The jackets were clean. So were the bags — totes, a weekender, the linings sitting flat the way honest linings do. The money in a shop like this never hung on the wall, anyway. It sat in the back, made for one man's hand, four grand a piece. I found the curtain half-drawn and a rack of finished orders behind it, each one in tissue with a name on the tag. I zeroed in on an attaché in oxblood, a lovely thing. My thumb went up the long seam where the lining meets the gusset, and I froze.
"Aleksi," I hissed through the curtain.
He slipped through, gun drawn.
“Put that away. You’ll put an eye out with it, ye will.”
I got out my seam ripper and picked the recess open a stitch at a time. The lining peeled back off a false wall sewn from the inside, the way I'd been taught to sew it. I turned the case over in my palm and gave it a shake, and the stones came down bright into my hand, all six of them.
"There's yer diamonds," I said. "Yer boss was right, the clever bastard."
Aleksi was still tucking the gun away when the curtain slid back.
“You! You’re not supposed to be back here!” He gasped when he saw the gutted attaché. “Do you have any idea whatyou’vedone? That’s a four-thousand-dollar piece!” He made the mistake of grabbing my wrist.
Aleksi’s hand shot out and caught the shopkeeper by the elbow and yanked. The arm came back and twisted and…
I grimaced at the sound of bones twisting and snapping.
The man collapsed over his own bench, screaming. Aleksi kept his arm twisted in that unnatural position. “That’ll teach you to put your hand on my man,” he growled, and my cock gave an interested twitch.
"Niko," Aleksi said, not looking up. "Get the door."
Niko flipped the sign in the window, locked the door, and drew the blinds before coming back and peeling off his coat.
"You could have asked before you broke it," he said mildly. "Now he cannot even sit straight. Hold him."
Niko dragged the chair from the corner and Aleksi put the man in it one-handed, the bad arm hanging wrong, and when the shopkeeper started bucking and choking out something about police, about cameras, Niko bent and said something low in French against his ear that went through him like cold water. He stopped bucking. He kept crying.
"Cameras," Aleksi said.
"Already on it." Niko had the box open on the wall, pulling the drive like he'd done it a hundred times.
I should've made myself useful. Instead, I leaned on the bench with the six stones warm in my fist and watched my man work, and I'd not have moved for a fire.
The shopkeeper found one last scrap of fight, lunging his good side toward a drawer. Aleksi sighed like a man whose dinner had gone cold and drew the gun. The man saw it and went still enough that Niko barely had to work to get him back in the chair.
“Arlo Bianchi, right?” Aleksi broke the cylinder open against his palm, let one round drop in, just the one, snapped it shut, and spun it.
The man swallowed and said nothing.
Aleksi squatted in front of him, gun dangling between his knees.
“Do you believe in God, Arlo?”
Arlo’s jaw trembled, and he glared at Aleksi with nothing but raw spite.
Aleksi gave him the glare a moment and then stood. “Everyone’s got to have something to believe in. God. The Devil. Luck.” He paused and glanced at me briefly before adding, “Love.”
A shock of something warm and unfamiliar went through me.
Aleksi turned back to Arlo. “My pop believed in love,” he said. “Believed in it so hard, he sold his soul for it. Sold his family. His life, in the end. The man died from being a bleeding heart as much as anything else. The point is,” he continued, waving the gun at Arlo, “right now, in that thick skull of yours, you’re praying to whatever power you hold supreme, hoping that it’s going to save you. But your god’s not here, Arlo. I am.”
"Who brings you the commissions?" Niko asked. "The special ones. With the room sewn into them."
"I have—" Arlo's voice cracked and started over. "I have hundreds of clients; I don't ask what they—"
Aleksi put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.
