🔥 Clause Six 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Seventh Daughter’s Bodyguard
by Maeve Hollow

For one night, the bodyguard is the principal. Her only instruction: the witch decides everything.

Clause Six: Greer

The sweet peas came in the third week of July, and they were good for absolutely nothing, exactly as advertised.

Greer saw them from the truck. She came down Ferry Street at nine-forty on a Thursday night with the windows open and the heat still coming up off the asphalt like breath, eleven hours out of the office in Auburn and a long ugly day behind her, and there they were, climbing the trellis she’d built for no reason up the south side of the cottage. Pink and purple and a white so pale it was almost blue. A whole wall of them, gone mad in the heat, flopping over the gutter and into the greenhouse vents and halfway across the kitchen window. She could smell them before she’d turned off the engine.

She sat there for a minute with her hands on the wheel. She did that sometimes now. Just sat in front of her own house and looked at it.

Then she went up the porch steps, and stopped.

There was a sheet of paper on the holster hook.

The holster was still there, hanging by its strap where it had hung since January, empty and soft with ten years of sweat. But somebody had folded a sheet of workroom paper over the hook beside it and pinned it with a clothespin, and there was writing on it in a quick slanting hand Greer would have known in the dark.

She took it down and read it under the porch light.

Addendum to the agreement dated December 5th.

CLAUSE SIX. For one night only, the principal is Greer Halvorsen. Her instructions govern. Nobody else’s count.

The contractor (L. A. Vantreese) agrees to do whatever the principal tells her to do, including nothing.

Either party ends this at any time, in one word.

Add whatever you need.

Underneath, a pencil.

Greer stood on the porch with the paper in her hand and moths throwing themselves at the bulb over her head, and felt the long ugly day go out of her shoulders all at once, the way it did when Linnea put a palm flat on her sternum.

She pushed the door open.

The cottage was dark except for the greenhouse. The door to it stood open at the end of the kitchen, and the light came through it gold and low and moving — candles, a lot of them — and with it the smell of wet earth and tomato leaves and those useless, beautiful flowers. Biscuit was asleep on the kitchen floor in front of the open fridge door, which someone had propped with a chair so he’d have the cold air. He thumped his tail once without opening his eyes.

Linnea was in the greenhouse doorway.

She was leaning on the frame with her arms folded, barefoot, in one of Greer’s white undershirts and nothing else. Her hair was down and enormous with the humidity. She’d been in the garden — there was dirt on one knee, and a sweet pea flower tucked behind her ear, pale pink, and Greer was fairly sure she didn’t know it was there.

“You read it,” Linnea said.

“I read it.”

“And?”

Greer looked at her for a long time.

At the woman in the doorway, with the candlelight behind her coming through the thin cotton, so that every curve of her was there in dark outline against the gold. At the mark below her collarbone, seven silver lines gone quiet as old scars, where the neck of the shirt had slipped. At her face, which was doing its best to look calm and businesslike and was failing badly at the corners of the mouth.

Greer clicked the pencil.

She put the paper flat against the kitchen doorframe, and wrote under Linnea’s clauses in her small square capitals, and then she crossed the kitchen and held it out.

Linnea took it. Read it in the candlelight. Her lips parted.

THE PRINCIPAL DOESN’T WANT TO GIVE INSTRUCTIONS. THE PRINCIPAL WANTS THE CONTRACTOR TO DECIDE EVERYTHING. ALL NIGHT. THE PRINCIPAL WILL SAY OHIO IF SHE NEEDS TO. SHE DOESN’T THINK SHE WILL.

— G.H.

Linnea looked up.

“You’re sure.”

“You said I’d say that.” Greer’s voice had gone low. “You said it in the greenhouse at Sevenfold. You said I always ask. So I’m not asking. I’m telling you I want you to decide. I want to stand there and not know what’s coming and not check the door.” She swallowed. “I’ve had a day. I’d like not to be in charge of anything. I’d like to be had.”

Linnea folded the paper very carefully, in thirds, and tucked it into the waistband of nothing, realized there was no waistband, and laughed, and set it on the kitchen counter instead.

Then she straightened up, and her whole face changed.

