Page 13 of Graceless

"Every night," she said, finally, and her voice had the quality of a woman setting down a very heavy thing she fully intended to pick back up. "You call me. Every single night. You tell me everything — not the police report, Cat, the real inventory. What he says, what he does, where he sits, what his hands do when he thinks you're not looking."

"Nina—"

"Those are my terms. You want to talk terms? I have terms. Every night, or I show up with a rolling pin of my own, and mine's marble, and the policy can take it up with my aunt."

"Every night," I said.

"And the MINUTE he does anything — the minute, Cat, I don't care if it's three in the morning, I don't care if he looks at you wrong, if he breathes at you wrong — you call me, and the commission can go to hell, because commissions come back and you don't. Swear on the saints."

"I don't believe in the saints."

"SWEAR ANYWAY."

I swore anyway. She made me say it twice.

The doorbell rang.

Two long pushes. The bell nobody rings, ringing on schedule now.

Through the front window I could see the Meridian van at the curb, and the locksmith unloading a door's worth of hardware, and him on my stoop in the last of the light, clipboard in hand, first day on the job.

I unchained the door. I opened it.

"Miss Fontana," he said.

"Don't start," I said, and let the job in.

CHAPTER 5

RAQ

Two long pushes. I stood on the stoop holding a clipboard I did not need, wearing a name I had borrowed, waiting for a woman with a rolling pin to decide whether to let me in.

Coffee through the door — dark roast, over-extracted, ground too fine. Under that, old plaster. Under that, her.

The locks cycled. Three of them, the new ones, brass and steel doing the work the old Segal never could. She opened the door and the morning light came off the street and found her, and I stood on her stoop and let it happen to me.

Dark hair, still wet at the temples, pinned up with something inadequate to the job — one lock already down, against her neck, and I marked its exact position the way I have marked artillery. Brown eyes, lids heavy. A crease from the pillow, left cheek, fading. Five foot four in wool socks, one of which had a hole at the ankle bone, and she was holding her coffee like a weapon, and she was the single most dangerous thing I had encountered in ten thousand years, and I had spent the night on a rooftop confirming there was nothing dangerous on this block.

"You're early," she said.

"It's eight."

"I know what time it is. I have clocks. What I don't have is a security guard in my studio before coffee. So you'll stand there."

I stood there. She drank. She watched me over the rim, and the watching had a weight to it, and I let her do it because the alternative was speaking, and I did not trust what I would say.

"Before any of this happens." She didn't move from the doorway. "Fifth Avenue."

"You have answers about Fifth Avenue."

"I have answers about the painting and the policy. I don't have an answer for how a man moves two city blocks in under a second and then disappears." Steady hands on the mug. Steady eyes. The cadence had edges on it, worked smooth. "That answer. Before you come into my house."

"You could say thank you. Most people pulled out of the path of a bus say thank you."

"I DID say thank you. On the street. While you were doing the disappearing. Which is the part we're discussing."

"I was fast."