THE MAN BEHIND THE GLASS #2
“That one is what we call a crime. Somebody gilded over a clean piece of seventeenth century Flemish oak in, I'd guess, the seventies, because they thought it would sell better. I bought it to strip it. I have not stripped it, because every time I sit down to do it I get angry.”
“You would return it to the original?”
“Yeah.”
“Even though the gilt is what would sell.”
“Yeah.”
“Why.”
He looked at me, steady this time. “Because I'm not in the business of helping things lie about themselves.”
“That is a good answer.”
“It's an honest one.”
“Those are not always the same.”
“In this shop they are.”
He held the look another second, and then he glanced past me toward the back, and the motion pulled the collar of his sweater an inch lower against his skin.
“Walk me through the shop.”
“All of it?”
“You have three rooms.”
He blinked. “Yeah, yeah. Okay.”
It took longer than it should have, because I asked more than I needed to, and because when he answered, the answers were not the answers of a man who was selling.
He talked about damage without the salesman's instinct to hide it, pointing out flaws before I could find them myself, plainly, without shame, which was rare in a man who made his living convincing strangers to buy things.
He showed me a chair he had pieced back together out of three different chairs, and he pointed out the seams without pride and without apology, and as he spoke, his hands moved over the joins the way a man's hands move over work he has spent real hours on.
They were a workman's hands, nicked and scarred and stained dark at the cuticle, and there was a fresh cut along the side of one thumb, a day old, closed but not yet healed.
I felt the familiar pull of hunger at the sight of it, faint and easily set aside, an old habit I had stopped paying much attention to centuries ago.
What unsettled me was that the hunger for his blood was not the loudest sensation in the room.
Underneath my ribs sat a different pull entirely, one that had nothing to do with blood at all, and it pulled toward him regardless, toward the whole of him rather than any part of him, and I could not name it, and disliked very much that I could not.
I did not speak much. He did not seem to require it. He answered the questions I asked and asked none back, which I respected, and the conversation moved between us more easily than any conversation had in a very long time.
“Sorry, I'll let you look. I get carried away. Someone comes in for a lamp and I tell them about a flood. It's a problem.”
“It is not a problem.”
“You're being polite.”
“I am rarely polite.”
“So what can I help you with, Mr....”
“Reed. Draco Reed.”
Nico went still. His shoulders came up half an inch, and his hand found the edge of the counter and stayed there. The warmth that had built between us over the last twenty minutes was gone from his face within a single breath.
“You're Draco Reed.” He said it slowly, working it out as he spoke. “I've seen your name in the business section of the paper my downstairs neighbor still gets delivered, next to words like holdings and acquisition, words that generally mean nothing good for people like me.”
“I did not come here to acquire anything of yours, Mr. Venn.”
“You spent twenty minutes asking me about hinges and gilt and wedding boxes. You let me think you were actually interested. Was that real, or was that you deciding whether I was worth your time before you told me why you're actually here?”
“It was real. I wanted to know if you were as good as I had been told, and you are, which was not a performance on my part, whatever you have decided to believe about the last twenty minutes.”
“Great. Glad I passed. Now can you please tell me what you're actually doing in my shop at eleven o'clock at night, because I have had a genuinely awful week, and I am not in the mood to be anybody's homework.”
“I am not in the habit of doing homework, Mr. Venn. I came here because of your brother.”
Nico's face changed again, the anger dropping out of it all at once, replaced by a rawer, less guarded fear that he did not bother to hide.
“Is he alive?” His voice had lost its edge entirely.
“Yes.”
The breath went out of him all at once, his shoulders dropping, and his hand came up to cover his mouth for a second before he lowered it again.
“Is he okay? Is he hurt? Where is he?”
“He is alive, and he is unharmed beyond what he has done to himself, and he is somewhere safe, which is more than he managed on his own.”
Amara turned her phone toward him. The picture had been taken twenty minutes before we left the warehouse, Remy in a clean shirt on the couch in the upstairs room, eyes shut, working through a sandwich that did him no favors, the split lip already fading. Alive. Chewing.
Nico looked at it a long moment, and his jaw worked once. He handed the phone back without a word and set his hand flat on the counter, and I waited, because I could see the next wave building in him and there was no use speaking into it before it landed.
When he came back up, he held my eyes, which most men could not.
“I don't have the money you're asking for, and you already know I don't, or you would have sent a bill instead of coming yourself.”
“The money stopped being the point the moment he signed, Mr. Venn, though he will not have understood that either. Your brother put his name to a contract written in a language he cannot read, witnessed by people he will never be allowed to meet, and the sum he quoted you is the smallest and least interesting thing it asks for.”
“What contract? What did he actually sign? And what does it actually want from him?”
“One I will explain in a room with fewer windows than this one.”
He straightened, his arms crossing over his chest without his seeming to notice he had done it, bracing for whatever came next, and I gave him the rest of it plainly.
“Tomorrow you will come to me.”
It had worked on senators and on killers and on men far harder than a tired antiquarian in a washed out sweater.
This time, the compulsion found nothing to take hold of.
Compulsion was not persuasion. It did not ask, and it never had, not once in a thousand years of using it.
It was a current I sent outward from myself into whatever will stood in front of me, and in every one of those thousand years, that current had always found somewhere to land. It landed now, or it tried to.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
I did not let it reach my face. I knew only that I had reached for this man's will, the way I had reached for ten thousand others, and his will had not so much as noticed me do it.
Interesting was not a large enough word. I kept it anyway, for lack of a larger one.
“Pen.”
Amara had one in my hand before the word was finished, and Nico's eyes cut to her and back.
I turned the card on the counter and wrote the address of Blackthorne, and held it out, and he took it.
His fingers brushed mine, and the same unfamiliar pull from the warehouse stirred again beneath my ribs at the contact, more insistent this time, and I gave it no ground.
“Tomorrow, Mr. Venn.”
He looked at the address as though it had asked him a question he was not ready to answer. He did not say goodbye, and he did not need to.
I went to the door. Amara had it open already. I did not look back, though it cost me more than it should have not to.