Greer had seen it change like that before. On the north point in the snow, when Linnea had started giving orders. In the chamber, with her hands on the stone. It was the face of a woman who had decided, and it went straight down Greer’s spine and pooled hot between her legs.

“Boots,” Linnea said.

Greer took her boots off in the kitchen. Then her socks, because Linnea said socks. Then she stood there on the cool linoleum in her work clothes — black jeans, a grey button-down with the sleeves rolled, the belt — and waited.

Linnea walked around her.

Slowly. All the way around, once, the way Greer had once walked the perimeter of a property. She didn’t touch her. She just looked, and Greer could feel her looking, the back of her neck, the line of her shoulders, the place under her shirt where the knife scar ran along her ribs. When Linnea came around to the front again she stopped very close, close enough that Greer could smell the sweet pea behind her ear, and reached out and undid the top button of Greer’s shirt.

Only the top one.

“You’ve been in Auburn since seven,” Linnea said.

“Since six-forty.”

“I didn’t ask.” She undid the second button. “You drove home with the windows down. You smell like the road.” The third. “You sat in the truck for a minute before you came up the steps. I saw you. You do that.”

“I like looking at the house.”

“I know you do.” The fourth. She pushed the shirt open, and off one shoulder, and put her mouth on the bare skin there — not a kiss. Her teeth, very lightly, on the curve of the shoulder where the dislocation had been, where it still ached in the cold. Greer’s breath went out of her. “Arms down,” Linnea murmured. “Don’t help.”

Greer kept her arms down. Linnea took the shirt off the rest of the way and dropped it on the floor. Then the undershirt, over her head, and Greer stood bare to the waist in the kitchen with the fridge humming and the dog snoring and her nipples drawn up tight in the cold air off the open freezer.

Linnea looked at them, and smiled, and did not touch them.

She went to the hook by the door instead.

Greer watched her unbuckle the back strap from the empty holster. The long one. Soft with ten years of sweat. She’d buckled it around Linnea’s wrists once, in the white iron bed on this same street, in December, with snow coming down and a dead woman watching from the edge of Linnea’s mind. She’d never had it on her own.

Linnea came back with it looped over her hand.

“Wrists,” she said. “In front.”

Greer held them out.

Linnea wrapped the leather around them. Once. Twice. She did it the way Greer had done it — snug, not tight — and slid two fingers under the strap to check, and Greer heard herself make a sound she didn’t recognize at all.

“Can you get out?”

Greer pulled. The strap held.

“No,” she said.

“Good.” Linnea took hold of the loose end of the strap like a lead and turned toward the greenhouse. “Come on, then.”

She’d lit every candle in the house.

They were everywhere. Jam jars on the potting bench, tea lights along the brick floor, a row of church candles on the shelf above the seedlings. The glass walls threw them back a hundred times over, so the whole small room was a box of gold, hot and close and breathing, the air thick with wet earth and green tomato and the heavy sweet smell of the flowers pressing their faces against the panes from outside. The ridge vent was cranked open. Far off, over the lake, there was thunder that hadn’t decided yet.

Linnea led her by the strap to the middle of the brick floor, under the crossbeam.

The crossbeam was cedar. Greer had bolted it in herself in April, a four-by-six that ran the width of the greenhouse at a little over seven feet, and she’d put two iron hooks in it to hang the grow lights from, and she’d been very proud of how level it was. The grow lights were down now, set aside on the bench.

The hooks were empty.

Linnea looked at the hooks. Then she looked at Greer.

“I measured,” she said. “You can stand flat-footed. You’ll be stretched. You won’t hurt your shoulder.” She paused. “Ohio’s still Ohio.”

“I know.”

“Arms up.”

Greer lifted her bound wrists. Linnea stood on the bottom rung of the stepladder and looped the end of the strap over the left-hand hook and buckled it back on itself, and then came down and stood in front of her and looked.

Greer had never been looked at like that in her life.

She stood under her own crossbeam with her arms stretched up over her head and the leather snug around her wrists and her chest bare and rising and falling too fast. Her heels were flat on the warm brick. Everything she owned was on display, every scar — the knife on her ribs, the burn on her forearm, the four inches of pink where Pell’s chisel had gone in. There was nothing to hold. Nothing to watch. No door. Just Linnea, in a white shirt, with a flower behind her ear and her eyes gone black in the candlelight.

