9. Adrianos
Adrianos
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“No.” Her hands are pressed flat to her own thighs to keep them still, and she believes I can’t see it.
“I’m trying to do the job you abducted me to do.
The two keep overlapping, and I’d file a complaint, except the complaint goes to management, and management is the man who put me in the trunk, so it’s a closed loop with no one home at the top of it. ”
“You walked into a dead man’s office alone.
No call. No name left with anyone. Not one person on this earth knew where you were standing except the two men who put a barrel against your skull.
” The car eats a block of Midtown while I bring the words down to level, because level is the only register that touches her and is close to the last one I’ve got.
“Tell me you understand what you stepped into. Say it out loud, because from here it looked like you wandered into a public library and were annoyed about the fines.”
“It had a bunch of files that weren’t considered important.
Do you have any idea how rare that is in my line of work?
Files left alone on the scene. A dead man’s own hand on the page, months of it sitting there because the people who ransacked the place couldn’t read what was under their fingers.
” She twists in the seat to face me, and the fear is burning off her now, anger sliding in behind the wheel, because anger is the one that holds her steady.
“I found the thing you stole me out of my bed to find. In an afternoon. And the reward is a grown man shouting at me across the back of a car, a man who didn’t think to tell his own driver to watch the door I’d obviously go through. ”
“You’re proud.” My voice drops under the engine. “You knelt on the floor of a tomb with a hammer cocked over you, and you’re sitting here proud of the paper.”
“I’m always proud of the paper. The paper is the one part of my life that has never once let me down, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t hand it back because two large men raised their voices and a pistol.”
“He didn’t raise his voice. He raised the hammer.
” I turn to her. “Two more seconds and there’s no car, no correction of my staffing, no you.
The whole distance between you breathing and you in a bag was me being early.
Sit with that for a moment before you tell me again how well the afternoon went. ”
“Then thank you for being early. Genuinely. But early and furious don’t fit in the same man at the same time, you have to choose one, and you’ve chosen furious, which tells me the fury isn’t about the office at all.
So stop circling the enormous awful thing you keep waving at and name it.
A variable you won’t show me frightens me more than one you will. Name it.”
So I name it, every edge left on, because softening is how she ended up on her knees thinking dust was the worst thing in that room.
The Crown, the five of us, the table that’s held the city’s blood behind a wall for thirty years and is one bad week from coming down.
The wolf-crown burned over the bodies. The heirs.
The children. A boy of Declan’s blood found under the mark with his throat open.
The money she’s been reading and the killings are one hand wearing two gloves, and the men who cornered her are the gentle end of that hand, and she met the gentle end and barely walked.
I leave my son out of all of it. He has no place in a lesson about other people’s dead, and I will not set him down in front of anyone, least of all as a warning.
She takes it faster than I can hand it over, which she does with everything, and when I run out her jaw has set, and her eyes have gone too bright, and her hands have finally stopped trembling, because fury steadies her where fear never could.
“You’ve spent ten blocks calling me reckless,” she says, quieter, and I know the quiet by now, it’s the run-up.
“Lecturing me on loss. On what it does to walk into a room and find the worst already finished without you. I’m fluent in that room.
I buried my best friend not that long ago, so put the seminar away because I tested out of grief with a perfect score. ”
“Your best friend.”
“Kalliopi.” It leaves her like a tooth coming out by the root.
“Kalliopi Rinou. University together, then the same firm, the only living person who could read me front to back without missing a line. She was doing some private job she never said one word to me about, and it killed her, and I never thought to look, me, the one who misses nothing, I missed the only thing that ever counted. So yes. I’m the standing authority on the room. ”
The car goes quiet in a way the engine can’t account for.
I’ve held her photograph every night for nine nights.
I took it off the shelf so this woman wouldn’t have to look at a dead stranger over breakfast, and the stranger was hers, the closest person she had, and I’ve had her in my house two days chasing the same theft that got Kalliopi killed, never once knowing I was the one putting her back on it.
“She worked for me,” I say.
“I know.” It comes out of her, flat and worn. “I worked it out the second I saw the photo and couldn’t make myself say it. The two of you, easy like that, in the sun. She doesn’t smile like that for a client.”
“We were just friends,” I say quickly, feeling the urge to make that clear.
“But the private job that got her killed was mine. In fact, it’s the same job you’re doing now.
” I keep my eyes on the road ahead, because I owe her the truth whole, and I won’t also make her watch my face deliver it.
“She’s dead because of me. I sent her at it alone, because she was the best I had, and the best I had had no one at her back, and I’ve spent every day since learning down to the cent what that cost.”
“You.” She’s reading me like a column that won’t add up no matter how she runs it. “She died for you. The job she’d never name. It was you, the entire time I was burying her, not knowing.”
“The entire time.” There’s no telling of it that sits softer, so I don’t go hunting one.
“And the person who loved her most in the world is in the back of my car, having just repeated the act that killed her. Walked in alone. Pulled the thread bare-handed. Tell me once more my fury’s in the wrong place. ”
Her eyes fill and she blinks it back hard, composure clicking into place like a thing she’s drilled a thousand times, and when she speaks she’s holding the words level with both hands and I can hear the effort in every one.
“Then let me go.” Low. “If you can’t live through getting another one of us put in the ground, this part’s simple. Open the door. I disappear. You never stand at a second grave reading my name off a stone.”
“Too late for that.”
“It is not too late; it’s a door. Doors have hinges; I’ve watched them work my whole life.”
“You’ve stood in Berezin’s office. Those men carry your face out of there now.
You’ve been making waves in the live accounts, and a wave reaches the shore whether or not the woman who made it is still standing in the water.
The hour I took you off that street, you stopped being no one to these people, and the hour you knelt in that office, you stopped being safe in any room I’m not standing in.
