Chapter 14: Spooned and Sworn
Chloe got one sock off before her arms gave out. She sat on the edge of her bed, blinked, and the next thing she knew the second sock was somewhere near the radiator and her skirt had slid down her legs without her remembering pushing it. Her body felt wrung out, every muscle humming low, her ass still tender in a way that made sitting a decision.
She lay back on the quilt and didn't move.
The candles Anneliese had lit were hours behind her now. Here there was only moonlight, silvering the edge of Ruby's dresser, the armoire door Chloe had left open, her clothes lying where they'd fallen on the floorboards. She should shower. She should at least pull the blanket up. She did neither.
The locket was still around her neck. She pressed it flat against her sternum with two fingers and breathed.
The lock clicked.
Ruby stood by the door in her uniform, blouse hanging open to the third button, curls loose around her shoulders. She turned the key, pocketed it, and looked at Chloe sprawled naked on the bed with her clothes dumped behind her.
"You didn't even make it under the covers," Ruby said.
"Shut up."
"I've seen you after sessions. This is worse." Ruby came toward the bed, unbuttoning as she walked, unhurried. She peeled the blouse off her shoulders and dropped it on Chloe's pile of clothes. Her skirt followed, rolled at the waist, easy to shed. She wore nothing under it, and she stood a moment in the moonlight with her full breasts soft and heavy, her wide hips catching the silver edge of the window.
Then she lifted the quilt and slid in behind Chloe.
Her body was warm. Chloe hadn't realized how cold she was until Ruby's chest pressed against her aching back, the weight of those large breasts settling soft against her shoulder blades. Ruby's arm came around her waist. Her thighs tucked behind Chloe's. She fitted herself along Chloe's spine like she'd measured it.
"You're trembling," Ruby murmured.
"I'm not."
"Your shoulder is." Her lips touched the nape of Chloe's neck, barely. "Anneliese's dinners run long."
"Longer than that."
The room was quiet enough that the old paper smell seemed to have weight. Somewhere down the hall a door closed, once, and then nothing. Ruby's hand lay flat on Chloe's stomach, not moving, just resting there, and the warmth of it seeped through the ache.
"I took control of her," Chloe said.
She felt Ruby go still. Not startled. Listening.
"Saturday she was the one buying me at dinner. Tonight I told her to undress. She did." Chloe watched the moonlight on the ceiling. "I went down on her until she forgot what she was scared of. Then I rode her face. Then I fucked her with the strapon over the arm of the sofa, and she took it, and after that she agreed to earn the name from me instead of the other way around."
Ruby's breath came slower against her neck.
"She's terrified," Chloe went on. "Voss left campus with two first-years and no filed itinerary. The old board members don't know what to do with her. Her mother thinks it's Vance and Voss moving against the families. And my mother's file is gone from the archive. Vance holds the only key that doesn't log."
The arm around her waist tightened. Not much. Enough.
"Christ," Ruby said softly. "You sat through all that with a straight face and then came home and fell over sideways."
"She wanted the leverage. I had more of it than she knew."
"You've been here three weeks."
"Vance said my mother graduated with distinction. The board is already watching me. Anneliese needed me more than I needed her, and she finally saw it." Chloe turned her head, and found Ruby's face very close, eyes dark and awake in the moonlight. "Voss and Vance have the old guard rattled. Whatever's coming, it's coming soon."
Ruby didn't answer with words. She turned Chloe's chin with two fingers and kissed her.
It was different from the kiss on the night of the ratings, which had been congratulation. This one was slow and serious, Ruby's full lips moving against hers, her hand sliding up from Chloe's stomach to cup the underside of her small breast, thumb resting just under the nipple without teasing it. Chloe opened her mouth. Ruby made a low sound and pulled back an inch, breathing her in.
"You taste like pussy," Ruby said, and smiled against her lips. "Anneliese's."
"Mostly hers."
"Mostly." Ruby kissed her again, longer, wetter, her tongue sliding deep and unhurried, and this time Chloe felt it in her spine, the same place Petra had found with ten seconds of a fingertip. Ruby's tongue knew what it was doing. She licked into her like she had all night, and Chloe's hips pressed back without permission, finding the warm soft curve of Ruby against her ass.