“Oh,” Linnea said softly. “Oh, look at you.”

She stepped in close and put both hands flat on Greer’s ribs.

Then she started.

She did it the way she did a ward. End to end before she touched the knot. Her hands went everywhere except where Greer wanted them — down the long muscles of her sides, over her hips through the denim, up the inside of her stretched arms to her bound wrists and back down again, slow, the pads of her fingers barely grazing. Her mouth followed. The hollow under Greer’s jaw. The notch of her collarbone. The knife scar, the whole six inches of it, with her open mouth and the flat of her tongue, the way she’d done it the first night in the moonlight at Sevenfold.

“You remember this,” Linnea murmured, against Greer’s ribs.

“Yes.”

“You told me what it was before I asked. Duluth. Bad ex-husband. He wasn’t mine.” She kissed the top end of it. “You were so scared of me.”

“I’m still scared of you.”

Linnea laughed against her skin. Then she closed her mouth over Greer’s left nipple and sucked, hard, and Greer’s arms jerked against the leather and the whole crossbeam creaked.

“Fuck —”

“Mm.” Linnea didn’t let go. She worked it with her tongue, then her teeth, then her tongue again, until Greer was arching into her mouth with nowhere to put her hands, and then she let go and blew on it and moved to the other one and did it all again. Greer’s knees went loose. The strap took her weight for a second and Linnea’s arm came around her waist and held her up.

“Stand,” Linnea said. “I didn’t say you could lean on it.”

Greer stood.

Linnea’s hand went to her belt.

She took her time with that too. The buckle. The button. The zipper, one tooth at a time, so slowly Greer could hear each one over the thunder. Then she hooked her fingers in the jeans and the underwear together and drew them down to Greer’s ankles, and Greer stepped out of them, and Linnea kicked them across the brick, and Greer was naked under the crossbeam in a glass room full of candles with the whole night pressing against the windows.

Linnea stepped back to look at her again.

“Spread your feet.”

Greer spread her feet on the warm brick.

“More.”

Greer did. It pulled the strap tighter on her wrists, stretched her long, opened her. She could feel the air on her. She could feel how wet she was, a slick heat between her thighs she could do nothing about, and she knew Linnea could see it in the candlelight. Her face burned. Her ears burned. She didn’t look away.

“You’ve been like that since the porch,” Linnea said. It wasn’t a question.

“Since the clothespin.”

Linnea’s mouth curved.

She came close again, and put one hand flat on Greer’s lower belly, and slid it down — slowly, slowly — and didn’t stop where Greer wanted her to. She went past. Her palm cupped Greer whole, the heel of it pressed just above her clit, her fingers lying along her, not moving, just there, hot and possessive, and she held Greer like that and looked up into her face from six inches away.

“Tell me how it feels,” Linnea said. “Not what you want. You don’t get to want anything tonight. Just how it feels.”

Greer’s throat moved.

“Like,” she said, and had to stop. “Like I can’t do anything. Like there’s nothing to watch. Like there’s nothing I’m supposed to be doing, anywhere, and nobody needs me to hold anything up.” Her voice cracked. “Like I’m the one being held.”

“You are,” said Linnea, and slid two fingers into her.

Greer cried out.

She couldn’t help it. It went up into the glass roof and came back down, and Linnea didn’t flinch, didn’t hurry. She pressed her fingers in all the way and held them there and put her mouth on Greer’s sternum, right over the bone, right where she’d laid her palm the night she’d fired her, and began to move. Slow. A long drag and a long press, curling up on every stroke against the place that made Greer’s thighs shake, her thumb settling on Greer’s clit and circling, unhurried, like there was nothing else in the world she’d rather be doing for the rest of the night.

“You’re so good,” Linnea said, into her chest. “Look at you, taking it. Standing there for me with your arms up. Not checking the door once. Do you know how good you are?”

Greer’s head fell back against her own raised arm. “Linnea —”

“Shh. You’re doing so well.”

