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An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Crown Him in Blood by Rafe Calder
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of Crown Him in Blood: the wedding night. It contains major spoilers for the novel’s ending and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
Nikolai’s side of the night Remy marries him: nine seconds in a brass elevator, a box tied with black ribbon, the mirror, two gold bands with two words cut inside them, and the call from the front desk at eleven. Explicit content — 18+.
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The elevator doors at the Lumière take nine seconds to close.
I have counted them on a great many nights. Carrying him. Leaving him. Once, with my gloves on a table in a spill of cold coffee, watching him turn his face to the window. I know every one of those nine seconds the way I know the stair on Pier 9 and the treads of the bluff stair that are rotten.
On our wedding night, he used all nine.
He walked me backward into the car with his hand flat on my chest, the left one, the new band cool through my shirt, and he didn’t kiss me. He reached past my shoulder and turned the key to fourteen, and then he stood there with his palm over my heart and watched the brass close behind me, one heron at a time.
“Seven,” Remy said. “Eight.”
“Remy.”
“Nine,” said my husband, and the doors met, and he took my face in both hands and kissed me like a man collecting on a debt he’d decided was finally due.
I had been married for nine hours. I had stood at the foot of the stair in the lobby of the Hôtel Marguerite in a suit my tailor had wept over, and Claire Laurent had rung her father’s bell three times to start it, polished brass, a clear high note, and looked at me over the top of it with an expression I am still translating. Sabine had worn gray. Gabriel had worn a tie, under protest, and danced with Adrienne in front of witnesses. Madame Roux had cried into Odette’s shoulder. Gault had told the room he’d attended four Laurent weddings and this was the first one where nobody in the front row was armed, and Duret, in the front row, had looked at his hands.
I had said the words. I do. Two syllables. I’ve said fewer to end men. I had meant them more than I’ve meant anything in my life, and my voice had held until the very last of them, and then it hadn’t, and he’d put his ringed hand on my jaw in front of two hundred people and said, Hi, and I had laughed out loud at my own wedding.
Now he had my jacket open before the car had cleared nine.
“You were magnificent,” he said into my mouth. “I want you to know that. Before I ruin you. You stood up there and you didn’t look at a single door.”
“I looked at one.”
“Which?”
“Yours. The kitchen door. Where you came in.”
He went still against me. Then his hands moved on my face, thumbs along my cheekbones, the way his mother does it, and he kissed me again, slower, as if I had said something he meant to keep.
The car rose. Thirteen. The chime.
“Fourteen,” Remy murmured. “Do you know what the doors take?”
“Nine seconds.”
“I’ve been waiting for them all day,” he said, and pushed me out backward into the penthouse.
Every lamp was off.
That was the first thing. He runs a room bright when he means business, and I had walked into that suite a hundred times since the winter to every lamp burning. Tonight the room was dark except for the lake, and the lake was full of moon, and the long curved wall of glass was silver from end to end.
The second thing was the table. The small one by the window, where he’d once set two places across the corner and later moved the chairs to face each other. There was one chair at it now. A white cardboard box sat on the wood, tied with black ribbon.
The third thing was the ice bucket on the bar, below the chip in the plaster that he has never let anyone fill.
“Open it,” he said.
“The box.”
“The box. The bucket’s for later.”
I untied the ribbon. Inside, folded in tissue the way a good laundry folds a shirt, were my gloves.
Black leather. Cleaned and conditioned. The left cuff had come up perfectly from the coffee, and they had been stored all year, I could see, with something inside each one to keep the shape. Under them there was a card, in his handwriting, the round confident hand I know from cafeteria napkins and the backs of envelopes.
Yours. Wear them or don’t. Decide before you come through the door. — R.
Sabine’s words. He’d read the note on our refrigerator every morning for a year.
I stood there with them in my hands for a long time.
“I kept them because I didn’t know what else to do with them,” he said quietly behind me. “Then I kept them because they were yours. I’m not giving them back because I want you to wear them. I’m giving them back because I want you to have the choice. Nobody gave you a choice about anything for eighteen years. You can have this one.”
I turned around.
