Chapter 19 #2
"Killian knows your name," I say. The words cost me.
They are a betrayal of my brother's intelligence and a gift to the man beside me, and the dual nature of the act---treachery and trust in the same breath---makes my skin feel like it belongs to someone else.
This is the choice. This is the moment. The words are the boundary line, and I have just stepped over it, and there is no stepping back.
"I know," Kazimir says.
I look at him. "You know?"
"The Kavanagh Clan has been making inquiries through intermediaries in Dublin for ten days. The inquiries reached a contact in my network three days ago. I have been monitoring the traffic."
He knew. He knew Killian was looking, and he did not tell me, and the omission is not a lie---it is a load-bearing wall in a structure designed to keep me focused on the forgeries and free from the paralysing guilt of knowing my brother was hunting for me while I was in another man's bed.
"You should have told me."
"Yes." He does not excuse it. He does not explain. The single word carries the weight of a man who knows he was wrong and who will not dress the wrongness in justification. "Yes. I should have."
I stare at the bathroom floor. White stone. Brass fixtures. The shower where he washed the paint from my body and said let me see you clean. The room that is his, that was private, that he opened because the cage had changed shape and the man inside it had changed his.
"He gave me two weeks," I say. "Killian gave me two weeks before he comes."
"The auction is in nine days. We will be out of the country in eleven."
"With the ledger sent."
"With the ledger sent."
He lifts my hand. He presses his lips to my knuckles---the same gesture from the studio floor, the one that made my vision blur, the one that contains more tenderness than any sentence he has spoken.
His mouth is warm against my skin. The kiss lasts a beat longer than it needs to, and the extra beat is the confession he will not make in language.
"We should go," he says.
* * *
The car is a black Mercedes. Yuri drives. Kazimir sits beside me in the back, his hand resting on the seat between us, the fingers close to mine but not touching---the specific restraint of a man who is leaving a building that has cameras and entering a world that has watchers.
The penthouse disappears behind us. The cage is closed and empty, and the cage's contents---the two of us, the crated Modigliani in the boot, the encrypted phone in Kazimir's breast pocket that carries the Red Ledger on a secure server---are in motion, and motion is both freedom and exposure, and I am calculating both as the Mercedes turns onto the main road.
I look out the window. Kensington in the grey light. Terraced houses. Parked cars. A woman walking a dog. A man at the corner, standing beside a black cab, looking at his phone.
The man is tall. Dark-haired. He wears a leather jacket over a frame that carries the dense, hard muscle of a brawler.
His nose is slightly crooked from a poorly set break.
His knuckles, even at this distance, even through the window of a moving car, are the knuckles of a man who has used his fists more often than his words.
He is not looking at his phone. He is looking at the building we just left.
My heart stops. The world contracts to the distance between the Mercedes and the man on the corner---thirty feet, twenty, ten---and as we pass him, he looks up from the phone, and his eyes track the car the way they track everything---automatic, assessing, the scan of a man cataloguing vehicles near a target building.
He does not see me through the tinted glass.
He cannot. But I see him, and the seeing is a blade between my ribs.
Killian.
He is here. He is in London. He is standing on the street outside Kazimir's building with the specific, coiled stillness of a man who is not waiting but hunting.
He watches the Mercedes pass with the professional attention of an operative logging a plate number, and he does not know that his brother is inside it, six feet away, in a navy suit, holding another man's hand.
The car turns the corner. Killian vanishes from the mirror.
Kazimir's hand finds mine on the seat. His fingers close around my fingers. The grip is firm. He felt me tense. He felt the car pass the corner. He knows.
I do not tell him. I do not need to. The man beside me reads bodies the way I read paintings, and my body has just told him everything: that my brother is here, that the two-week window is a lie, that the Reaper is in London and the Reaper does not negotiate and the Reaper does not wait.
The Mercedes accelerates toward the airport.
Zurich is ahead. Killian is behind. And I am sitting between the two men who own different pieces of me, holding the hand of the one I chose, driving toward a city where the forgeries will either save us or bury us, and the boy in the navy suit presses his forehead against the cold glass and watches London blur into speed and does not look back.