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Her first time clubbing. A man’s hand on her side, fingertips bordering the underside of her right breast. No, she said. He smiled, and told her she was pretty, and his hand didn’t move.
Before that. Long before that. She was six and a quarter, and the boy was five and a half, and he wanted to sit next to her in form time, and hold her hand, and marry her when they grew up. No, she said. She doesn’t remember what the teacher said to her when the boy told, but she remembers the feel of his slightly sticky fingers on hers all through the next lesson.
Later. University halls, but not her own. Unable to remember the journey here, head buzzing, sitting on his bed and kissing. She pulled back. No, she said, and he swore at her, gripped her shoulder hard. You fucking cocktease, you bitch, till finally she said yes, sorry, yes. He relaxed his grip, and while he was smiling at her, at her yes, she tore free of him and ran. Once she was back in her room she locked the door and sat with her back against the wall watching it. She remembered his smile, the way he softened as soon as she said it, the magic word to undo the dark magic of the word she’d used before.
She holds the knowledge close to her, as the years go on. She breaks all the other rules; she lets herself be sharper and swifter and cleverer than them no matter how much they hate it. She beats them bloody and makes them crawl across the floor for her. She steals their money and their secrets and their dignity. But she says yes to them, or flees before they can ask the question. She says yes and yes and yes, and feels the nos pile up inside her, clamouring and trying to tear their way out but never getting anywhere.
Her body becomes a bloody chamber, a prison of nos. She doesn’t mind. The times when she passes other women in the street, reads on them the invisible handprints of men in clubs and sticky boys from long ago, sees the places where the skin is stretched taut over the body’s prisoners, are the only times she doesn’t feel alone.
-
She knows what people like, and she gives it to them. She takes things from them in return. It’s none of it very complicated.
Until –
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She doesn’t know what it means. She knows he said This email will save the world and that she said yes. She doubts very much that the statement deserved a yes, but she means to make sure. Unfortunately, that’s going to involve bringing in outside help.
None of this is the important bit, though. That happened several months earlier.
-
She doesn’t get many female clients. And certainly not many as pretty and put-together as this one. Her name is Kate Norton, and she says she’s heard about Irene through the grapevine. Everyone’s talking about her, she says.
They’ll have told you only to warn you off me, Irene thinks, half sad and half amused. The blue bruises, the house full of doors; she’s wealthy and powerful, but don’t go to her, they’ll have said, and here you are anyway, you beautiful little creature. Do you want to see the blue for yourself? Do you want to open the doors?
Kate comes back the next day, and the next. On their seventh session, Irene hisses have you been wicked? and Kate gasps yes, yes, yes. Irene digs nails into her back. You don’t have to say yes, she whispers, pleading. You don’t have to, I don’t care, say no to me, push back. Say no.
Kate looks at her, straight at her, makes unflinching eye contact with her like no one ever does, and says, voice hard and steady, ‘Yes.’
Irene’s breath spins in her lungs. Her throat contracts. ‘Move in with me,’ she says.
-
She knew a man once who worked in the city and made millions, who had an immaculate penthouse flat with a palatial living room and a bedroom in tasteful neutral colours and a door that looked like a cupboard but really led to a small but very expensively fitted out kink den.
Her world is, of necessity, the other way about. She advertises sex, dresses up as it, fills the rooms of her house with it, posts photos of it on her website. She’s never fucked a client and never will; that’s not really what they come for, but she gets better rates selling the possibility that one day, maybe, she might. In Irene’s house people walk flinchingly past restraints hanging from walls and artfully placed toyboxes to find the one locked door in the building. They shiver slightly at it, wondering what bloody kink-spattered revelation might lie behind it, what could possibly be worse than all of this.
The locked door is a recent addition. Before, she never worried about keeping her little study a secret; no one would have been interested in seeing it anyway. An old desk, a mostly blank laptop, and piles of children’s books, salvage she took with her when she fled her childhood earlier than she was supposed to.
But Kate is interested in everything. And there are additions to the room now: a folder of photos, a curl of hair in a ring box, a miniature freezer containing only a stoppered vial of blood.
There is a yes trembling and thrumming in Irene’s chest, though she has done everything she can to crush it. Yeses are for lips, for lacquer, they don’t belong in the bloodstained spaces of her body where the nos wail in the dark. The yes is bursting up through her, a hot brightness in a place where nothing is meant to draw so much attention to itself.
No is real, and must therefore be trapped and hidden. Yes is a gift, and a gift is a lie. Irene’s lived by this for years. She doesn’t know what to do now, except keep her skin closed against the ache of longing pressing at its underside, and keep the study door locked at all times.
Any room, she tells Kate. Any room in the house but that one. You won’t like the consequences if you disobey me.
