Chapter 10: Chapter 10
Chloe's room was empty when she got back. Ruby's coat was gone from its hook, her bed made with corners so sharp they looked cut. Chloe sat on her own bed with her books still in her lap and her lips still carrying the memory of Voss's mouth, and she tried to think about the report due Friday and got nowhere.
The knock, when it came, was not a knock. A paper slid under the door, quick and soft, and footsteps moved off down the corridor before she could reach it. She picked the note up off the floorboards.
Heavy cream cardstock, black ink, an elegant hand. The tower. One hour. Come alone, tell no one, and burn this.
She did not burn it. She put it in her desk drawer, under the swab kit, and looked at herself in the small mirror above the sink. Her face was composed. Her pulse was not.
The dining hall was half-full when she came down. The noise dipped when she entered, the way it always did now, then rose again, and she counted the looks. Fewer than yesterday. Fewer than this morning. A fresh spectacle at lunch had evidently bled off some of the pressure, the way Ruby had promised. Measured girls were yesterday's news by dinner.
She took a roll, some soup, sat at the end of a bench, and ate fast without tasting any of it.
Anneliese was at the long table in the middle, and she looked at her three times. The first was casual, the kind of look a second-year gave any first-year. The second lingered. The third came with a small tilt of the blonde's head, chin down, eyes up, the look of someone appraising a horse she intended to buy. Chloe held the third look for a second longer than she needed to, then went back to her soup, and felt Anneliese's attention stay on her back like a hand.
No Ruby anywhere. Not at the third-years' table, not in the doorway, not in the corridor after. Chloe checked twice, then stopped checking, and went out into the cold.
The far tower stood against the last of the evening light, stone going violet at the edges. The stairs wound up in the dark and her breath carried her all the way to the oak door, and she knocked.
"Enter."
Vance's office was larger than she remembered, lamplit, the desk, the bookcases, the tall window with the mountains going black behind it. Voss was there. She sat in one of the two leather chairs angled before the desk, legs crossed, black dress unstirring, and she turned her head as Chloe came in.
"Close the door, Bennett."
Chloe closed it. The two women had been talking; she could feel it in the room the way you felt a fire recently built. There were two glasses on the sideboard, one empty, one half-full of amber. Vance stood behind her desk and did not sit.
"Do you know why you're here?"
"Private instruction," Chloe said. "Or expulsion. I genuinely can't tell which."
Voss laughed, short and real, and Vance's mouth moved at one corner.
"Neither," Vance said. "Sit."
Chloe took the chair beside Voss. Vance came around the desk, slowly, and began to speak, and as she spoke she began to walk, and her walk took her in a circle around Chloe's chair.
"You've been here six days. In six days you've earned the highest ratings a first-year has drawn at the autumn social in nine years. You've made an instructor come in an anatomy practical, unasked, in front of her class, in a way she has described to me as unforgettable. You've been measured against eleven of your peers and you sit exactly where a gifted girl should sit, which is to say, at the top of the range with everything still closed to you." Vance was behind her now. Chloe felt the woman's presence at her back like warmth off stone. "It is not a whole week, Miss Bennett. Do you understand what that means in the economy of this school?"
"It means people are paying attention."
"It means people are investing." Vance's fingers settled on Chloe's shoulder, light, and began to move with her as she circled. Her fingertips traced across the top of Chloe's back, along the collar seam, down one arm to the wrist, lifting the hand briefly as if inspecting it, then releasing. She came around the front. "And investments want returns."
The fingers trailed over Chloe's collarbone as Vance passed, touched the chain of the locket, and moved on. Chloe sat very still and let her be touched, and her skin reported every point of contact like a seismograph.
"I want a demonstration," Vance said. She stopped in front of the chair, facing her. "I've read the reports. I've heard Voss. I want to see for myself where you are. Right now, as you stand. What you can do with what you have."
Chloe's mouth was dry and her pulse was not. She thought about the rule. Everyone knew the rule; it was written nowhere and known everywhere. Students did not mix personally with staff. It was the first thing Ruby had ever told her that sounded like law.
"And the rule?" Chloe said. "About staff and students."
"Is mine," Vance said. "I wrote it. It binds you, and it binds Voss, and it binds every teacher in this building, and none of it binds me. When I direct something, it isn't a violation. It's curriculum." She let that settle. "I'm directing something."
Voss rose without a word, crossed to the far wall, and opened a side door Chloe had taken for a closet. Warm light spilled out, and a man walked through it.
Chloe knew him instantly. The third man from Tuesday's class, the thick one, the one her team had finished, the one whose cock she had deep-throated to clean him because it was hers to do. He was dressed now in plain dark clothes, and he stood by the door with the patience of a paid instrument, and his eyes went over her once and gave nothing back.
"He's from Ashworth's staff roster," Vance said. "You'll remember him. The demonstration is simple, and it's not for him. You should fuck him, Miss Bennett. Here, now, and you should fuck Voss as well. Both of them. In front of me. I'll assess what I see."
The room went very quiet. The lamp flickered in the draft from the door Voss had left open.
Chloe sat with it for three heartbeats. She wanted it; her body had already answered, heat pooling low and sudden, and she was not going to pretend otherwise, not here, not with these two. But she had learned this week, in an alcove with a nervous boy and a grateful girl, that the person who takes what is offered is worth less than the person who improves the offer.
"I'll do it," she said. "You know I'll do it. I want to." She let Vance see the want. "But you asked for a demonstration of where I am. If I just do as I'm told, you'll learn where an obedient girl is. You already know that. If I get to make one change, I'll show you something you don't have on file."
