Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
KAZIMIR
The suit is ruined.
I pick it up from the studio floor. The charcoal wool is streaked with cadmium red and church-lead white---his handprint still visible over the left breast, the fingers splayed, the palm pressed flat where it landed over my heart.
The lining is stained with lapis lazuli.
One lapel is torn where he gripped it. The jacket costs four thousand pounds and I hold it in my hands and feel nothing except a strange, settled peace that I do not recognise and do not trust.
Rory is sitting on the studio floor where I left him.
His back against the worktable cabinet, his knees drawn up, his body folded into the compact shape of a man who has been thoroughly taken apart and is waiting to see what happens to the pieces.
The white shirt is destroyed. His skin is a canvas---red and blue and the pale smears of lead white across his ribs, his shoulders, the curve of his hip where the waistband of his jeans has slipped.
His hair is wild with dried paint. His eyes are closed.
He is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I have spent thirty years looking at the most beautiful things in the world.
I drop the suit on the floor. I cross the studio. I crouch in front of him and place my hand on his knee, and his eyes open---the green fractured, soft, stripped of every defence he has spent twenty-four years constructing.
"Come," I say.
He comes.
* * *
The shower is in my quarters. Not his---mine.
A distinction I am making deliberately, because taking him to my bathroom is an act of admission that my study and my archive and even the studio were not.
Those rooms are functional. This room is where I am unguarded, where the water runs too hot and the tiles know the shape of my shadow.
The bathroom is large. White stone, brass fixtures, a walk-in shower with a rain head. I turn the water on. I wait for the heat. I turn to him.
He is standing in the doorway, watching me. The paint is drying on his skin, cracking along the lines of his body---at the crease of his elbow, the hinge of his hip. He looks like a painting left in the rain. Something valuable, damaged, in need of restoration.
I undress him. The ruined shirt falls. His chest is narrow, the ribs visible beneath the skin---he does not eat enough, does not rest enough.
I file this. His jeans. His breathing has changed---slower, deeper, the rhythm of a body that has learned to associate my hands with release.
He is naked and paint-streaked and shivering, though the bathroom is warm.
I undress. He watches. His gaze catalogues the scar tissue, the muscle, the decades between his body and mine. I let him look.
I take his hand. I lead him under the water.
The heat hits us. He gasps---a small sound, pleasure and relief---and his head tips back into the stream, and the water runs red and blue down his body as the paint begins to dissolve.
I watch the colour leave him. Cadmium red streaming from his shoulders.
Lapis blue pooling at his feet. Lead white turning the water milky where it runs from his ribs.
I take the soap. I begin with his hands.
The same gesture as the studio sink, weeks ago.
But the context has shifted so completely that the repetition becomes something new---a quotation of an older text, rewritten.
I wash each finger. The paint lifts in layers.
Beneath it, his hands are pale and steady---the long fingers of a forger whose genius lives in these ten digits.
I wash his forearms. His shoulders. The flat plane of his chest. I work the soap across him with the systematic attention I give to everything I value, and he stands under the water and lets me, and his silence is not the weaponised silence of the early days.
It is the silence of surrender that has found its feet.
"Let me see you clean," I say.
The words are quiet. They carry a meaning that extends beyond the shower, beyond the paint, into a request I have no right to make: let me see you without the armour. Without the performance. Without the chaos that you use to keep the world at a distance that your heart considers safe.
He opens his eyes. The water runs over his face. He looks at me through the steam, and the look is so open it makes my chest constrict---the physical sensation of a wall being breached that I built decades ago and maintained with a rigour that has kept me alive and alone in equal measure.
"I'm clean," he says. A ghost of the smirk. "You're thorough."
I turn off the water. I wrap him in a towel. I wrap myself in another. I lead him out of the bathroom and into the adjacent space that he has not seen before: my kitchen.
* * *
The kitchen is not a room I use for entertaining.