When Ruby finally broke the kiss, her lips were shining. She stayed close, forehead against Chloe's temple.
"I told you once I like mature women," she said. "That was true. But it's not why I'm here at midnight with the door locked."
"Then why?"
"Because Voss vanishing scares the families. Because someone bought a board seat to ask about your mother. Because a file walked out of a locked archive under Vance's key." Ruby's hand spread warm over Chloe's breast now, holding it rather than working it. "That's a war in slow motion, Chloe, and you're standing at the middle of it with a locket and no allies."
"I have Anneliese."
"You have Anneliese on a leash. That's not the same." Ruby's thumb traced a slow line under Chloe's nipple. "She'd sell you the moment it was cheaper than the alternative. Her family has been lending money to this school for three generations. They don't do loyalty. They do interest."
Chloe lay with that. Ruby's body was a furnace along her back, and her exhaustion and the heat had tangled somewhere under her skin until she couldn't tell which made her shiver.
"The initiation's still coming," Chloe said. "Vance postponed it. When it happens, girls get presented to the board or learn to run it."
"And you're the one both sides want." Ruby kissed the corner of her jaw. "So here's my offer, and I'm not dressing it up. Whatever this becomes, whoever moves first, I stand with you. Not Vance. Not the families. Not whoever paid for your mother's file. You."
"Why me?"
Ruby laughed quietly, and Chloe felt it in her own back.
"Because I watched you walk in here three weeks ago with your uniform buttoned to the collar, and now the blonde money of this school gets off on her knees when you tell her to." Her fingers curled, gentle, around the small weight of Chloe's breast. "And because when you took Anneliese apart tonight, you didn't do it for the favors. You did it because she had something of yours."
The file. Her mother. Ruby said it plainly, and the word settled into Chloe's chest heavier than the exhaustion.
"Stay," Chloe said.
"I'm not going anywhere. I locked the door." Ruby pulled the quilt up over them both, tucking it around Chloe's shoulders, and settled deeper against her, one full breast pressed soft and warm between Chloe's shoulder blades. "Sleep. In the morning we start figuring out who your enemies are."
"Both of them?"
"Both of us," Ruby said, and her breathing slowed first.
Morning came grey through the high windows. Chloe woke with Ruby's arm still heavy across her waist and her body sore in the ordinary way, a low heat in her ass that hadn't fully faded since Thursday. They showered in the communal room, early enough that the steam was the only other thing here, they had the space to themselves.
Ruby washed her first. She soaped Chloe's shoulders, her small breasts, her stomach, working down over her hips with unhurried hands. When Chloe braced a hand on the tile and tilted forward, Ruby's fingers slid between her legs from behind, found her clit, and circled it slowly under the hot water. Chloe gasped. Ruby worked her with two fingers inside, lazy and thorough, until Chloe's thighs trembled, then stopped just short and kissed the back of her neck.
"Turn around," Chloe said, and returned it, soaping Ruby's heavy breasts and sliding her own hand down the curve of her hip to press into the slick heat between her legs. Ruby was easy to make gasp; she threw her head back against the tile, red curls darkening with spray, and ground into Chloe's fingers until her breath broke. They finished rinsing each other, and Ruby knelt.
She kissed Chloe's ass first, softly, one cheek and then the other, and then pressed her lips directly to the tender pucker and held them there. Warm. Slow. Long enough that Chloe felt her own heartbeat there. The ache didn't vanish, but it loosened, the way a knotted muscle loosens under a thumb.
Chloe laughed, surprised. "That actually works."
"Told you I'd have helped free of charge." Ruby stood, water running off her chin.
Breakfast was nearly empty. A few seniors at the far table, Marta behind the counter, and no first-years at all except Marguerite, who ate quickly and left. Thea wasn't there. Even the staff moved quietly, and the silence had a direction to it, like the hush before a storm front.
"I'm going to Vance," Chloe said, setting down her cup. "Today. Now."
Ruby looked at her. "You're going to walk into the head mistress's tower and ask her what she wants with your mother."