He was leaning against the bar in his wedding shirt with his tie loosened and his jacket somewhere on the floor of the elevator, and he was nervous. I could see it in his hands. Twenty-six years old, head of the family, master of four hundred and forty people and three hotels and one bad roof, and his fingers had gone to the knot of his tie.
I walked to the bar. I held the gloves up so he could see them. Then I dropped them into the ice bucket, one and then the other, into the meltwater, where a ring once landed on its back like a drunk in a hot tub.
He laughed. It came out of him all at once, surprised and wet.
“That’s six hundred dollars of Italian leather.”
“I’ll buy you a lamp,” I said, and lifted him onto the bar.
I took his tie off first.
I always do. It’s the first thing I ever did to him with my hands bare, in a Long Room, with his father’s chair at his back. I drew the silk out of the knot slowly and laid it on the marble beside him, and he watched me do it with his heels hooked behind my thighs and his breath already coming short.
“Do you know,” he said, “that you’re the only person who’s ever undressed me who folds things?”
“I’m a methodical man.”
“I know.” He dragged me in by the shirtfront. “Be methodical faster.”
I wasn’t. I took his shirt apart one button at a time from the throat down and put my mouth to each inch as I uncovered it. The hollow of his throat. The left side, an inch under the jaw, where I marked him in a coat room and where, a year later, he still touches without knowing he does it. His collarbone. His breastbone, where a fist once rested against him while he came on nothing but my voice. I had him bare to the waist on the Lumière’s bar, gold in the moonlight, with the new band on his right hand braced against the marble, and I went to my knees on the bar rail and took his shoes off.
“Kolya.” Something in his voice. “You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t.” I unlaced the left. Black, size ten, the pair Madame Roux bought him a year and a half ago, resoled twice. He wouldn’t be married in anything else. “Let me.”
He let me. He watched me ease each shoe off and set them side by side on the floor below the bar, the way you’d set them outside a hotel room door to be polished. I took his socks off. I held one bare foot in my hand and kissed the arch of it, and felt him shudder from the ankle up.
“Oh,” said Remy, very softly, as if he’d found a room in his own house he hadn’t known about.
I opened his trousers on the bar. I drew them off him along with everything under them and folded them, because he’d told me to be methodical faster and I am, in my way, obedient. Then I stood and looked at him.
My husband. Naked on a bar in a hotel he’d saved, in a city he’d taken with four questions and a cup of bad coffee, with his knees open for me and his cock hard and flushed against his stomach and the moon on him like a sheet.
“Say something,” he whispered. “You’re looking at me like the first night. In the lobby. Like you opened a drawer.”
“I did open a drawer.”
“What was in it?”
“Everything,” I said, and put my mouth on him.
I have learned him.
That’s what a year is for. In the winter I knew his file. Eleven pages. I knew what he grossed in a bad February and what he’d been charged for a boiler. Now I know the rest. I know that he likes it slow at first and then not slow at all. I know the exact place, just under the head, where my tongue makes him swear, and the other place, lower, that makes him stop swearing and start begging. I know that if I hold his hips down he’ll fight it for four seconds and then go loose and let me, and that the four seconds are the part he likes best.
I held his hips down. He fought it for four seconds.
“Fuck—you know—”
“I know.”
I took him to the root and swallowed and held him there until his heel drummed once against my back, and then I let him go and did it again, slower, watching his face. His hands were in my hair. He wasn’t pulling yet. He would.
“That’s it,” I told him when I came up for breath, the way I do. “Look at you. Married four hours and already falling apart on a bar.”
“Nine,” he said, wrecked. “Nine hours. Count properly.”
“Nine hours,” I agreed, and pressed a slick finger into him.
He’d planned. Of course he’d planned. The bottle was in the ice drawer under the bar, he’d had it put there that morning, and when I found it he looked at me with such bald self-satisfaction that I had to kiss him for it. I opened him slowly with my mouth on his cock, one finger and then two, and when I found the place inside him, he did pull. Hard. Both fists.
