I was on my feet. I didn't know when I'd stood up.
"Say it again," I said.
"Yer da was a cunt." He wiped his mouth, and his hand came away red. He looked up at me from the floor without blinking. "He made her sit at a machine letting out his trousers so he could fuck a French woman in Paris. He was a cunt."
"Shut your fucking mouth."
"Make me."
I stood over him with my fist still closed and looked down at him on the floor of my entryway with blood on his lip and his wrists bare. No cuffs. No marks either, which meant he hadn't taken them off when I came through the door. He'd been out of them.
The little shit had picked the lock.
Of course he'd picked the lock. Scottish leatherworker, been in captivity for six months, had hands like a surgeon's. I'd been cuffing him every night with all the faith of a man putting a padlock on a screen door. Fucking brilliant. Add it to the list.
"Don't say another word," I said.
"All right."
I walked down the hall to my bedroom, shut the door, and stood there with my hand on the knob. My knees were killing me. Of course they were. My knees were always killing me.
At the dresser, I pulled the bottle out of the back of the top drawer, looked at it, and put it back. The last thing I needed was to wake up tomorrow hungover on top of whatever the fuck tonight was going to turn into.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. My back complained. Jesus Christ.
My knuckle was split. Middle one, right hand. I hadn't even hit him with the fist. I'd hit him with the flat of my hand, and my knuckle had opened anyway, because apparently tonight nothing was going to work the way it was supposed to. I’d scraped his tooth, probably. Maybe I'd caught it on the wall. I didn't know, and I wasn't going to stand up and go to the bathroom mirror to figure it out because my knees were not on speaking terms with me.
My hand was still shaking.
I picked up the phone and scrolled until I found Valentina's number. We had an arrangement, the Madam and I, and her girls never disappointed.
"Send Nadia. Within the hour."
"Yes, sir."
I hung up and dropped the phone on the bed beside me.
Real convincing, Aleksi.
I got up to find a clean shirt.
The resin was settingcleaner than I'd had any right to expect, given the state of the leather and the state of me. I'd done two passes since five in the morning, my eye welded to the loupe, my back going by inches. The consolidant was doing its job. The cracks were drawing closed at the molecular level, the fibers rebinding like the textbook said they would. My granddad had ruined a Victorian satchel once with too much PVA and kept it as a teaching aid for the rest of his life. I was not going to be a teaching aid.
I sat back and rolled my shoulders. The loupe had pressed a pink ring into my eye socket that was going to look absolutely brilliant for the rest of the week. I'd been at it since five because I'd given up pretending I was going to sleep through what I'd been listening to. Now my hands were starting to ask for a break before I made a mistake I couldn't undo on a piece of dying leather.
The piece of dying leather was Aleksi's da's jacket, which was not the only reason I was being careful, but it was high on the list.
I would say this for the man. He'd been quiet the whole time I'd known him, a quiet that came off him like cold off a window. Last night he'd made noise like he was getting paid by the decibel. The woman I'd heard once, a single laugh near the start that sounded like she'd been told a joke at the wrong moment. The rest was him. It had gone on, with breaks, with starts, with the bedframe doing work the bedframe was not designed to do. I'd lain on my back with the cuff loose around my wrist, my split lip throbbing, listening to a forty-year-old vory enforcer perform straightness through a wall for an audience of one.
I picked the brush up again because thinking about it was less productive than not thinking about it. The work didn't care about my opinion. The work cared whether the resin was even and whether my hands were steady.
I gave it another twenty minutes before the light shifted in the windows and my back filed a formal complaint. The second pass needed two hours to set before I could go over it again. I stood, stretched, and discovered I was wearing a shirt stiff with sweat and resin, neither of which was going to improve on further acquaintance.
I went to my room, opened the drawer of clean shirts Gregori had bought me, and looked at them. Plain dark cotton. Identical to what was on my back. Three of them, folded with military precision, which meant Gregori had folded them himself. A detail I was going to have to think about another day.
If I changed into one of those, I hadn't really changed. Same color, same cotton, same fit. I'd come out of the shower wearing the same shirt I'd gone into the bedroom with, except cleaner, and the man who'd spent six hours of the night fucking a stranger through a wall would walk past me at some point thisevening and see exactly what he'd seen at breakfast: a skinny ginger lad in plain dark cotton, eating his food, working his job, behaving.
I was tired of behaving.
