray with the refilled cup by her hand, and Noor had turned the tucked foot out from under her and was looking at nothing in particular.

He had three stacks for everything in this House. He went up the steps without filing the half second into any of them.

* * *

The dossier was waiting in the salon at eight, which told him everything about the coming week before Livia said a word.

She was already there, no red today, a charcoal suit with the jacket over the chair's back. This was working Livia, the one the cameras got, whose outside he had known for years before he ever met the woman. Three folders lay squared on the low table. She didn't stand.

"Corvin's moved," she said, and skipped the preamble as a courtesy. "The chair of the Competition Authority falls vacant next month. Parliament confirms it by a two-thirds vote of the full Chamber. The rule was written after the last chair was accused of being somebody's man, to prove the seat's independence by making it arithmetically hard to capture. So every deputy who hasn't declared is, this week, the most expensive property in the Kingdom."

"What's Corvin's stake in a competition regulator?"

"Everything, if Hannah's read of his client's timeline is right. Corvin's client has spent three years quietly building a media holding. Titles nobody watched being bought, one at a time, each purchase small enough that it never triggered a second look. The day they file the merger notification, it's the Authority's chair who decides how narrowly to draw the market. Draw it narrowly enough, regional readership instead of national, print instead of 'news' entire, and the deal clears without a vote. Corvin has no need to win one. All he needs is a chair who makes sure none is ever required."

"His candidate."

"Herman Aerts, on paper. Twenty years in competition economics, entirely respectable, with a scholarly habit of finding market-definition rules 'increasingly difficult to justify on principled grounds' whenever they're applied to media. The opposition has put him up against ours, and Corvin has forty-one votes behind him."

"Forty-one is a long way short of a hundred."

"It was never meant to reach a hundred. Aerts is there to lose." She said it without any heat. "Corvin needs one thing on Friday. He needs our candidate to fall short. If nobody reaches two-thirds, both names are spent, and the rules send the party leaders into a room to agree on a third. Corvin has had the third ready since the spring. Marc Hendrickx, a retired commercial judge whom nobody dislikes and nobody has looked at closely. No fee from Corvin's client a journalist could find. On the one day it matters, he draws Corvin exactly the market he needs, and he does it with a compromise candidate's clean hands."

Julian looked at the folder again. "And ours."

"Sofia Dumont. Ten years running the Authority's merger division, immune to the word 'scholarly,' and considerably harder to move than either of them." Livia tapped the folder shut. "Viktor didn't build this House's bridge to keep it open for the view. He built it so he could close it the moment somebody dangerous got close enough to matter, and Corvin's client never has before. Dumont keeps the market defined wide, wide enough that the merger gets reviewed properly and probably dies there. Don't mistake that for principle. The House is protecting the only bridge it owns." She moved on before he could ask her to soften it. "Two-thirds is a hundred of a hundred and fifty. The coalition has more seats than this on paper. Eighty-four is what it can count on without asking. Corvin's opposition sits at forty-one, most of it happy to sit there. That leaves twenty-five undeclared. We need sixteen of them. Corvin needs ten. Of the twenty-five, three actually matter, and the rest will vote however the room is leaning by Thursday night, and the Chamber divides on Friday. So the room is the thing we're building."

"And building it is your domain."

"Building it," Livia said, "has been my domain since before I had a seal. Watch, if you like. You've been too polite to ask what I do here besides read polls back to you in better sentences." The parliamentary calibration came off her mouth all at once and the grin he had met in June came up under it, with all the appetite left on the surface, and she took her time getting to the end of the look. "This is the part nobody films. Wear the gray suit. You're going to be furniture in three corridors this week and I would like the furniture to be worth looking at."

"That was flirtation," Julian said.

"It was," she agreed, entirely unbothered, and picked up the folders.