It is small by the penthouse's standards. A galley with dark countertops and a gas range. I cook for myself---one of the few acts of self-sufficiency I retained from Volgograd, when I was a young man who learned to make black bread and borscht because the alternative was hunger.
I give Rory my robe. Dark grey, heavy cotton, too large by a significant margin.
He puts it on and the fabric swallows his frame---sleeves past his fingertips, hem at his calves.
He sits on the counter beside the stove with his bare feet hanging and his wet hair dripping, and he looks young.
He looks his age, which is a thing I try not to think about.
I make eggs. Scrambled, with butter. Toast from the dark bread. Two glasses of water. He eats ravenously---with his whole body, elbows on his knees, his head bent over the plate. He does not speak until it is clean.
"Killian would burn this building down if he knew," he says.
The sentence arrives without preamble. He is staring at the empty plate. His hands are wrapped around the water glass, and his knuckles are white.
"Knew what?" I ask. I lean against the counter opposite him. The kitchen is narrow. Our knees are close.
"Any of it. The forgeries. The cage. You.
" He drinks. Sets the glass down. "Killian is the Reaper.
You know what that means. He has killed men for less than what you've done to me, and he would kill you for it, and he would be right, and I would let him, except I wouldn't, because I chose to be here, and that's the part he would never understand. "
He looks up. His eyes are red-rimmed. The shower washed the paint from his skin but not the exhaustion from his face, and beneath the exhaustion I see the thing that lives at the centre of Rory Kavanagh like a stone in the middle of a river---the thing the current of his personality flows around, shaping itself to avoid.
"He's the Reaper," Rory says. "And I'm the Jinx.
The screw-up. The family embarrassment who got caught shoplifting at fifteen and spent a year in juvenile.
Killian protects people. Killian brokered a peace that saved hundreds of lives.
What do I do?" His voice is quiet, stripped of bravado.
"I paint fakes. I forge signatures. I make pretty things that pretend to be something they're not. Deception. That's my contribution."
"You believe that."
"Everyone believes that. It's true."
"It is not true."
I set my glass down. I stand upright. The kitchen is small enough that this changes the weight of the conversation---I am no longer leaning, no longer casual, and his eyes track the shift with the acuity of a man who reads body language the way he reads brushstrokes.
"Killian destroys. That is his function.
Destruction is the natural direction of all systems. Anyone with sufficient will can destroy.
" I hold his gaze. "You create. You take lead smelted in a medieval furnace and pigment ground from a stone that formed forty million years ago, and you produce something that will defeat a machine built specifically to detect deception.
That requires genius. It is not something your brother or any man in his organisation could do in a hundred lifetimes. "
The kitchen is quiet. The refrigerator hums. His eyes are bright, and his jaw is working, and his hands grip the glass with a force that suggests he is holding on to it because he cannot hold on to what I have said---it is too large, too close to the wound, too precisely aimed at the belief that has structured his entire self-concept.
"You're not a fraud, Rory. You are the most talented person in any room you enter, and the fact that no one in your family has told you this is a failure of their perception, not your worth."
He sets the glass down. He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. His shoulders are shaking. Inside the enormous robe his body looks like what it is---young and exhausted.
I cross the narrow kitchen. I take his wrists---gently, both of them, the first time I have held both---and pull his hands from his face. His eyes are wet. His expression is the expression from the study, from the shower: raw, the face of a person who has been seen.
I press my lips to his forehead. The gesture is not sexual. It is the gesture of a man who has ruined something precious and is attempting, with the limited tools available to him, to communicate that the breaking was not the end of the story.
"Bed," I say.
* * *
My bed is large and has been occupied by one body for six years. The sheets are white. The room is dark---curtains drawn, total absence of light, the manufactured darkness my body requires for sleep.
Rory falls asleep in four minutes. I know this because I am counting, and counting is what I do when I cannot control my environment---reducing the unmanageable to data.
He sleeps on his side, facing me. His hand rests on the sheet between us---palm up, fingers loosely curled, the hand of a man who fell asleep reaching for something and did not close the distance.