Voss and Vance looked at each other. Something passed between them, one of those shared thoughts that moved like weather. Vance's eyebrows lifted a fraction.
"What do you propose?"
Chloe stood up. She crossed the few feet of carpet and she did not stop at a respectful distance. She went in close, close enough to smell Vance's perfume, something dry and faintly bitter, and she began to circle the woman the way Vance had circled her. Her fingers came up and trailed along the taller woman's side as she moved, over the wool of her jacket, down the curve of her waist, not grabbing, not pressing, just drawing a line that said I know exactly what this is. She completed the circuit. She came around the front and closer still, and when she spoke the second time her mouth was near Vance's ear, and she let her breath go warm against the woman's neck.
"What I want," Chloe said, "is you."
Vance did not move. Her breathing had changed, though. Chloe could hear it.
"I've wanted to fuck you since the uniform inspection. You stood close enough to kiss me and then you touched my neck and walked away, and I've thought about it every night since. I want to know your body the way I know Voss's already. I want to learn you with my hands and my mouth, and I want to make you come, and I'm going to, and you're going to remember it the way she remembers Wednesday." Her fingers traced up Vance's spine, slow, feeling the woman's shoulders hold and then not hold. "And I want that cock. I've had it in my throat. I loved it. I've been wet all week thinking about it filling my pussy, and I'm wet right now, standing here, just saying it out loud to you."
Vance's jaw tightened. Chloe saw it, and kept going.
"And I want Voss so badly I can't think straight. She kissed me an hour ago in an empty classroom and I dropped my books like a first-week girl, and I want her mouth, I want her hands, I want her on top of me." Her breath crossed Vance's neck and the woman's pulse was visible under her ear, quick, and Chloe knew she had her. "That's the demonstration. Not me fucking a stranger on your carpet. Me taking this room."
"One change," Vance said, and her voice was not quite level. "You said one."
"There's one more thing."
"Ask."
"Ruby." Chloe drew back enough to look at her. "I want Ruby in the middle of it. All of us, on her, at once. She's spent a week being paid to watch me and want me and never touch. I want her in the middle of this room with every one of us on her, fucked until she can't form sentences, and then I'll be so hot for it, so far past control, that you'll get anything you ever want from me afterward and we'll both know it."
Silence. The lamp hissed faintly. By the side door, the man waited with the stillness of furniture.
Then Vance turned her head, took Chloe's chin in one hand, and kissed her.
It was nothing like Voss's kiss. Voss had tasted her like a reading. Vance kissed her like a signature, deep and claiming, tongue driving into her mouth, and her other hand came up and closed over Chloe's left tit through the blouse and squeezed, fondled it frankly, thumb finding the nipple already hard and rolling it while she kissed her. Chloe made a sound into her mouth and pressed into the hand, and Vance held the kiss until Chloe's knees complained, then pulled back an inch, her thumb still moving.
"Well," Vance said. "Six days."
She released her and walked to the desk. She picked up the telephone, an old black thing with a heavy receiver, and dialed a two-digit number from memory.
"It's Vance," she said. "Tell Ruby to come to the tower immediately. Yes, immediately. She's to tell no one where she's going." She listened a moment. "Good." She set the receiver down.
"She'll be ten minutes," Vance said, turning back. "That's long enough to begin."
Voss had already moved. She locked the side door behind the man with a click, then crossed the room and stopped in front of Chloe, close, pale blue eyes moving over her face.
"You understand what you just did," Voss said.
"I improved the offer."
"Vance doesn't get improved." Voss's mouth curved. "I'm going to enjoy watching her work out that you're better than her files."
Vance unbuttoned her jacket as she came back around the desk. She draped it over the chair and stood in her waistcoat and white shirt, tall, grey-eyed, unhurried, and she pointed at the space in front of the fire.
"There. Chloe, undress Voss. Start with the dress. Slowly. I want to watch your hands."
Voss turned her back to Chloe without being asked, and lifted her black hair off her neck with one hand. The dress had small buttons down the spine. Chloe found the first one and worked it open, and her fingers were steadier than she expected them to be, and the fire cracked, and below them in the dark the whole school went on with its ordinary evening.
The buttons gave one at a time. Chloe pressed her lips to the back of Voss's neck as the fabric parted, and Voss made a small low sound that Chloe had never heard her make in a classroom, and pushed back against her mouth.
"Keep going," Vance said from the leather chair. She had crossed her legs and settled in, one hand loose in her lap, watching like an examiner at a viva. "All of it. I've never seen her undressed by anyone either, so don't imagine she has the advantage."
The dress came off Voss's shoulders. Chloe slid it down over the woman's bust, the heavy fullness of it shifting in the lace beneath, over her waist, and it pooled at her feet. Voss stepped out of it and turned around, standing in underthings in the firelight, and for the first time since the east-wing classroom, Instructor Voss looked like something that could be undone.
"Her measurements are in my files," Vance said dryly. "Yours aren't. Take the rest off her yourself and show me what you find."
Chloe reached behind Voss and unhooked the bra. It slid forward and off, and her breasts came free, large and pale and heavier than they looked, nipples pink and already tightening in the warm air. Chloe cupped one in each hand and felt the weight of them, real weight, flesh and heat, and Voss's breath went out of her in a long controlled stream that did not stay controlled to the end.
"You did this in class," Voss said quietly, watching her own nipples being rolled between Chloe's fingers. "Above the collarbone only, you and Marguerite and Dot. You were under instructions."
"I’ve been under a lot of instructions this week."