* * *

De Smet received him in a committee-room corridor between sessions. Livia had stopped three steps back at a window with her telephone to her ear, a deputy with a call to return, and those three steps were the entire strategy. A cleaner's cart stood abandoned outside the committee room with one wheel turned sideways. The woman in front of him was in her fifties and had the patience of someone who had spent thirty years being underestimated by people who mistook conviction for naïveté.

"Mr. Reeve." She offered him an assessment in place of a hand. "Your predecessor never came to this building. He sent very good position papers."

"I've brought one. I read it this morning and it's better than anything I could improvise, so it's here instead of an argument." He held out a folder, thinner than the dossier and unmarked by any House hand, market-definition studies from three jurisdictions, dry as a customs form. "I won't tell you how to vote, Deputy. I'd like you to know what's actually being decided this week, because I don't think everyone in that Chamber does."

She took the folder and didn't open it, and he'd expected that. Livia's margin had as good as said she would read it alone, on her own terms, and that anything he added in a corridor would only make her trust it less.

"Your company used to be the one everyone assumed owned all the microphones," De Smet said. "Convenient, that it turns out to be the one arguing nobody should own too many."

"Convenient and true aren't always enemies." He let it stand. "Read it or don't. I'm not going to call you before the vote."

"Good," De Smet said, already turning back to the committee room. "I'd have voted the other way out of spite." She took the folder with her all the same, and Livia at her window went on with her call and did not once look round, which Julian was learning to read as her loudest approval.

She caught up with him on the stairs when the committee-room doors had shut. "You didn't sell her anything. Do you know how rare that is here? Men come to this building to sell." She looked him over from the shoes up and did not trouble to pretend otherwise. "It's inconvenient, what that does to me. I'd like it noted that I'm working through it professionally."

"Is it working?"

"Not remotely," Livia said, and went down the stairs ahead of him.

Lefebvre took a quarter of an hour and a phone call Livia made herself, with her back to Julian at another window, in a voice he hadn't heard from her before, warm and in no hurry, naming a portfolio timeline like a train schedule she'd memorized. She hung up and said, "Done," in the tone of a woman closing a ledger column.

"That's it?" Julian said. "No leverage. No file."

"He told me what he wanted a year ago, loudly, at every reception where anyone would listen. I simply believed him the first time." She was already walking. "Most leverage in this city is patience wearing a disguise. Van Damme is the interesting one. Come and watch me not have an answer yet."

* * *

Sarah found him at the corner bar two evenings later. It was not engineered this time, or it was engineered differently, with a text an hour ahead, your table's free if you want it, the coincidence retired in favor of the plain request.

She looked less armored than she had a week ago at this same table, the night he came back from Geneva. The partner-track coat hung on the chair instead of belted at her waist, and she'd ordered the same house red without commenting on its vinegar, and he took that as a small act of forgiveness for the lie he'd told her that night and neither of them had mentioned since. The dog was not under the coat rack. He found he had looked for it.

"You look like a man in the middle of something," she said. "Good something, for once, and you've got the face you used to get when a placement landed clean."

"A vote. Nothing you'd find interesting."

"I find everything about you interesting, Julian, that was always the problem." She put her glass down without turning it. "I've had a week to be angry with you and I did it properly. I'm good at it. It turns out it hasn't touched the other thing at all." Her eyes stayed on his. "There's a door at the back with a bolt on it. I'm going to go through it. You can follow me or you can finish your wine, and whichever you choose I'll come back to this table and be civil about it."

She went without looking round.

Julian sat with the house red. A week ago her hand had come halfway across this table wanting one true sentence from him, and he had moved his own to his glass. This wanted no sentence of any kind. He understood that this was the entire reason he could say yes to it, and he did not much like the man who understood it, and he got up. The landlord was reading the racing page and did not lift his head.

The room at the back was a sink, a mirror going brown at the edges and a window the size of a book, and she had left the door off the latch. He shot the bolt. She had her back against the wall and her weight on her left hip, and she took him by the shirtfront and kissed him before he had finished turning round, hard, with her whole mouth, and a week of being angry was in it after all.

