Chapter 7: The Negotiation
The silence in the parlor was thick enough to chew. The only sounds were the frantic rhythm of Bob’s own heart and the shallow, hitching breaths coming from Emi beneath him. He was still inside her, softening now, the frantic heat of his own climax cooling into a sticky, complicated reality.
Hart moved first. He walked to the sideboard, his steps heavy on the floorboards, and poured three fingers of amber whiskey into a glass. He didn’t offer it to anyone. He just drank it down in one long pull, his Adam’s apple working. Then he turned, his face an unreadable mask of hard lines and shadow.
“Take her upstairs,” he said to Bob, his voice gravelly but firm. Not a suggestion. An instruction. “Wash her. Let her rest. Then you come see me and your brother in my study.”
He looked at Sam, who was hastily pulling on his trousers, his eyes anywhere but on Bob or Emi. “Sam. Now.”
Sam nodded, a quick, jerky motion, and followed Hart out of the room without a backward glance. The heavy oak door to the study down the hall clicked shut, a sound of finality.
Bob slowly pulled out of Emi. She flinched, a fresh tear tracing through the dried salt on her cheek. She couldn’t look at him. She just curled in on herself there on the rug, a small, devastated creature covered in the evidence of them all.
“Come on,” Bob said, his voice hoarse. He stood, his legs unsteady, and reached for her. She recoiled for a second, then went limp, allowing him to gather her up. She was surprisingly light. He carried her through the quiet house, up the stairs to the bathroom they had once, briefly, shared.
He set her down on the closed toilet lid and started the water in the clawfoot tub. Steam began to rise, fogging the mirror. He knelt in front of her.
“Let’s get you clean,” he whispered.
He helped her out of her ruined dress, his hands trembling. The marks on her body were a map of his absence. A faint bruise, yellowing at the edges, on the inside of her thigh. The red imprint of teeth on her shoulder. A scattering of love bites along her collarbone and the heavy swell of her breasts. Her nipples were dark and peaked, overly sensitive. But it was the state of her sex that made his breath catch. She was swollen, glistening, the pink flesh noticeably fuller, used. The proof of his father and brother was slowly leaking out of her onto the bathroom tiles.
A hot spike of something ugly—jealousy, rage—pierced him. But beneath it, coiling low in his stomach, was that same dark fascination. He had just been inside that. He had felt how accommodating she was, how deeply she could take him.
He washed her gently with a cloth and a bar of lye soap, the scent clean and harsh. She was passive, her head lolling against the cool porcelain of the tub. He rinsed her hair, the black strands sleek and long against his fingers.
“I’m a terrible wife,” she murmured, her eyes closed. “I have no honor.”
“They said I was dead, Emi.” The words felt strange in his mouth. “What were you supposed to do?”
“Wait. I should have waited forever.” She opened her eyes then, and the pain in them was bottomless. “But I was so empty. And they were here. And they… they filled it.”
Bob didn’t know what to say to that. He lifted her from the tub, wrapped her in a thick towel, and carried her to the bedroom. He tucked her into the cool sheets. She was asleep almost instantly, a deep, exhausted sleep that looked like an escape.
He stood watching her for a long minute. Then he dressed in clean clothes—denim pants, a simple shirt—feeling like a stranger in his own skin. He walked downstairs, the house groaning softly around him. He paused outside the study door, hearing the low murmur of voices. He took a breath and went in.
The study was dim, the air stale with tobacco and old leather. Hart was behind the desk, refilling his glass. Sam stood by the window, staring out at the fading light, his shoulders tense.
Hart looked up. “Close the door.”
Bob did.
“Sit.”
Bob remained standing. “We need to talk about this. I can… I can maybe understand what happened. While I was gone. But it stops now. It has to.”
Sam spun around. “You think it’s that simple? You think you can just come back and everything goes back to how it was in your head?” His voice was strained. “You weren’t here. You don’t know—”
“Sam.” Hart’s single word cut the air. He didn’t raise his voice, but the authority in it was absolute. Sam shut his mouth, his jaw clenching. Hart leaned back in his chair, the old leather creaking. He studied Bob, his eyes like chips of flint.
“Tell me something, Bobby. Honestly. When you were inside her just now… how did it feel?”
Bob blinked. The question was so crude, so direct, it stripped away any pretense of a normal conversation. “What?”
“You heard me. Did her pussy feel good? Better than it did on your wedding night?”
The memory flashed, unbidden: Emi trembling beneath him, tight and virgin, her quiet cries of pain mingling with whispers of love. Then the visceral, overwhelming sensation from an hour ago: hot, slick, impossibly deep, the way her body milked him like it knew exactly what it was doing.
He gave a single, stiff nod.
A slow, knowing smile spread across Hart’s face. It wasn’t friendly. It was the smile of a man who’d won an argument he hadn’t even started aloud. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. See, we didn’t just fuck her, son. We taught her. We coaxed that shy little girl out of her shell. We showed her what her body is for. All that heat, all that need… we unlocked it.” He took a sip of whiskey. “She’s used to the feel of us now. The stretch of us. You felt it yourself. One cock?” He shook his head, almost pitying. “One cock won’t do for her anymore. She’ll be craving what she’s grown accustomed to inside. You’ll see. You’ll try to give her your one cock, and she’ll be polite. She’ll even come for you. But it won’t be the same. She’ll be faking it for your pride, and we’ll all know it.”
Bob’s fists tightened at his sides. “That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?” Hart pressed. “You think the woman you just washed, covered in our marks, dripping with our seed, is gonna be satisfied with quiet missionary lights-out? That’s not the wife we made, Bobby. We made a woman who needs to be full. Who needs her men.”
The word ‘men’ hung in the smoky air. Plural.
Hart stood up, coming around the desk. He wasn’t a tall man, but his presence filled the small room. He put a heavy hand on Bob’s shoulder. “You love her?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then you want her happy. Really, truly satisfied. Not pretending. We can give her that. All of us together. The way it’s been.” He squeezed Bob’s shoulder, his grip firm. “The way it should be. For her.”
Bob looked from his father’s unwavering gaze to his brother’s guilty, hungry stare by the window. He thought of Emi asleep upstairs, her body a testament to their shared possession. The moral ground he’d imagined standing on crumbled, not into horror, but into a terrifying, seductive possibility. Hart’s words slithered into the dark place that had been awakened in the parlor, nurturing it, giving it a reason to grow.
He didn’t say yes.