Chloe leaned in and took one nipple into her mouth. She sucked it slow, tongue flat and heavy against it, and felt it stiffen further against her tongue, and Voss's hand came up and sank into her brown hair and held there, not pushing, just holding, like a hand on a railing. Chloe suckled one breast and kneaded the other and listened to the change in the woman's breathing, the clinical rhythm breaking down into something less professional, and she thought, with a thrill that went all the way through her, I am doing this to her in front of the woman who runs the school.
"That's enough of that for now." Vance's voice had a rasp in it. "Knickers down. Hers and yours. I want to see both of you."
Voss pushed her own lace down over her hips and stepped out of it, naked, and Chloe undressed fast, blouse, skirt, the black lace, knee-highs last, and stood in the firelight with her small pale body and hard nipples and her cunt already visibly slick.
Vance looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at the man by the side door.
"Take your clothes off," she told him. "When the roommate arrives, she finds all four of us already occupied. Understood?"
He nodded and began unbuckling his belt. His cock came out of his trousers half-hard already, thick, heavy, the one Chloe knew by weight and by throat, and it swelled as he watched the two naked women, filling toward the size she remembered, veins rising along the shaft.
"Chloe," Vance said. "Show me what you do to a woman when no one is grading you. Voss, on the rug. On your back."
Voss knelt and lay down on the thick rug in front of the fire, black hair spreading across it, and opened her legs without a flicker of hesitation, and her cunt was flushed and visibly wet, the lips parted, the hood drawn back enough to show her clit already emerging.
Chloe went down between her thighs.
She started with her mouth above the clit, breathing on it, letting Voss feel the heat without the contact, and Voss's hips twitched once. Then Chloe put her tongue on her, a long slow stroke from entrance to clit, flat and broad, tasting her properly for the first time, salt and musk and something darker, and Voss's whole body arched a half inch off the rug.
"Oh," Voss said. Just that. Just the vowel.
Chloe worked her. She found the rhythm in the first minute, the way she'd found it Wednesday, tongue circling the clit in slow tightening spirals, two fingers sliding into the woman's cunt and curling forward against the front wall, pressing the spongy ridge from inside while her tongue worked the nerve above. Voss's hand left her hair and gripped the rug. Her thighs came up and trembled against Chloe's ears.
From somewhere above and behind, Chloe heard Vance shift in her chair, heard the small unmistakable sound of a woman's fingers moving in her own wetness.
"She found it in under a minute," Voss said to the ceiling, breath ragged. "I'm reporting that. Officially."
"Shut up," Chloe said against her clit, "and come."
Voss laughed, and the laugh broke in the middle, and Chloe felt the woman's cunt clamp around her fingers as the orgasm took her, hard, hips driving up off the rug, a sound coming out of her that was nothing any classroom had ever heard from her, low and broken and long. Chloe held on, tongue steady through the convulsions, gentling as they gentled, and licked her slowly down.
The door opened behind them.
Chloe turned her head, chin shining, still between Voss's thighs. Ruby stood in the doorway with her hand still on the handle, red hair loose, mouth open, taking in the room: Voss sprawled and gasping on the rug, Chloe naked between her legs, the Ashworth man thick and hard in the firelight, and Vance in her waistcoat with her hand inside her own trousers, watching them all.
"Close the door, O'Connell," Vance said. "And take your clothes off. You're in the middle tonight."
Ruby closed the door and put her back against it. Her eyes went around the room once more, cataloguing, and then her mouth found its shape.
"You are joking," she said. "You're all joking. This is an elaborate joke and I'm the punchline."
"You have ten seconds to be naked," Vance said, "or you're the girl who watched."
Ruby stripped faster than Chloe had ever seen anyone strip, jumper, shirt, bra, skirt, knickers, socks, in a heap at the door, and stood there freckled and flushed and gloriously bare, red hair down her spine, her cunt visible pink between her thighs because she was already wet. Chloe saw it. Vance saw it. Nobody said it, which was somehow louder.
Vance stood, and began to unbutton her waistcoat.
It was a small sound in the room, the little buttons giving one by one under her fingers, and every head turned to it. She wore a grey shift shirt beneath, and as the waistcoat opened she shrugged it back off her shoulders and folded it over the arm of the chair with the same unhurried precision she used for everything. She rolled her sleeves to the elbow. Two buttons at her collar. Nothing came off yet beyond that, and somehow that was worse, that was deliberate, theheadmistress showing wrist and throat while everyone else stood completely naked, keeping one layer of the room's power for herself.
"You'll get the rest when you've earned it," she said, to nobody in particular, and sat back down with her legs crossed, watching.
Voss had recovered from her orgasm enough to lift her head. "Get up, Chloe. Come here."
Chloe rose from between her thighs, chin wet, and Voss caught her face in both hands and kissed her, licking her own taste off Chloe's mouth, slow and shameless. When she pulled back she turned Chloe by the shoulders to face the man.
He stood by the fire, naked now, his cock full and heavy, thicker than Chloe remembered through the haze of Tuesday's class, the head dark and veined, a bead of shine at the tip. He looked at Vance, not at Chloe, waiting for direction like a good instrument.
"Condom?" he asked.
"No," Vance said. "She's protected and I want to see it finish inside her. That's part of the assessment."
Chloe's cunt clenched on nothing at the word inside, and she walked to him, and Voss followed her like a shadow.
"Bed," Voss said, nodding at the low couch against the wall, deep enough for what Vance had planned. "Lie down on your back. Let him in slow. I'll be behind you."
Chloe lay back on the couch, knees up, feet planted, and reached between her own legs and spread herself open with two fingers, because she had learned this week that showing what you wanted was half of getting it. The man knelt on the couch's edge, took his cock in his fist, and dragged the fat head up and down her slit, and she felt her own slickness coat him, her lips gripping and releasing around the crown without even being penetrated yet.