"Quiet," Sarah said, against his ear. "The old man can hear a cork come out from the cellar."

Her tongue went along the rim of his ear, which she had never once been fair about, and he took a breath and held it, and she laughed without any sound, her shoulders shaking against him.

"There he is," she said.

He got his hands under the skirt. She had come from work in it, gray and narrow and lined, and it went up over her hips with a hiss of the lining, and her bare thighs were warm and she was already wet through the cotton when he put his palm against her. She made the low impatient sound into his collar. He pushed the cotton aside and slid two fingers along her, slick, and she bit the sound off and caught his wrist and held his hand exactly where it was for one long press of her hips.

"Not like that. I want you in me, and I want to watch you try to keep a straight face."

She turned in the small space and put both hands on the edge of the sink and looked at him in the mirror. Her chestnut hair was coming loose from whatever had held it through the day, her mouth was open, and her eyes were on his and neither kind nor unkind. He got his belt open. She watched him do it. He drew her underwear down her thighs, and she widened her feet on the tiles as far as it allowed, and he took his cock in his hand, hard enough to ache, and fitted the head of it against her and pushed in.

She was tight at that angle and very wet, and she took him slowly to the root with her head going down between her arms, and when it came back up she found him in the glass again. Neither of them made a sound. He held her by the hips and began to fuck her in short deep strokes, because the room allowed nothing longer, and the sink ticked against the wall, and she reached back with one hand and gripped his thigh to slow him until the ticking stopped.

"There," she breathed. "Like that. Don't you dare speed up."

He didn't. He kept it deep and even and watched her in the mirror, the flush climbing out of her collar, her lower lip caught in her teeth, the small high breasts moving under her blouse with each stroke. He slid one hand round her hip and down and found her clit with two fingers, and she jerked and pushed back onto him hard, and her cunt tightened around his cock in a way he remembered in his spine.

She turned her head and he bent over her back and she kissed him over her shoulder, awkward and wet, her breath coming through her nose. When she broke it she pressed her mouth against her own upper arm, and her thighs began to shake, and she came as she always had the first time, fast, with no warning given, clenching on him in hard pulses while her eyes in the mirror stayed open and on his. The only noise was the air going out of her.

He could not have held out against that and did not try. He drove in once more as deep as she could take him and held there, and came with his face in her hair and his teeth shut, emptying into her in long pulls, her hand still locked on his thigh.

They stayed as they were. The tap dripped. Out in the bar a chair scraped and nobody came.

She straightened first and turned round inside his arms, and put her palm flat against his chest where his heart was still going.

"That wasn't forgiveness," Sarah said. "I want that understood."

"Understood."

"Good." Her hand stayed where it was. She leaned up and kissed him once more, lightly, with her eyes open. "It wasn't nothing, either. I'd like that understood as well."

She went out first. When he came back to the table she had her glass in her hand and her hair pinned again, and she looked like a woman who had been waiting for him to finish a telephone call.

"My firm picked up a file," she said, and turned the glass a quarter-turn by the stem, the old tell. "Last week. Belgian estate matter. A decades-old holding structure that needs untangling before it transfers. Deeply boring. I only mention it because for four seconds I wondered if it was yours, and then remembered your estate isn't the kind that goes through a firm like mine." A small laugh, aimed at herself. "Everything's your estate now, in my head. Occupational hazard of having loved a man who outranks discretion."

He filed it the way Constance had taught him to file things, known, assumed, believed, and knew even as he smiled and let the moment pass that it belonged in the first stack now. Someone had retained Sarah's firm for a Belgian estate matter, and the word estate did not, in this city, in this year, belong to very many families.

"Not mine," he said. It was exactly true, and he let the true thing carry the weight of everything else. He had gone still without meaning to, and to cover it he heard himself ask whether the rain was expected back before the weekend.

Sarah looked at him. "Saturday, they say," she said.