The thunder came closer. The first drops hit the glass overhead, fat and slow, one, two, a handful, and then the sky opened all at once and the rain came down on the greenhouse roof like applause. The candles shivered. Outside, the sweet peas thrashed against the panes. Inside it was hot and gold and close and the only sounds were the rain and Greer’s breathing and the wet slow sound of Linnea’s hand.

Greer was close. She could feel it building, low and tight and enormous, the way it built when Linnea talked to her. Her hips were rocking into Linnea’s hand without her permission. Her wrists strained at the strap.

“I’m —” she gasped. “Linnea, I’m going to —”

Linnea took her hand away.

All at once. Completely. Stepped back a full pace and stood there in the candlelight with her wet fingers held up between them, and watched Greer’s whole body lurch after a touch that wasn’t there anymore.

Greer made a sound like something breaking.

“No,” Linnea said, quite gently. “Not yet. I didn’t decide that yet.”

“Please —”

“You’re not supposed to ask for anything tonight.” Linnea tilted her head. The pink flower behind her ear caught the light. “Clause six. You wrote it yourself. In capitals.”

Greer stared at her. Then she started to laugh — a wrecked, breathless, half-sobbing laugh, hanging from her own crossbeam with her thighs shaking — because Linnea was right, and Linnea knew she was right, and Linnea was standing there in Greer’s undershirt with a sweet pea behind her ear looking as pleased with herself as Greer had ever seen her look.

“You’re a terrible person,” Greer said.

“I’m a contractor,” said Linnea, “doing exactly what I was told.”

She put her wet fingers in her own mouth and sucked them clean, slowly, while Greer watched. Then she pulled the undershirt off over her head and dropped it on the brick.

Greer forgot how to breathe.

She’d seen it a hundred times. A thousand. It didn’t matter. Linnea naked in candlelight, in a glass room, in a summer storm — the heavy sway of her breasts, the soft round of her belly gleaming with sweat, the dark curls between her thighs, the long strong legs, the comma-shaped freckle on the back of her left calf that Greer had memorized in December so she’d never have to check. She was flushed all over. She was wet; Greer could see it, glistening at the tops of her thighs.

Linnea knelt down on the warm brick in front of her.

“Now,” she said, and looked up. “Now I’ll decide.”

She put her mouth on her.

There was no warning. No slow start. Linnea put her mouth on Greer’s cunt like she’d been starving for it for a week, open and wet and greedy, her hands on the backs of Greer’s thighs pulling her in, and Greer’s whole body jerked against the strap so hard the crossbeam groaned. Linnea didn’t stop. She licked her open in long flat strokes, then found her clit and sucked it into her mouth and worked it with her tongue, fast, relentless, nothing like the patient hand from before, and pushed three fingers into her at the same moment and curled them.

Greer screamed.

The rain took it. The rain hammered on the glass roof and the thunder rolled over the lake and Greer hung from her own beam with her heels coming off the brick and screamed Linnea’s name at the ceiling, again and again, and Linnea held her up by the thighs and didn’t let up for a second. Fucked her with her fingers. Ate her. Hummed against her, low, so Greer felt it all the way up her spine. The edge she’d been dragged back from came rushing up at her twice as high and twice as fast and there was nothing — nothing — to hold on to except the leather around her wrists and the hands on her thighs and the mouth on her.

She came so hard her vision went white at the edges.

It tore up through her from the soles of her feet. Her body bowed off the beam and locked there, and her cunt clamped down on Linnea’s fingers in long hard pulses, and she was swearing, sobbing, a stream of it with no words left in it, and Linnea kept her mouth on her through every second. Softer. Softer. Not stopping. Until Greer was hanging limp in the strap and shuddering at every brush of that tongue.

Then Linnea stopped, and stood up, and held her.

Wrapped both arms around Greer’s waist and pressed her whole soft heavy naked body against her, front to front, sweat to sweat, and took her weight so the strap didn’t have to, and kissed her. Greer tasted herself on Linnea’s mouth. She kissed back like she was drowning.

“Again,” Linnea said, against her lips.

“I can’t —”

“You said I decide.” Linnea’s thigh slid between Greer’s. Pressed up. Greer’s breath went out of her in a ragged whine. “I’ve decided.”