"Look at that," Voss murmured, kneeling on the floor beside the couch, her mouth at Chloe's ear, watching the head notch against her entrance. "She's swallowing him before he pushes."
He pushed.
The burn came first, the same slow splitting stretch the graduated dildo had given her that afternoon, and she gasped and arched, and Voss's hand came up and pressed flat on her sternum, holding her down, an anchor.
"Breathe out. Let it open you. He's not even halfway."
He went in another inch and her whole body shuddered around the sheer width of him, her walls spreading and spreading, the pressure rising up through her pelvis into her stomach. When his hips finally met hers she was full to the top, stuffed, his balls resting against her ass, and she looked down the length of her own body and saw herself wrapped around his thick shaft, her lips stretched taut and shiny around the base.
"Oh, fuck," she said, very quietly, to herself. "Oh, that's so much cock."
He began to move. Long, unhurried strokes, dragging out of her until only the head was held inside her clutching entrance, then driving back down to the root, and every stroke forced a sound out of her that she didn't authorize. Voss's fingers found her clit and began slow circles, counterpoint to the cock, and Chloe stopped trying to manage anything and let her head fall back and her eyes roll, taking it, taking it, her small tits shaking with each thrust.
"That's it," Voss said. "Just feel. No watching. Remember?"
The fifty-year-old woman's words from Wednesday, thrown back at her by the instructor who had fucked her to orgasm an hour ago, and Chloe laughed, high and broken, and closed her eyes, and let the feeling fill her up the way the cock filled the rest of her.
Vance's voice came from the chair. "Is she going to come on him?"
"She's close already," Voss said, clinical as ever even now, her fingers reading Chloe's clit like an instrument panel. "Her thighs are shaking and her cunt's clamping on every third stroke. Look at her stomach."
Vance stood. Chloe heard the soft fall of the shift shirt onto the chair, and opened her eyes to find the assistant headmistress crossing the room naked for the first time, tall and pale and elegant, small high breasts, a neat dark triangle between her thighs, her body built on long lines like the tower itself. She stopped at the end of the couch and looked down at Chloe being fucked.
"Come for us, Miss Bennett," she said. "I want to watch your face while he's inside you. That's data I can't get anywhere else."
The command did it. Chloe's orgasm detonated from her clit outward and the cock met it halfway, hammering through the spasms, and she screamed, actually screamed, her hands clawing the couch cushions, her whole body lifting off the couch against Voss's restraining palm. The man groaned above her and drove deep and held, and she felt his cock twitch inside her and then the hot flood, pulse after pulse of it, his cum coating her insides, filling her until she felt it overflow around his shaft and run down over her asshole onto the leather.
He withdrew slowly. Voss pushed Chloe's knees apart and looked at the mess.
"Beautiful," she said. "Hold still. Don't let any out."
Then she bent and put her mouth on Chloe's flooded cunt and licked.
Chloe jerked. Voss sucked the cum out of her in slow pulls, tongue driving up inside her, gathering everything the man had left and swallowing it, then cleaning her labia with long flat strokes until Chloe was wrung out and whimpering, overstimulated, her clit twitching away from every touch.
"Up," Vance said. "All of you. Ruby. Center of the rug, on your back."
Ruby had been standing frozen at the edge of the firelight, watching her roommate get fucked, one hand between her own thighs and moving. She snapped it away too late and flushed scarlet.
"I saw," Vance said. "You'll get yours. Center of the rug."
Ruby lay down on the rug, red hair fanning out, her soft pale body trembling with anticipation. She looked up at the circle forming around her, Voss and Chloe and the man, and Vance standing over her feet, and her voice came out small.
"Everyone at once?"
"Everyone at once," Vance said. "Chloe, her mouth. Voss, her hands. Him, her cunt. I'll supervise."
Chloe straddled Ruby's face facing down her body, knees on either side of the girl's ears, and lowered herself until her slick, cum-smeared pussy pressed against Ruby's mouth. Ruby made a muffled sound of pure want and got to work, tongue lapping up through her folds, lapping up the mixed taste of Chloe and the man's cum without a second's hesitation, greedy, sloppy, moaning into her.
"She's eating it out of me," Chloe gasped to the room. "Vance, she's eating his cum out of my pussy, she's not even hesitating."
"She's wanted to do that for a week," Vance said dryly. "She was being paid not to."
At the same moment Voss took Ruby's hands and pressed them onto her own body, guiding one between her thighs, folding Ruby's fingers up into her cunt, and Ruby's free hand found Voss's heavy breast and squeezed. Then the man knelt between Ruby's legs, spread them wide, and fed his thick cock, still half-hard and slick with Chloe, into her dripping cunt.
Ruby's hips bucked off the rug. The sound she made vibrated up through Chloe's clit, and Chloe ground down on her mouth, riding her tongue, watching the whole tableau from above: Voss's pale body rocking against Ruby's hand, the man's broad back flexing as he drove into Ruby, Vance standing at Ruby's feet with her arms crossed and her eyes burning.
"Open your eyes, O'Connell," Vance said. "Look up at what's on top of you. You watched her all week. Now you can see her."
Ruby's green eyes opened under Chloe, looking straight up into the pink wet heart of her, and Chloe saw the girl's whole face flushed and dripping, and something broke loose in her own chest, tenderness and filth braided together, and she reached down and threaded her fingers through Ruby's hair and held her mouth against her clit and started to move.
The room filled with sound. The slap of the man's hips on Ruby's thighs, the wet chorus of two cunts being fucked, Voss's breath going ragged again, Ruby's muffled whimpers, the fire cracking. Vance circled them once, slowly, her fingers trailing down Ruby's flank as she passed, over Voss's shoulder, across Chloe's thigh, touching all four of them like a conductor checking her orchestra.