She didn't push. She never had, and it was one of the things that had made three years with her feel like air. They talked for the rest of the hour about nothing that mattered and everything that did, her partner track and a case she couldn't discuss and the landlord's furniture aging one more year into the landlord, and at the door she said only, "Same time next week, if you're not too important," and was gone before he could decide whether that was an olive branch or a countdown.

* * *

Livia had worked that third day alone, in the sense that Julian saw none of it and heard all of it late the same evening, after the corner bar, over a count she laid on the sitting-room table like a hand of cards finally shown.

She had gone back past the two donors, into the plainer question underneath, which was what Ilse Van Damme was afraid of losing. The answer was almost embarrassingly human. It was a supervisory board seat at a mid-sized publisher, promised for after politics, the soft landing every deputy her age negotiates years ahead and never mentions aloud. Corvin's client sat, at two removes, on that board.

Livia hadn't threatened to expose it. She'd found Van Damme in a corridor much like De Smet's and told her, in the register she kept for numbers rather than people, that there was enough weight behind two other names on that board to guarantee the landing however the vote went, and that the choice between conscience and career did not, this week, have to be one.

"You insured her," Julian said.

"That's the timely offer," Livia said. It came out private and exact, a term she had plainly used a hundred times in her own head and never once to a guest. "Blackmail spends the same currency and buys the opposite thing, a vote and an enemy in one transaction. The timely offer buys a vote and, done correctly, a friend who owes you something she'll spend the rest of her career pretending not to remember owing." She closed the folder. "The House doesn't pay for silence. Constance will have had you read that in the ledger room by now, and it's as true of the Kingdom as of anything in her books. We paid for a woman not to have to choose."

"What did it cost us?"

"A favor. Unnamed, unwritten, called in whenever the House decides to call it." She looked at him with the expression he took for her most honest one, the audit running behind the eyes even here. "A debt for later. File it and forget it, the way I have to."

* * *

She did not, in fact, forget it, though she would have let him believe she had.

Livia ran the last day's numbers alone in the small office off the salon that had become hers without any ceremony declaring it so, with Hannah's trees on one wall in pencil copies she'd made herself rather than ask for the originals. Eighty-four secure. Lefebvre, banked, cheap, grateful. Van Damme, bought with mercy instead of money, the one currency Livia had ever enjoyed spending. De Smet last, unspoken but certain, because the folder had done its work.

HOUSE XII -- INTERNAL NOTE

Chamber vote, chair of the Competition Authority. Two-thirds required: 100 of 150.

Coalition, secure without persuasion: 84. Opposition (Corvin-aligned), secure: 41. Undeclared, four days out: 25.

Result: Dumont confirmed, 104--46. Twenty of the twenty-five undeclared voted to confirm. Five went to Corvin. No further items.

By the standards of a two-thirds threshold it was less a win than an unmasking. Corvin had counted on the undeclared breaking his way, or at worst splitting evenly, as undeclared blocs do when nobody works them. Sitting on his forty-one he needed ten of the twenty-five to hold Dumont below the hundred, the kind of margin a man of his weight collects without appearing to reach. He got five, and the judge he had kept ready since the spring was never sent for. Livia had worked the bloc as nobody had troubled to work one in years, and twenty of the twenty-five came in for Dumont in four days, a break so lopsided that from the outside it read as if the vote had changed its own mind.

She let herself, for as long as it took to walk from the office to the corridor mirror and check the day hadn't shown on her face, think about what she'd wanted to say to him the night before Geneva, dressing him for a table full of men who had spent decades deciding what women like her were for.