“There,” he said. “There, don’t you dare—Kolya, there—”
I didn’t dare. I kept him right there, three fingers deep, my mouth working him, until he was shaking from the knees up and his voice had climbed into the register I’d once heard through a door in his father’s house and swore I’d hear for the rest of my life.
Then I stopped.
He made a sound that was going to need a formal complaint.
“Not here,” I said, and picked him up off the bar.
“Nikolai Sokolov—”
“Laurent-Sokolov,” I said. “Since four o’clock. Hold on.”
The mirror is as old as the building. Tall, in a gilt frame, original to the suite. He made me look into it on our fourteenth night and on our forty-first, and on our hundredth, and on every night I’ve needed to be reminded what I am when I’m not guarding anything.
Tonight I put him in front of it, and I stood behind him.
The moon came across the room and caught the glass. Both of us were in it. Him bare, flushed, wet-mouthed, his hair wrecked by my hands. Me behind him in what was left of my wedding shirt, open, the trousers undone, and my bare hands on his hips.
On both our hands, a ring.
Plain gold. Narrow. A Harlow Falls jeweler had melted down the Laurent signet, heron and all, and poured it into two bands, and inside each of them, where only the wearer would ever see, he’d cut two words that he’d had to have spelled out on a napkin.
“Put your hands on the frame,” I said.
He put them there. Right hand, left hand. The gold clicked on the gilt.
“Look.”
He looked. I watched him look at us. I watched his eyes go from his own face to mine above his shoulder, and then down, to my hands on his hips, and the rings on them, and back up.
“I used to think,” he said, unsteadily, “you’d never let anyone see you like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you want something.”
“I want something.”
“What?”
“You,” I said. “Every day. On purpose. In front of whoever’s looking.”
I pressed into him.
Slowly. All the way. I watched it happen in the glass, his mouth falling open and his hands tightening on the frame, his whole body taking me inch by inch and giving, and giving, until I was flush against him and so deep I could feel his pulse around me. I held there. I didn’t move. Not moving is a thing I have always been good at. I let him feel all of it, and I let him look.
“Oh,” he said, very small. The way he’d said it the first night, in this room, in a storm.
“There you are,” I told him. “There you are.”
Then I moved.
I took him the way he likes it on the nights he asks for the mirror: long and slow and so deep he goes up on his toes, my arm across his chest holding him back against me so he couldn’t fold forward, couldn’t look away, couldn’t do anything but watch himself be had. I talked to him. I always talk to him. I told him how he looked. I told him that the city had spent a year bowing over that hand and not one of them knew what it looked like braced on a mirror frame with a ring on it, shaking. I told him he was the best thing I had ever been given and the only thing I had ever earned. I told him he was mine in two languages.
“Ya tvoy,” he said back, and this time he said it right.
It undid me a little. I felt it go. I drove into him harder and he cried out and shoved back to meet me, and the mirror shivered in its frame the way it has every time, and the moon went over us both.
“Kolya. Kolya, I’m—”
“I know.” I closed my hand on his cock, my ringed hand, and watched his eyes find it in the glass. “Look at it. Look at whose hand that is.”
“Mine,” he said. “That’s mine—”
He came looking at it. Pulsing over my fist and onto the old silvered glass of a mirror older than both of us put together, his ringed right hand white on the gilt, my name coming out of him in pieces. He clenched so hard around me that I lost the count of anything and followed him over with my mouth on the side of his throat, on the old mark, saying the only two words I’ve ever owned, into his skin, until there was no breath left to say them with.
For a long time we stood there holding each other up.
“You’re going to clean that,” he said eventually, into the glass, with his eyes shut.
“Mrs. Baptiste is not going to find that.”
“She’s going to find it. She finds everything. She’ll bring it up at Christmas.”
“Then I’ll clean it twice,” I said, and he laughed against my arm until his knees gave out.
I carried him to bed.
He let me. That’s the second thing a year is for. In the winter he’d have made a speech about being a grown man who had never been carried anywhere. Now he put his face in my neck and let me bring him to the big white bed by the glass and lay him down in it, and he pulled me down with him by the shirt I still hadn’t taken off.