The man came first. He pulled Ruby's legs up over his shoulders and drove in to the root and groaned, his ass clenching, and Ruby's eyes went wide under Chloe as the heat flooded her. He stayed in her, grinding slow, milking it out, then withdrew and stepped back, and his cum began to slide out of Ruby's pink swollen cunt, trailing down over her anus onto the rug.
Vance pointed at Chloe. "Off her mouth. Down there. She's not allowed to spill on my carpet."
Chloe climbed off Ruby's face and slid down between her thighs in time to catch it, pressing her open mouth over Ruby's leaking hole and sucking his cum out of her, and Ruby shrieked, grabbed Chloe's hair, and came instantly, hard, her whole body convulsing, her hips driving her clit up against Chloe's chin, her scream cracking into sobs. Voss rode her fingers through her own orgasm above them, quiet, shuddering, her head dropped forward, and the three of them came apart together on the rug in a tangle of limbs and mouths while the man stood back, spent, and Vance watched all of it.
Ruby lay flat at the end of it, chest heaving, eyes glazed, her lips shiny. Voss disentangled herself and sat back on her heels. Chloe crawled up Ruby's body and kissed her, tasting three people on her mouth.
"Still able to talk?" Chloe asked.
Ruby took a long shaky breath. "No."
"Good," Vance said. "That was the point."
She crossed to the sideboard, poured herself two fingers of amber from the half-empty glass, and drank it standing, naked, looking at the ruin of four bodies on her rug with the expression of a woman reviewing accounts that had come in better than forecast.
"Chloe. Come here."
Chloe went to her, naked, glowing, Ruby's taste and the man's cum still on her lips. Vance took her chin and studied her face in the lamplight for a long moment.
"The demonstration is concluded," she said. "You took a command and turned it into a coup. You undressed an instructor, spent a man, broke your roommate, and got me out of my waistcoat, all inside an hour, and the last thing you said to me was a threat dressed as an offer." Her thumb brushed Chloe's lower lip. "You told me afterward you'd do anything I want. I'm going to hold you to that, and you should know that what I want will sometimes look nothing like this."
"I know," Chloe said. "I meant it anyway."
"I know you did. That's why you're dangerous." Vance released her chin and picked her waistcoat up off the chair, and held it, and did not put it on. "You'll stay tonight. Ruby's bed is in her room and you're both in mine. Voss, you have the couch. He's finished; he can dress and go."
The man was already pulling on his trousers. At the door he paused, looked back at Chloe once, and for the first time gave her something, a small nod, one professional to another, and then he was gone and the lock clicked behind him.
Ruby had rolled onto her side, watching them with heavy eyes. "For the record," she mumbled, "I would have helped with the lavatory thing, and it would have been better than plumbing."
"Get up, O'Connell," Vance said, holding out her hand. "You're a disaster. You're coming to my bed."
Ruby took the hand and let Vance haul her upright. She stood swaying on the rug, red hair everywhere, a red mark on her throat where her own collar had pressed, and looked down at herself like she was auditing the damage.
"I can't feel my legs," she said.
"That's the correct outcome," Vance said. "Go wash your face. You look like a casualty."
Ruby shuffled toward the small washroom off the tower room, banging her hip on the couch corner on the way, and her muttering carried back through the door. The tap ran. Vance stood by the fire with her drink, naked and unbothered about it, her body lit along one side, and she looked at the door Ruby had gone through and then at Chloe and something in her expression moved that Chloe couldn't name.
Voss had already crossed to the sideboard.
She poured three more drinks from the decanter without asking anyone. Amber over crystal, the small precise sounds of ice, and while she poured she spoke with her back to the room.
"Private instruction is not meant to include the headmistress's bar," she said, "but Vance's rug just took four people, so I'm overriding my own policy. Bennett. Yours is the short one."
She handed a glass to Chloe, who took it with both hands because her hands were still not entirely hers. The whiskey went through her like a lit fuse down her chest. Voss kept the third glass and did not drink it, just held it, watching the fire move in the amber.
Ruby came back out with a wet face and her hair tied up with whatever she'd found, and stopped when she saw the glass in Voss's hand.
"Is that for me?"
"It's the headmistress's whiskey, O'Connell, not communion wine. Yes."
Ruby took it, drank half in one go, coughed, and sat down on the rug where she'd just been broken, cross-legged, shameless. "Okay. I have questions."
"You have one question," Vance said, "and the answer is no, you are not being expelled, promoted, or inducted tonight."
"My question was actually where the bed is." Ruby drank again, smaller. "But now that you've said all that out loud I have eleven more."
Voss lowered herself into the leather chair that still held the shape of Vance's jacket, and for the first time since the east-wing classroom she looked tired in a way Chloe suspected nobody at this school had ever witnessed. Her heavy breasts were still bare. She made no move toward her dress.
"Ask the interesting one," Voss said. "The other ten are logistics."
Ruby pointed the glass at Chloe. "How long have they known. About you. Because this room was built before you walked into it. I got summoned like a pizza order. Someone had a list."
"I built it six days ago," Vance said from the fire. "The list. After your social ratings. Voss confirmed it Wednesday from the practical. Tonight was the first field check."
"And the man was booked in advance." Ruby nodded slowly, as if confirming a theory about the tides. "He walked out of a closet like furniture. Nobody produces a man like that on an hour's notice unless he was on the schedule."
"He's on rotation," Voss said. "Ashworth leases out four of them each term. We've had this one twice. He's professional and he's clean and he does exactly what he's directed to do and nothing else, which is more than I can say for most of the men in this county, including the teaching staff of this school."