"The interest was there before I ever touched anyone in that classroom. Weller spent forty minutes on her file a week into term. Someone paid for it. I want to know who, and I want to know before the board meeting, while I still have things people want."
"Then I'm coming." Ruby stood. "You said both of us."
Vance answered the tower door herself. She wore a charcoal dress and no expression, and she looked at the two of them for a long moment before stepping aside.
"Misses Bennett and O'Connell. I was going to send for you both later, but this will do."
The suite was the same one. Chloe recognized the wide bed, the heavy curtains, the low couches arranged around a cold fireplace. Voss stood by the window in her dark teaching clothes. Three women occupied the room like pieces moved onto a board.
Two of them were identical twins. Long straight black hair, pale blue eyes, faces that might have been cut from the same cold stone. Maybe twenty-five,no older than twenty-seven. They sat with their spines straight and their hands loose, and they watched Chloe and Ruby enter the way watchers watch. They had a look that reminded Chloe of Voss, but not quite like Voss. They could have played villains in a film or the women who killed the villain.
The third woman rose from the couch and Chloe nearly lost her composure on the spot. Blonde, perhaps thirty-five, her hair falling in a shine that belonged in a salon advertisement. Green eyes that held and kept. A blouse straining over very large breasts, tight black leather pants, heels that made her taller than Chloe. She smiled as if she already knew what Chloe would look like naked.
"Sit," Vance said.
Chloe sat on one of the couches with Ruby close beside her. She folded her hands and did not look at the blonde again, though it cost her.
Before Vance could open her mouth, Chloe spoke.
"I know something is happening. Miss Voss left campus with two first-years and never filed an itinerary. The old board members don't know what to do. Anneliese's family thinks you and Voss are plotting a coup, that they're going to lose their influence, and her mother is calling twice a day." She kept her voice level. "I know my mother's file is gone from the archive, and that it's causing a problem for Anneliese for reasons I haven't been given. And I know the interest in my family existed before my marks did. I've chosen my side. I'm bringing Ruby with me. I'm ready to be told what's going on."
The silence after it had texture. Voss's mouth curved very slightly. One of the twins raised an eyebrow at the other.
Vance studied Chloe for a long moment, and Chloe saw genuine surprise move behind the composed face before it settled again.
"You've been here three weeks," Vance said. "And you just walked into my suite and told me your terms."
"I learned from the best classroom in the building."
Vance sat down across from them, folding her hands over one knee. "Then you'll be told. The school is changing what it sells. For a century we trained daughters of the rich to marry well and manage their husbands. The families paid through donations and held us through debt and obligation, and they have used that power over this place for too long. We are adding a second kind of student. Not aristocracy. Corporate operatives. Intelligence professionals. Women whose employers pay up front, in full, with no control strings attached. The money is better. The obligations are clean."
"The file," Chloe said.
"Was leverage against us. Someone wanted to know what your mother became after she left here, and what her daughter might be worth. I removed it before it reached them." Vance let that stand. "We will honor every debt the old families hold. But they will no longer hold the purse. Some of the new trainees need less academic work. Many already hold degrees or run divisions. What they need from us is the curriculum. And they can offer something you'll want: physical protection. Some alumni have grown bold and aggressive in recent years, and the school has never had muscle."
Voss spoke from the window, dry as chalk. "These three are the first. The first group ever to take the entire course of training."
"The twins are Selene and Janette," Vance said. The black-haired women inclined their heads identically, without smiling. "The blonde is Gwenn."
Gwenn's smile deepened, and her green eyes moved over Chloe slowly, from the collar of her uniform down, cataloguing. "So you're the daughter."
"I'm the daughter," Chloe said.
"And the course is three weeks old," Vance went on, "and already produces results I didn't expect for a year. Which brings me to why you're both here." She gestured, one hand, toward the three women. "I want you and Miss O'Connell to demonstrate for them. Show these three older professional women that already wield power what a pair of eighteen-year-olds with three weeks in the program have learned to do."
Chloe felt Ruby shift beside her, warm and ready, and felt the room's attention settle on them like a hand.
"All three of them," Voss said. "Take your time. We're watching."