“Off,” he said. “All of it. I want my husband in this bed with nothing on him but a ring.”
So I took it all off. He watched me do it from the pillows with that look on his face, the one that means he’s taking inventory and doesn’t intend to tell me the total. When I lay down beside him, he rolled onto his side to face me and put his hand flat on my chest, over the old scar under my collarbone, and left it there.
We lay a while. The lake was going from silver to gray. Somewhere fourteen floors down, a night porter was salting a dock ramp, because somebody had finally read a memo.
“Can I tell you something,” he said.
“Yes.”
“When we stood up today. At the Marguerite. Mom rang the bell, and you looked at me, and I thought—” He stopped. Started again. “I thought, he looks like the only true thing that was ever in the morning room. Like he was always going to be. Like the rest of it was just the long way here.”
I couldn’t answer that. He didn’t need me to. He kissed me instead, slow, and slid his thigh over my hip the way he does, and after a while his hand went down between us and he made a pleased, sleepy sound to find me hard again.
“Again?” he asked against my mouth.
“If you want.”
“I always want. That’s established. It’s in the file.” He pushed me onto my back, gently, and climbed over me, and sat up astride my hips in the first gray light with his hair in his eyes, and took the bottle off the nightstand. “This time I’m driving.”
“You always drive in the morning.”
“It’s morning. Technically. Look.” He nodded at the glass behind him, where the lake was turning the color of pearls. “And it’s my wedding. I’ll drive whenever I like.”
He took me in his hand and sank down onto me with a long, contented sigh, all the way, the way he did the first morning in this same bed, in full sun, when he told me I was beautiful and took the account. He settled. He rolled his hips once, slow, and his eyes fell half shut.
“Oh, that’s nice,” said Remy. “Good morning, husband.”
He rode me slow. There wasn’t any hurry in him anywhere. He moved on me in long, lazy rolls with his palms flat on my chest and his ring catching the light, and the dawn came up behind him over eleven miles of open water, because the ice had gone out of Grise Bay in April and we had both stood on the dock at Heron Point at a quarter to five and listened to it go. He looked at me the whole time. I let him. I’ve learned to.
“Hold still,” he murmured, when I reached for his hips.
My words. He keeps everything.
I held still. I let my husband have me in the gray light with my hands open on the sheets, while he took his time and told me what he saw. He was very thorough. He touched the gray at my temple and the lines by my eyes and the scar on my ribs and the newer one, low on my left side, front and back, where a man in a dark cap put a bullet a year and a half ago. He kissed that one. He always kisses that one.
“It weighs the same,” he said, very low, rocking on me. “You told me that. In the cannery. You said it weighs the same, you get stronger.”
“Yes.”
“Is it true?”
“Some days.”
“Today?”
I looked up at him. The light was on him now, the first sun across the water, gold on gold.
“Today it weighs nothing at all,” I said.
He made a sound I’d never heard, and leaned down, and kissed me, and moved faster. I put my hand on him, finally, and he came over my fist and my stomach with his forehead on mine and his breath in my mouth, and I went after him, up into him, saying his name and the other thing, the thing with no verb in it, until there wasn’t anything left to say.
The telephone rang at ten past eleven.
Remy reached over me without opening his eyes and picked it up.
“Yes?” A pause. His mouth started to curve. “No, I’m aware. Yes. It’s eleven on the card, I wrote the card.” Another pause. “Mrs. Baptiste, I love you, you know I do, but I own the building.”
He listened. He opened one eye and looked at me, lying there in the wreck of his wedding night with the sun on the sheets and my hand still on his hip, and the curve in his mouth went all the way up.
“Tell the desk Mr. and Mr. Laurent-Sokolov won’t be checking out,” he said.
Another pause.
“No,” said my husband. “Not today. Not ever, actually. Put it in the file.”
He hung up. He rolled back over onto my chest and put his face in my neck, and his ringed hand over my heart, and sighed.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
Outside, fourteen floors down, the lake was blue all the way to Heron Point. In the ice bucket on the bar, a pair of black gloves floated in the meltwater, where they belonged.
Neither of us moved for a very long time.
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