Chloe drank again and let the warmth settle. She was sitting on the arm of the couch, still naked, her cunt a slow satisfied ache, the man's cum and Voss's mouth dried to a memory on her skin, and she realized she was listening to operational details about her own evening the way someone else might hear about a harvest.
"How much did you actually plan?" Chloe asked. "The demonstration. Because I changed it. You asked for obedience and I gave you a coup instead, and you kissed me before I'd finished my second sentence."
Vance looked at her over the rim of her glass for a long moment.
"I planned for obedience," she said. "I would have been satisfied with obedience. I would have written one page in your file and sent you back to your dormitory by eleven." She turned the glass slowly. "I did not plan for you to put your mouth against my neck and tell me you were going to take this room. That part, Miss Bennett, was yours, and it is the only reason you are sleeping in my bed tonight instead of being walked back to the east wing with a warning about ambition."
"Was I ambitious or was I right?"
Voss laughed into her glass. Vance did not laugh, but her eyes did something.
"You were both. They are frequently the same thing here. The girls who go far at St. Aurelia's are the ones who misjudge the line early and get away with it." She drank. "You got away with it."
Ruby raised her glass. "To getting away with it."
Voss leaned forward and touched her glass to Ruby's, and then, after a beat, Chloe's, and then she looked at Vance across the rug and the headmistress crossed the three steps and let the crystal click against crystal, four naked women toasting in a tower while the school below did its homework.
Ruby drained hers and held it out for more without a shred of embarrassment. Voss took it, went to the decanter, and poured, and while her back was turned Ruby looked at Chloe and mouthed oh my god with an expression of such catastrophic delight that Chloe had to put her face in her glass to keep from laughing.
"Say it out loud, O'Connell," Voss said, pouring. "I can hear you thinking."
"I had a plan for this term," Ruby said, taking the refilled glass. "It involved a lot of careful observation and maybe getting you into my bed by spring, Bennett, honestly, if I'm confessing things, that was the whole secret agenda, and instead I've been used as a communal project in the headmistress's tower on a Thursday." She drank. "I want it on the record that I'm not complaining. I'm recalibrating."
"On the record," Vance said, settling into the other leather chair with her legs crossed, entirely composed, and Chloe watched her do it and understood that the composure was a garment the same way the waistcoat had been. "O'Connell, your watching assignment is concluded as of tonight. Our arrangement is dissolved. You'll report to no one about her."
Ruby's head came up. For a second, under the flushed skin and the whiskey, something unguarded crossed her face, and Chloe caught it, the flicker of a girl who had spent a week doing a job she hated and been paid in information she loved.
"And my payment?"
"Paid in full by tonight's activities, I would have thought."
"I did those for free." Ruby's chin went up a little. "The watching was the paid part."
Vance looked at her for a moment, and then did something Chloe had never seen her do. She reached into the drawer of the side table without getting up, took out three folded notes, old soft paper, and set them on the rug by Ruby's knee.
"Then settle the account properly," she said. "The watching is paid. The rest is your own affair."
Ruby looked at the notes and did not touch them. Then she picked them up, folded them smaller, and tucked them into the abandoned pile of her own clothes at the door, and came back to the rug, and there was something different in how she sat down. Less employment in it.
Voss finished her drink and set the glass down with a click. She had been quiet for a while, watching the two girls on the rug, and when she spoke her voice had the classroom register in it again, the one that made twelve first-years sit up.
"I want to say one thing before we go to bed, and it's professional, so hear it that way." She looked at Chloe. "What you did tonight with your mouth on my neck and your words in my ear, you did it by reading us. You read where the pressure was and you applied it. That is the entire senior curriculum in one gesture, and you improvised it under assessment with no time to think. Nobody taught you that."
"Marguerite's alcove taught me some of it."
"Marguerite followed your lead in that alcove. I've read the impression book." Voss turned her glass by the stem. "Here's the professional part. What you have is rarer than the body measurements they took this afternoon. Bodies are common. This is not. And it's also more dangerous, for you, because the girls who read people are the girls other people notice, and second-years notice, and not all of them will be as charmed as the three of us were tonight."
"Anneliese," Chloe said.
The name went into the room and sat there. Vance's glass stopped turning.
"You've met her already?"
"Three looks across the dining table tonight. The third one was a purchase." Chloe said it evenly, watching both older women. "Ruby tipped me off about her connections on Tuesday. Nobody's told me what those connections are."
Vance and Voss looked at each other again, and Chloe was getting faster at reading that weather, and this time she thought she saw agreement arrive.
"Anneliese is mine," Vance said. "In the loose sense. Her family are the school's largest creditors, three generations of them. The alumnae debt system I explained to you in this office, the one your mother's name is written into? The Devereux side of it is her family's side. She runs errands for the board as well as for me." She drank. "She has taken an interest in you before I scheduled one, which is either excellent or very inconvenient, and I haven't decided which."
"What does she want?"
"The same thing everyone in this school wants. Leverage. A promising instrument she can own early and cheaply." Vance set the glass down. "You've now been in my bed, so the price just went up, and if she's the girl I think she is, she already knows that, because I telephoned a summons to your tower tonight and this building's information economy runs faster than its plumbing. Ruby knows. Marta knows. By breakfast, half the senior corridor will have performed the arithmetic."
Ruby had the decency to look about ten percent guilty. "I haven't told anyone. Yet."
"You will," Chloe said, and Ruby, caught, laughed and didn't deny it.