I hate holding conversations with dead men. She'd meant it as wit at the time, a line to close a door on, and it had taken her nine days and another woman's locked door to admit what sat underneath it. She'd spent four years learning to manage Viktor Berg the way you manage weather, working around it and never arguing with it and never expecting it to notice she'd had a good day, and all of that on top of a career spent managing men exactly like him for free, for a party that needed her more than it admitted. Somewhere in the eight days of dressing his replacement for Geneva she'd caught herself wanting, for the first time in longer than she was prepared to name, to be asked something rather than instructed in it. She had no use for softness. She wanted to be read correctly, as she read the Eleven, by someone capable of doing it back.

She had meant to say some careful, deniable version of it after Geneva. The conversation afterward, announced like a threat and delivered like nothing at all, because she'd lost her nerve exactly where nerve would have cost her something. Then Constance had gotten there first, four days later, in a locked ledger room, and Livia had heard it as the House heard everything, sideways and complete and instantly, and filed it with the same cold competence she filed a vote count, and discovered at this same mirror three nights ago that filing it did not stop it mattering.

Classify him, she told herself now. Asset. Considerable, well-placed, currently underused. Watch the House's investment in him the way you'd watch any position that could move the board.

The mirror gave her back a woman who had won a vote by a margin that would make Corvin recalculate his whole timeline, and who was, underneath the win, unable to stop being pleased that Julian Reeve had stood in a corridor and believed a deputy's price the first time she named it. Nobody had ever done that for Livia.

File it under risk, she thought, and meant it, and went to change for the evening anyway.

* * *

The card that reached him at seven had not been cut by the household. It was in Livia's own hand, upright and economical, with no candlelit formalities. Come to the long room at nine. No design tonight. A conversation first. Then, if you're willing, something I've wanted to build since the rehearsal night, and haven't asked for, because I wanted to win the vote before I asked you for anything else.

She was alone when he arrived. There was no black cloth and no rebuilt table, and the long-table room had been returned to its ordinary self, the table bare and twelve chairs pushed back against the walls as a room looks between meetings. She'd changed out of the charcoal suit into something without a committee's memory in it, dark green and simple, with her hair down as it had been in the salon on his first night, before she put it up at a window in a room he hadn't been invited into. Tonight she'd taken the pins out herself, which he registered and said nothing about.

"Sit," she said, and then, catching the word as it left her, "please. I've spent four days telling other people what to do. I'd like the evening to start differently."

He didn't sit. He crossed the room and stopped close to her at the cold hearth, closer than a guest would, and stayed there.

"A hundred and four to forty-six," he said. "I watched you build that number for four days, one deputy at a time, and it still didn't prepare me for hearing it read aloud. I don't think anyone else in that Chamber understood what they'd just watched happen." He made no attempt to dress it as an observation. "I'm impressed. I don't mean politely."

"It was arithmetic and one board seat," Livia said. "Any competent whip with the same file would have --" She stopped. Her hand had started toward the glass on the mantel and hadn't finished the journey. The color came up at her chest and then at the tops of her ears, in that order, as it always did and had never learned not to, and she let him watch it arrive without turning away from it.

"That was a deflection," she said. "You may enter it in the record."

"I noticed."

"Of course you did. I taught you that in a corridor." She left the glass where it stood. "Nobody in this House says that sentence out loud. Constance grades. Hannah costs it. Noor makes a joke and files the joke. You crossed a room and said I'm impressed like a man with no committee to answer to." She breathed out and didn't disguise the unevenness of it. "Do it again when I'm braced for it."

He didn't answer that, and it was into the quiet after it that she finally said the rest, in a voice with nothing of the corridor left in it. She had spent four years being useful to a man who never once asked what using her cost. She didn't yet know whether Julian was the same kind of man or a different one, and she had chosen, with the discipline she brought to a whip count, to find out by asking and to assume nothing.

"I ask for the evening," Livia said. Plain. Formal only in the five words themselves, nowhere else. "Not the House's evening. Mine."

"Is Mara all right with you asking me this?" he said.

"You waited a whole second before asking that." The last of the calibration went off her face, and what was under it had no manners in it at all. "I'd have thought less of you at two. It's cleared. It was cleared before I wrote you that card, because I don't ask for things I haven't already got leave to want." The grin came. "Her words, since otherwise you'll invent worse ones: try him once, and tell me whether he's worth the disruption."