She reached up with one hand and unbuckled the strap from the hook.

Greer’s arms came down. They were still bound at the wrists. Linnea didn’t untie them. She looped the strap over her own head instead, so Greer’s bound arms were around her neck, so Greer was holding on to her the only way she could. Then she walked her backward, three steps, until Greer’s bare back met the cool wet glass of the south wall.

Rain was streaming down the other side of it. The sweet peas were pressed flat against the pane, pink and purple and white, a hand’s width from Greer’s shoulders.

“There,” Linnea said. “Now you’ve got something to hold.”

She pushed her thigh up hard between Greer’s legs, and put her hand down between them, and found Greer’s clit with two fingers, and started again.

It was different this time. Slower. Face to face. Greer’s bound wrists locked behind Linnea’s neck and her forehead pressed to Linnea’s and their breath all mixed together, the glass cold at her back and Linnea hot all down her front. Linnea rode her own thigh into her and rubbed slow, deliberate circles on her clit and didn’t look away from her once.

“Tell me how it feels,” Linnea whispered.

“Like you’ve got me.” Greer’s voice was gone to nothing. “Like I’m yours. Like I don’t have to hold anything because you’re holding me.”

“I am.”

“Don’t stop.”

“I’m not stopping. I decided.”

Greer laughed, wet, and then couldn’t, because Linnea’s fingers had pushed inside her again and her thumb had found her clit and her thigh was grinding up under her, and Linnea was moving too, rocking against Greer’s hip, her own breath coming short and ragged. Greer could feel how wet she was against her skin. She could feel Linnea’s whole body tightening.

“Linnea —”

“With me,” Linnea gasped. “Come with me. Come on. You’re so good, you’re so —”

They went over together against the wet glass with the rain coming down. Greer’s bound arms crushing Linnea to her, Linnea’s fingers deep in her, both of them crying out into each other’s mouths. It went on and on. When it finally let go of them they slid down the glass together, slowly, until they were sitting on the warm brick floor in a tangle with Greer’s back against the pane and Linnea in her lap and the leather still around Greer’s wrists, still around Linnea’s neck.

Outside, the storm was moving off across the lake. The thunder was farther away now. The rain had gone soft.

Linnea unbuckled the strap eventually.

She did it slowly, and kissed the insides of Greer’s wrists where the leather had been, one and then the other, the way she’d once kissed the burn scar on Greer’s forearm. Then she dropped the strap on the brick and lay down against Greer’s chest with her head under Greer’s chin and her ear over Greer’s heart, and neither of them said anything for a long time.

The candles were burning down. Half of them were out. The air through the ridge vent had gone cool and smelled of wet earth and lake, and something sweeter under it.

Greer reached up and found the flower behind Linnea’s ear. Still there. Crushed now, a little, and very fragrant.

“You had this in your hair the whole time,” she said.

“I did not.”

“You did.” Greer held it up. Pale pink, bruised, sweet. “You went out to the garden and picked a useless flower and put it behind your ear and wrote me a contract. Then you tied me to the ceiling.”

Linnea took the flower from her. Looked at it. Started to laugh.

“I forgot it was there.”

“I know.” Greer kissed the top of her head. “I didn’t say anything. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

They sat on the floor while the last of the rain ticked on the glass. Biscuit wandered in eventually, nails clicking on the brick, and looked at them with deep concern, and lay down across both their feet with a groan.

“Greer.”

“Mm.”

“How was the principal’s night?”

Greer thought about it. About the porch light and the clothespin and the leather and the candles and not checking the door once, not one time, for an entire storm.

“Add it to the contract,” she said. “Permanent. Once a month.”

Linnea lifted her head.

“Clause six?”

“Clause six,” Greer said. “Every month. Your decision. Don’t tell me when.”

Linnea smiled — her own smile, quick and crooked, going up more on the left — and reached up onto the potting bench above them, where she’d left the pencil, and wrote it on the back of Greer’s wrist, right over the faint red mark the leather had left, in small slanting letters.

Agreed. — L.A.V.

Greer didn’t wash it off for three days.

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