"That," Vance said, "is your problem to manage, Miss Bennett, and managing it is worth more to me than the demonstration you gave me tonight. I'm not hiding you. This school doesn't hide assets, it displays them and lets the market price them. But you'll be approached now, from several directions, some of them wearing very pretty faces. Anneliese. Others. Your reports are due tomorrow, Voss's private instruction continues, and none of that changes. What changes is that you know the market has opened."
Chloe sat with that, the whiskey moving slow and warm in her, the fire lower now, the room smelling of sex and woodsmoke and the dry bitterness of Vance's perfume. She looked at the two women in the chairs and the girl on the rug and thought about how six days ago she had stood at these gates with one small suitcase and a locket.
"Then here's my opening position," she said. "Ruby stays out of the watching business permanently, and I'd like her in mine. As mine. Not assigned by you. Chosen by me."
Ruby went very still on the rug, glass halfway to her mouth.
Vance studied Chloe the way she had studied her over the uniform inspection, close enough to be felt, and Chloe held the look this time, deliberately, and let it cost her nothing.
"Chosen," Vance said at last, "is a word this school respects more than any other, though it pretends otherwise." She stood. "Granted. O'Connell, you serve at Miss Bennett's discretion now, and if that arrangement breaks, the debt comes back to my desk with interest. Don't make me write that letter."
"I won't." Ruby said it fast, and then, quieter, to Chloe, with none of her usual gloss: "Chosen. Okay."
"Bed," Voss said, rising, and gathered her black dress off the floor without putting it on. "All of us. The demonstration is graded and the market analysis is concluded and my knees have opinions about this rug."
The tower bedroom held a wide four-poster that seemed to swallow the lamplight, and Vance lay down in the middle of it without ceremony, flat on her back, pale and long-limbed against the dark coverlet. Voss climbed in beside her on the left and stretched out, her heavy breasts settling, and looked across Vance's body at the two girls still standing by the door.
"Positions," Vance said. "Bennett. Between my legs. You've earned the first turn."
Chloe crossed the room and climbed onto the bed, and Voss beckoned Ruby with two fingers. "O'Connell. Here. You've wanted this since last year, I could feel you staring at my body every time you pass by."
Ruby made a strangled sound and got onto the bed fast.
Chloe knelt between Vance's thighs and pushed them apart, and looked at the headmistress's cunt for the first time up close. A neat dark triangle above, the lips beneath flushed and already slick from watching the sown on the rug, the hood of her clit peeking out pink. She lowered her head and dragged her tongue up the whole length of her, slow, one flat stroke, and Vance exhaled above her.
"Good. Again."
Chloe again. She worked her tongue between the lips, lapping up into the entrance, tasting the sharp salt-freshness of her, then closed her mouth over the clit and sucked. Vance's hand came down and pressed the back of her head, not pushing, just claiming. Chloe spread the lips wider with her thumbs and licked her in long slow strokes, fucking her tongue tip in and out, listening to the breathing above her change register.
Beside her she could hear Voss doing the same instructing she'd had all week, murmured words Chloe half caught: slower, flat tongue, watch the thighs not the face. Ruby's giggling broke into something else, a low concentrated hum, and Voss's breath began to come shorter.
"Deeper," Vance said. Her voice had lost some of its polish. "You have a clever tongue, Miss Bennett. Put it in me."
Chloe stiffened her tongue and pushed it up into her cunt, as far as it would go, her nose pressed against the mound, her chin wet, and Vance's thighs closed briefly against her ears. She fucked her with her mouth, curling her tongue inside, dragging it out along the front wall where she'd learned that afternoon the tissue was thinnest, and Vance's breath hitched twice, three times, and then her hand tightened hard in Chloe's hair.
"There. Don't stop."
Chloe didn't stop. She pressed her mouth hard against her and licked through the orgasm, feeling the walls of her clench around her tongue in slow heavy pulses, feeling the wetness flood out over her chin. Vance made no scream. She made a long low sound through closed teeth, an unraveling, and her hand on Chloe's head shook. Beside them Voss came with a cry she didn't muffle, her hips driving up against Ruby's face, and then the two women lay gasping in the middle of the bed with two girls' wet faces lifted from between their thighs.
"Up," Vance said, still catching her breath. "Squat. Both of you. On your heels, over our faces. Bennett, me. O'Connell, Voss."
Chloe blinked. "Over your face?"
"You heard me. Knees up by my shoulders, feet flat, sit down on my mouth. You'll keep your balance or you won't."
Chloe turned around, straddled the headmistress's chest facing her feet, and squatted, heels planted in the mattress beside Vance's ears, her knees wide. Looking down her own body she saw her own cunt hanging open above Vance's mouth, the lips parted and flushed and gaping, and she flushed hot all over at the obscene angle of herself.
The first touch of Vance's tongue was long and slow, one stroke from her entrance all the way to her clit, and Chloe's arms nearly gave. Vance's tongue was long, longer than Voss's had felt, and she used it with the unhurried thoroughness she used everything, flattening it against the hole and pressing up into her.
"Squeeze around it," Voss said from the other side of the bed, her own mouth already working. "You took him bare an hour ago, Bennett. There's still some of him in you. Push it into her mouth. She wants to see how well you hold your money."
Chloe's face burned and her cunt clenched, and she felt it then, the thick sluggish slip of the man's cum, worked loose by the headmistress's tongue pressing deep. Vance sucked. She sealed her mouth over Chloe's entrance and drew, and the cum drained out of her in a slow pull, gravity and suction together, and Chloe felt every inch of its leaving like a fingertip dragged through her.