"And afterward you tell her."

"Afterward I tell her all of it. That's been the arrangement for eighteen months, and I find it concentrates the mind wonderfully." The look she gave him was entirely unrepentant. "You may find the same."

"Then say the rest of it."

"The door is golden. For both of us, all evening, no exceptions and no penalty for using it. Say it back to me, so I know we're standing on the same floor."

"The door is golden," Julian said.

"And you may decline. Now, or in an hour, and it costs you nothing." Her chin came up half an inch. "I would rather be refused outright than accommodated. I have been accommodated. It is the worst thing anybody has ever done to me."

"I'm not accommodating you."

"Good." She looked him over once and took her time about it. "Don't start when we're horizontal, either. I'll know."

* * *

She undressed him, and told him while she did it that she had been intending to since Geneva and had not, until this evening, been able to say so.

"Stand still," she said, at his collar. "You'll do it anyway. You do it in every room you walk into and you have no idea what it costs the rest of us."

He stood still. It took most of what he had, and she watched it take it, working down the buttons with the backs of her fingers dragging over his chest between each one, keeping up a commentary half instruction and half inventory. The shoulders, a waste on a clerk. The hands, which she had watched not move for four days and formed views about.

At his belt she stopped. "Now you're not calm. Say something."

"No."

The laugh came up out of her chest. "That's unfair."

She got the belt open and put her hand around him, and the noise he made was not his to withhold. Hers arrived just behind it, and she covered it with a sentence that never got finished.

It was his turn after that, and she announced that she was allowing it. The dark green came off over her head because the buttons were at the back and she would not say so aloud, and her hair came down through it, and he had a fistful of it before it finished falling.

"That's cheating," she said, into his mouth.

"You told me not to accommodate you."

"I did." Her mouth opened under his with a great deal more than it needed to, and the color that had started at her chest climbed her throat. "I did say that. Do it again."

He had wanted that mouth since the first hour in the salon, the wide deliberate mouth with the lips that never quite shut, and had spent every day since being extremely well behaved about it.

He stopped being well behaved. He didn't kiss her. He put his tongue into her mouth, hard, all the way, and for a second she was too surprised to do anything at all, and then she came back at him with everything, teeth and tongue and a hand fisted at the back of his neck, and it stopped being a kiss and became two people trying to eat each other alive.

He got her out of the rest of it against the cold wall between two of the twelve chairs, and she said something about the wall that stopped in the middle when his mouth found her nipple, dark and disproportionate to the rest of her and wired straight to her spine. He worked it slowly, tongue and then teeth, and her hand came flat to the back of his head and pressed, and the sentence never reached its verb.

He went down her slowly and she talked the whole way, over her ribs, over her stomach, over the crease where hip met thigh, where the talking got noticeably worse. He stopped short of where she was steering him, lifted her leg, hooked it over his shoulder and put his open mouth behind her knee, the flat of his tongue on the thin skin there.

The leg jumped. Her whole weight came off it and onto him, and the sound she made had no consonants anywhere in it.

"Who --" Her hand got into his hair and closed. "Who taught you that."

He didn't answer. He did it again, slower, with his teeth in it this time, and her heel dug hard into his back and the hand in his hair stopped being a question.

He went up the inside of her thigh and put his open mouth on her cunt and held it there, hot and still, until she pushed against him for more. He gave her the broad of his tongue in one long slow lick through the wet of her, and closed his lips around her clit and stayed. The commentary left her in stages. Instruction first, higher, there, there, then his name, then nothing that was a word at all. Her heel came up onto his shoulder. Her hand gripped and let go and gripped again in his hair and stayed shut. He worked two fingers into her and kept his tongue exactly where she'd sent it, and the wet sound of her filled the room where her voice had been.