-
The day comes, as she supposes it was always bound to, eventually, when a man asks something she cannot answer with a yes, and gives her no opportunity to flee.
I helped you, Moriarty says. You didn’t know how to play the Holmes boys, you didn’t know what to do with that string of numbers and letters. Now you’re going to help me.
Enough. This isn’t her game, she’s tried it and she knows for sure now. She’d thought, perhaps, that toying with human life might free her from the horrible pressure of the unwanted internal yes. That she could make herself cold again. She locked the evidence of it in the study with the folder and the hair and the vial, and told herself that it cancelled them out, but her terror of what Kate would say if she knew gave that the lie.
While Sherlock makes his way to the plane, Irene calls Kate just to breathe unevenly into the phone and hear Kate soothe her, confused and anxious. She floods her brain with Kate’s voice and tries to forget, but the sense-memory rattles about her body. Her body that had been so close to Sherlock’s so recently, emanating yes, a litany in her head: make him feel special make him feel wanted make him know how lonely he is. Make him want to do anything to stay this close. And she had been close, millimetres between his skin and hers, and his hands were big enough to cover her whole shoulder. So close, with no crop or knotted rope to form a barrier, she thought of his hands gripping her and her pulse raced desperately. She almost pulled back then, almost couldn’t go through with it, but she kept her hands still and smiled and was witty, and saved the shaking for after Sherlock had left the room.
I’ll give you everything I get from Mycroft, she texts Moriarty. That ought to be ample payment.
No, Moriarty texts back. Money is easy to come by. Agents of your calibre aren’t.
Her hands shake harder. She closes her eyes. I have a job, she texts. I will give you anything else.
Anything? says Moriarty’s first text, and she’s just trying to get her hands under control enough to reply when the second arrives. I’ll own your life, it says, or I’ll take hers. Your choice.
Irene opens her eyes again. She thinks, quietly, for twenty minutes. Then she picks up her phone, and changes the password.
She’s only of interest to Moriarty alive, after all.
-
Nicely played, Mycroft says, and for a moment Irene thinks it isn’t going to work, but then –
No, Sherlock says.
And she says sorry? And he says no. Very very close, but no. He says You were enjoying yourself too much. He says because I took your pulse.
She loathes him in that moment. Loathes him for the easy nos that drip off his tongue, negating her entirely without thought. This is all entirely according to plan, but it still makes her hate him, the way he’s hating her now, noing at her with his entire being across the room.
She pulls herself together for one final yes, her best performance yet. Please. You’re right. I won’t even last six months.
She doesn’t, in fact, mean to last anywhere near as long as that.
-
She knows they’ve caught up with her a few hours before it happens. It gives her time to agonise over one last decision. Fingering the key to the study in her pocket, turning it over and over in her hand.
She deserves to know, Irene thinks. She deserves to see.
But the key stays in her pocket, unsent, and as she’s kneeling to die she thinks of saying it with words, of texting her, but texts Sherlock instead, throws away her last words in a bitter attempt to make a man feel guilty for saying no the way she’s been made to all her life.
When I say run, run, says Sherlock’s voice, and for a moment she’s too appalled and furious to speak.
When she does, though, her voice is loud and clear. She snaps it, her lungs bursting with it. ‘No.’
He stares at her, shocked into silence, and then a gun goes off, once, twice, the men around them are crumpling to the ground, and a voice behind them says, ‘Oh yes you fucking will.’
Irene twists, sure she’s hallucinating, because that voice doesn’t belong here, was supposed to be safe, that was the whole point, she was supposed to be –
‘Don’t you ever dare leave me behind again,’ Kate says.
-
Photos of you, in a folder, Irene admits. A lock of your hair in a ring box. A vial of your blood, from the seventh time I made you bleed. Stupid things really. I don’t know why I kept them locked away so long.
Kate runs her hand over the bookshelves, the ring box, the freezer door, the folder. In her other hand she clutches the key. I’m sorry I took this, she says, and hands it back. I shouldn’t have. You’re allowed to keep secrets.
I said you wouldn’t like the consequences, Irene says, taking the key, still warm from Kate’s hand. I know this isn’t what I’m supposed to be to you.
‘You’re supposed to be you to me,’ Kate says. ‘You’re supposed to be everything.’
All of herself. All these women, all her dead selves, the ones she murdered with every unspoken no. ‘They’re yours,’ she tells Kate, ‘all of me, they’re yours, I’m yours.’ It’s the worst and most macabre gift she’s ever given anyone, and also the first that isn’t a lie.
Kate presses a hand against Irene’s chest, and the bloody chambers of her heart contract, expand, beating helplessly alive against the warmth.