” I turn and let her have my face for this part, because she won’t take it any other way.
“Letting you walk doesn’t make you safe.
It makes you alone. And you, of every person alive, know exactly how wide the gap between those two words runs. ”
“So what now?” It cracks on the second word, and she despises it. I watch the hatred of it cross her. “You’ve laid it out beautifully. I’m down a hole with no ladder, everyone who’s brushed against this is dead, and I don’t get a vote on any of it. So what now?”
“Now I make you strong instead.”
She blinks. It’s the one sentence all night she didn’t see arriving, and a woman this fast caught without a reply is a thing worth the price of the night to watch.
I face the front. “Evander. The range.”
“Already turning,” he says, and the car’s already turning.
The range runs under one of my buildings, concrete and clean, and at this hour the whole length of it is ours.
I bring her down into the cold light, and she comes without argument, taking in the lanes, the paper men hanging at the far end, the smell of the place, gun oil and chilled air and the ghost of old powder.
“I hate it down here,” she says.
“So do I.”
That lifts her head. I set the case on the bench and open it.
“I have never liked them.” I seat the magazine into my palm where she can watch it go.
“A gun is a confession that the talking failed, and I built a life on the talking working. But I like being alive a good deal more than I dislike the tool, and after thirty years the math has only ever run one direction.” I hold it out flat across my hand.
“This is a pistol. By the time we leave, you’ll have stopped fearing the object, because the object was never what should frighten you. The hand on it is the whole danger.”
“That was nearly a sermon. Do you rehearse those, or does the menace just arrive pre-buffed?”
“Both. Pick it up.”
I take her through it the way I’d take anyone, slower, because she has a question at every step.
How the magazine seats home. How to check a chamber so your own eyes have confirmed it.
The safety. The weight. Why both hands, always.
She loads it herself on the third pass, clears it, loads it again, because she won’t believe a single thing until her own hands have done it twice.
Then I stand her on the line, and that is where it stops being a lesson and starts being a problem.
Her stance is wrong. Feet squared up, shoulders dragged back like she’s bracing for the sound instead of the kick, and I tell her, but she argues, so I give up explaining and step in behind her to set it right, which is the error I walk into with both eyes open.
“Feet.” I knock the inside of her boot with mine until she widens them.
“Your weight goes forward. You’re leaning off it.
Lean into the thing that scares you, it’s the only move that has ever worked on anything worth the fear.
” I lay a hand on her hip and draw her weight onto the front foot, the other hand running up her arm to seat the elbow, and she goes still under both of them.
Her breath catches, the same catch I felt against my own mouth in a bathroom two nights ago, running now down the whole line of her back where she stands an inch off my chest.
It all arrives at once and I have no use for any of it.
The curve of her under my palm. The warmth coming off the back of her neck.
The loose curls dragging at my jaw. The plain fact that I’ve set her in a position that has nothing to do with a paper target hung twenty feet out.
My body marks the likeness and makes its case before my mind can throw it out, and makes the case again the second I do.
Two days of her in my house and now she’s stacked warm and quiet against me with my hands already in place, and the discipline this is taking is not a number I’ll be admitting to even later, or alone, or in the dark.
“You’re very close,” she says, and the blade’s gone out of her voice, dropped low and unsteady.
“I’m setting your elbow.”
“Your hand is on my hip. The elbow’s up here. The hip’s down there. They’re not even neighbors, and you’ve had your hands on enough of me by now to know that.”
“The elbow answers to the stance, the stance starts at the hip, the hand stays.” I keep my voice level by main strength, which is costing me more than the lesson is worth. “Stop talking. Breathe out. On the empty part of the breath, squeeze it. Don’t pull, don’t snatch. Squeeze.”
She breathes out. Her shoulders drop the half inch I’ve been chasing the whole time.
She squeezes, and the round cracks down the lane and punches the paper off-center but inside the lines.
The sound she makes is pure surprise, and her whole body rocks back into me for half a second before she catches it, her ass flush against my cock, all of her against all of me.
I let her stay there. I should move her off me, but I don’t.
“Again,” I say against her hair, and then I step off her, before stepping off her becomes a thing I’m no longer able to do.
She empties the magazine over the next hour and improves with every round. By the end her grouping has pulled tight enough that I quit correcting and only watch her work.
“You’ve gone quiet back there,” she says, not turning, sighting her next target. “Either I’ve gotten good or you’ve died standing up. Tell me it’s the first. I’ve had the worst day of my life, and I’d like a single result I can put down on paper.”
“You’re good.” I don’t decorate it. “Better in an hour than men who’ve done this for years. Pretending otherwise would insult you, so I won’t.”
Her shot goes dead center. She lowers the pistol and I watch her decide not to smile but she loses.
When the box is empty I walk her to the bench and set a second case in front of her, smaller, and open it. A compact pistol, sized for a hand like hers, sized for a purse or a coat pocket.
“This one is yours.”
She looks at it, then up at me. “You’re handing me a gun. One hour ago you were shouting that I’m a danger to myself, and the remedy you’ve landed on is to arm the danger. I want you to hear that plan read back in the order it happened.”
“I’m handing you a piece of strength you can carry out of any room.
” I fold her fingers around the grip until the weight of it settles into her hand.
“You asked me to open a door and let you walk out alone. I won’t do it.
But this goes where you go, and it means the next time a man stands between you and the way out, you’re not empty-handed, waiting on me to be early. ”
“And when I shoot a hole in my own bag digging for my keys?”
“Then you’ll learn precisely how much that hurts, and you’ll be more careful with it, and you’ll keep every part of yourself that matters.” I let go of her hand. “You will never stand helpless in a room like that one. Not while this is in your bag.”
She turns it over once in her palm, learning the weight, and then she slides it into her purse without one word of argument.