She took a fistful of his hair and pulled him off her, breathing badly.

"No. Not like that. I am not being administered to."

She got him down onto the rug, the twelve chairs standing round the walls like a gallery, knelt over his hips, put one hand around him and held him upright, and looked at what she had and did not hurry it.

"Hm," Livia said. "Slightly more than I'd budgeted for."

"You budget."

"I budget for everything."

She took his cock into her mouth in one slow motion, the whole hard aching length of him, thick and flushed dark and already wet at the tip from her hand, straight down, without stopping anywhere in the middle to negotiate, down until her nose was pressed against his belly and her throat had closed over the head of him, and Julian's spine came up off the floor.

She stayed there, and she was not breathing. She couldn't, with him that deep. She held it, her mouth stretched around the base of him and her nose against his stomach, and let him feel her throat swallow around the head of him, once and then again, entirely deliberate, and her eyes came up while she did it and found his and did not leave them.

She came off him slowly, all the way to the tip, tongue flat and dragging on the underside the whole distance, and went back down and did it again. And again, on her own count, building it as she built everything, her hand leaving his shaft to cup his balls and roll them in her palm, weighing them, working them with her fingers the whole time her mouth kept its rhythm, the other splayed hot across his hip, holding him where she wanted him. Then the head of him alone, lips tight under the ridge, tongue in small hard circles, watching his face to see what each thing did to it and adjusting accordingly.

He got a fistful of the dark blonde hair. She hummed around him, pleased, and the sound went down through him and out the backs of his legs. She took him to the root again and held him there and worked her tongue while she was down.

"Livia --"

She came off him at the exact moment his hands left her hair and went flat to the rug. Sat back on her heels, wiped her thumb slowly along her lower lip, and looked entirely delighted with herself.

"That was cruel," Julian said, when he could.

"That was timing," Livia said. "You've watched me do it to a Chamber all week. Did you think I'd take you all the way to the vote and let you have it?"

She moved to swing a leg over him and he caught her by the hip and turned her instead, and she went easily, laughing once on the way down, onto her back on the rug with her hair everywhere and one arm flung out against the leg of a chair.

"Oh, good," she said. "Do it badly and I'll never let you forget it."

He knelt up between her knees and pushed his cock into her, slow, all the way, the head of him parting slick heat and then the long tight glide of her closing around every centimeter as it arrived, and watched her run out of sentence somewhere in the middle of it. She was wet enough that nothing was in the way and tight enough that the last of it took its time, and the noise she made when he was fully in her was unlike anything she'd produced in four days of corridors.

He got both hands on her breasts, full and soft and giving everywhere under his palms, and took them, kneading, a little too hard to be called tender any more, and she arched up into it rather than away, and he began to move.

She narrated it from underneath, because narrating it was how it stayed hers. Faster, then deliberately not faster, then a remark about his hands that arrived in the wrong order and stayed wrong. Every stroke went the whole way in and she tightened on all of them. The color went up over the tops of her ears. Her tongue came out along her upper lip and dragged, edge to edge, and stayed there and did not go back in.

And then she stopped instructing him.

"Please," Livia said.

She heard herself say it. He watched her hear it. She said it again, louder, deliberately, with her eyes open on his face. "Please. Harder. Don't be careful with me."

He got a hand under her hip, lifted her into it, and gave her exactly that.

She came apart under him and he did not vary once. She lost her own rhythm entirely and he kept his, driving into her hard and even and steady, and her hands found his forearms and gripped and then could not do anything else. The flush had her from the chest up. Her mouth stayed open on nothing. He felt her clench and clench again around him in hard successive pulls, felt her thigh shaking against his ribs, and her eyes stayed open the whole time and on his face, and when she went he went with her, deep, and held there while it took him, the pull starting at the base of his spine and emptying up the whole length of his cock in long hard pulses that she answered, one for one, from inside.