"Oh, god." Chloe's thighs shook. She squatted lower, giving her mouth up completely, and Vance's tongue pushed back up inside her, deep, impossibly deep, curling against the front wall, and the suction came again. Between her own legs and the mirror of it happening to Ruby beside her, Ruby gasping and grinding down on Voss's face while the cum from the man's earlier finish was drawn out of her, Chloe stopped thinking entirely.
The tongue in her found the spot and stayed there, working it, long and rigid, and the orgasm came up from the bottom of the squat like water rising. She cried out and ground down, riding Vance's mouth through it, her whole body spasming, her knees skidding on the sheets, and she heard Ruby break beside her one breath later, a wail and then a sob, the two girls coming almost in unison over two older women's mouths.
Vance pulled her down. Chloe collapsed forward onto her hands and was dragged, turned, arranged, and before she'd gathered her senses she was flat on the bed with her head beside Voss's thigh and her own legs being lifted. The two women had pulled the girls forward, curled them onto their sides, and arranged them in a line: Chloe's face at Vance's cunt, Vance's mouth at Chloe's, Voss and Ruby mirrored the same way beside them. Side by side, paired off, sixty-nine.
"Tongues," Vance said into her thigh. "We've all come. We finish soft and slow."
It wasn't slow. Chloe buried her face in the headmistress's wet cunt again, lapping through the spend of her first orgasm, and Vance's mouth found her oversensitive clit and worked it with patient, diabolical gentleness until Chloe was whimpering into her. She could hear Ruby beside her, muffled and moaning, Voss's hands full of red hair. The room shrank to mouths and cunts, the wet sounds doubled, four bodies folded into a chain on the wide bed. Chloe came a third time, smaller, shivering, her hips twitching away and Vance's arm locking across her ass to hold her in place, and she felt Vance's own thighs squeeze around her ears as the woman crested again under her tongue, quieter this time, a shudder and a held breath.
Vance untangled last. She pulled them all up the bed by ankle and shoulder, four bodies arranged, Chloe's back against her front, Ruby tucked against Voss on the far side, the coverlet dragged over all of them. The fire was nearly out. The room smelled of sex and whiskey and woodsmoke.
"The reports," Ruby mumbled into Voss's shoulder, already going under.
"Tomorrow," Voss said.
Chloe lay still. Vance's arm lay heavy across her ribs, her breath slow against the back of Chloe's neck, and on Chloe's lips and in her nose was the taste and scent of her, the headmistress's cunt, salt and musk, soaked into her skin. She breathed it in and felt the locket warm against her collarbone and the whole day settle over her like the blanket.
She slept better than she had since the gates.
She surfaced once in the deep of the night. The fire had gone to embers, and the room was cold at the edges, warm in the middle where four bodies had pooled their heat. Chloe lay still for a moment, working out what had woken her.
Fingers. In her hair.
Vance's hand moved through the brown strands with a slow, even rhythm, from her temple back behind her ear, over and over. Not the touch of the office, not the touch of the bed. Something older and quieter than either. Chloe kept her breathing slow and let her eyes stay closed, because she wanted to know how long it would go on if she wasn't caught awake.
A long time, it turned out. The strokes kept coming. Vance's breathing above her stayed even, so she was awake, doing this deliberately, in the dark, to a sleeping girl she'd only known six days.
"You're breathing wrong for sleep," Vance said softly.
Chloe opened her eyes. The ember light caught the headmistress's collarbone, the hollow of her throat. "How long have you been doing that?"
"Does it matter?"
"It matters that you were doing it at all."
Vance's hand didn't stop. It came down through her hair again, and this time her thumb traced the edge of Chloe's ear on the way past. "My mother did it," she said. "When I was a girl. I've never understood why the hands remember. You'd think a person could file a thing like that away."
Chloe turned carefully in the circle of her arm so they were face to face. Vance's eyes in the dark were steady and unreadable, close enough that Chloe could see the fine lines at their corners.
"You have a mother," Chloe said. "I keep forgetting. You come across like you were built in this tower."
"Everyone was built somewhere worse." Vance's fingers kept moving. "You should know that the archive keeps more than your mother's records. There's a whole run of inspection notes from her final year. Physical ones. Handwritten."
Chloe went still under her hand. "You've read them."
"Twice. Once before you arrived, once after I met you." Vance paused. "The examiner wrote that she had the finest reading instincts he'd seen in a decade of cohorts. Untaught. His word. It's your word now too, Voss's, mine."
"What else did he write?"
Vance was quiet for a moment. Her fingers reached the end of a stroke and started another. "That she was reckless with it. That she read everyone and let everyone see her reading, and that someone would eventually use it against her, and he hoped the school would teach her caution before the world did." Her voice stayed low. "He was half right about the school."
Chloe's chest felt tight in a way that had nothing to do with sex. "And the world?"
"Your father," Vance said. "Is my assessment."
The locket was warm between them somewhere in the sheets. Chloe lay with the sentence and didn't answer it, because there was nothing to answer with, only the fact of Serena's hands on her in the living room and her father's absence on the other side of an ocean.
"You're doing it again," Vance said.
"Doing what?"
"Reading me. Your eyes went somewhere and came back with a verdict."
"You let me sleep in your bed," Chloe said. "You stroked my hair at two in the morning like I was something you'd lost. That's not nothing, whatever you file it under."
Vance's hand stilled. Then it moved again, one slow stroke, deliberate, as if to prove the point rather than deny it. "Go back to sleep, Miss Bennett. Morning is coming, and with it reports, and Anneliese, and the market."
Chloe didn't go back to sleep immediately. She lay there watching the woman's face, and Vance let her, which was its own admission. The fingers kept their rhythm until sleep finally took her again, and the last thing she registered was that the rhythm never changed, never tired, like something being practiced, or something being kept alive.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.