They ended on the floor with the rug rucked under them and one of the twelve chairs pushed out of true, and neither moved to correct it, which in that room was the most disorderly thing that had happened in years.

It was only then, on his back with her weight along his side, that Julian worked out she had not once let him do anything for her that she hadn't first told him to do. Except the backs of her knees. He'd stolen that off Mara in June, across a firelit room, watching a leg come apart in the correct order, and it was the only thing all evening Livia hadn't seen coming, and the only thing that had stopped her talking.

"You sat well this week," Livia said, eyes closed, "for a man learning two disciplines at once."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's an assessment." A pause. The color, which had never entirely left, came back at the tops of her ears. "It's a compliment. Don't make me produce a second one tonight."

"You'll tell her all of it."

"All of it." She turned her head on the rug and looked at him, and the grin came back with the appetite entirely on the surface. "I'm going to tell her you're worth the disruption. You should know what that will cost you before I do."

"What does it cost me?"

"An evening nobody has asked you for yet."

She propped herself on one elbow above him and kissed him, and this time it was nothing like the other one. It was slow and warm, her hand open along his jaw, her thumb at the corner of his mouth, no negotiation in it anywhere. She stayed a long time. When she finally sat back her eyes were still closed.

"Good night, Twelfth," Livia said.

* * *

The note came the next morning, before the House had finished its coffee, by a courier who left no name and asked no receipt. It was cream, heavier than the occasion required, and addressed in the small angry script of a man who had inherited his prose with everything else.

Mr. Reeve,

A two-thirds Chamber vote does not turn by twenty points in four days. In my time at that table I have watched it happen exactly twice, both times because someone had counted the room before the room had finished disagreeing with itself. I congratulate you, and more particularly whoever built the map. You may tell her, since House rules forbid my saying it to her directly, that I recognized the instrument without the signature.

"The timely offer." I have heard the phrase exactly once. Your predecessor used it across the table in Geneva, with some pride, and I took it for his own until this week. He was not a man who troubled to say where he had found a thing.

Give my compliments to the House. And to the First, my condolences. She has clearly not finished teaching you everything she knows. Aerts's defeat I had allowed for. Dumont's confirmation has cost me an afternoon rereading my own intelligence with rather less confidence than I read it yesterday.

A. C.

Julian read it twice, put it down between the coffee and the morning's post, and felt something cold settle that had nothing to do with the vote. Livia's phrase. Her private instrument, spoken inside these walls a handful of times and never once committed to paper.

She read it over his shoulder, once, and he watched her go very still, the stillness he had learned from her to take for thinking.

"So that's where it went," she said.

"You told Viktor."

"I told Viktor everything that worked. That was the position." Her voice had the corridor back in it. "I said it to him once, in the salon, the week I turned a committee he'd written off. He asked what I called it. I thought he was being interested." She set the note down with two fingers, as she might set down a hand she'd already read. "He took it to Geneva and wore it at that table as if he'd cut it himself."

"Then nobody's talking to Corvin."

"Nobody living. A dead man spent my instrument across a table without asking, and I find I mind that more." She breathed out through her nose. "I told you what I think of conversations with dead men. It seems one of them has been holding mine for me."

Julian looked at the cream paper. "He could have kept this to himself for years."

"He could. Read when he sends it. The morning after a win, to the man in Viktor's chair, so that you'll sit here wondering what else Viktor said at that table, and to whom, and so that I'll spend a month going back through four years of everything I ever told him." She tapped the note once. "This is the timely offer, Julian. Played on us. He's learned it rather well for a man who heard it once."

"What else did Viktor say at that table?"

"I don't know. Nobody in this House does, and Corvin knows we don't." A pause, and the almost-smile didn't quite arrive. "He wanted to know whether we'd panic. Let's not tell him."

* * *

This is my first series, and I'm writing it in the open so I can learn from the people reading it. Please tell me what's working for you, the plot, the House, the characters, the scenes, and what isn't.

-- Alix