16. Sixteen
They’d taken the finger four days ago. I’d counted every one of them.
I kept seeing it. Warrick’s gloves, the absorbent pad under Fin’s hand, the sound. Fin hadn’t screamed the way you’d think he would. He’d gone quiet, and the quiet was worse, and I’d stood there with Nikolai’s hand on my shoulder and let it happen, because the alternative was death.
I’d traded the finger again to keep the rest of him, and I couldn’t say that to a living soul, least of all to him. There was nowhere to put it. So it came out the way everything came out of me lately.
The mug went off the wall a foot from Nikolai's head, and he didn't even flinch.
"Feel better?" He picked a shard of it off the cushion beside him and flicked it away.
“No, you insufferable prick. Get the fuck out of my apartment!”
“And leave my big brother all alone with all those dangerous Italians on the loose?” He clicked his tongue. “Désolé, but no can do. Besides, who would protect the injured bird in your bed?”
I clenched my fists. “Keep his name out of your fucking mouth.”
“What name?” Nikolai spread his hands wide. “I didn’t say a name.”
“I’m warning you, Niko…”
“I hear you,” he said in Russian and waved me off. “Now go play nursemaid. My soaps are on.”
Fucker, I thought and stomped out of the living room.
My rotten half-brother had moved in the day after Fin’s amputation on Nikita’s orders.
Supposedly, everyone was doubling up. Heightened security, he said.
Just until things calm down, he said. What he hadn't said was why.
Gregori had logged a gray sedan outside the building twice in one week, different plates each time, gone before anyone could walk up on it.
Nobody knew whose it was. Until somebody did, we all got roommates.
Meanwhile, my apartment had a new front door, new plaster, and a hole where the TV used to be until Niko ordered a bigger one on my card.
Irina had fought the dust for two days and lost. You could still smell it under her cooking.
Well, Gregori didn’t have to host a houseguest. And if he did, it wouldn’t be anyone half as annoying as Nikolai. Most house guests could remember to pick up their dirty socks, or to put the cap back on the toothpaste when they were done with it, or pay for their own fucking DoorDash orders.
But no, not Niko. With him it was always, “I forgot, Aleksi. I used to have people for that, Aleksi,” or my favorite, “My accounts are frozen, Aleksi.”
At least Fin hadn’t been awake enough to put up with his bullshit. That was just what I needed, both of them running their fucking mouths at me at once.
I went to the tap and turned it on to get some water for Fin, ignoring the pile of Niko’s dirty dishes. There was a part of me that missed Fin’s smart mouth, and it was a bigger part than I wanted to admit. You’d think they cut out his tongue as quiet as he’d been the last four days.
He’d slept a lot. That was part of it. But even when he was awake so I could change his bandages or try to force some food down his throat, he didn’t have anything smart to say. It was just, “Are ye done?” and “Aye.” And that was it.
He wouldn’t even look me in the eye. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t look me in the eye either. Not after what he’d lost. Not after the price he’d paid for my stupidity.
And the worst part was, I’d still do it again. I’d replayed the whole damn thing over in my head a thousand times since that day and scrutinized every choice. There wasn’t a single thing I’d do differently. I’d choose Fin over waiting for permission from above every fucking time.
I filled a glass at the tap and shook two Tylenol into my palm from the bottle on the sill. No more of the good stuff that knocked him flat. He didn’t like it, because it barely took the edge off the pain, but he wasn’t complaining about it.
The bedroom was dark. I'd offered to open the blinds the first day, and he'd told me to leave them, so I left them.
He lay on his back with the bandaged hand resting on his chest, above the heart the way Warrick had shown me, to keep the swelling down.
His eyes were open, and he was staring at the ceiling, still as a corpse.
"Hey," I said. "Tylenol time."
He turned his head, and it struck me then how dull and lifeless his eyes had gone. "Aye."
I set the glass on the nightstand and held out the pills. He lifted his good hand off the blanket and took them without comment or complaint.
"You want the TV?" I said. "I can put something on the laptop in here."
"No."
A soft knock, and Irina came in without waiting for an answer, the way she never had with me either.
She carried a tray — the soup, the good blue bowl, the chicken and dill he'd cleaned out twice in his first week here.
She set it on the edge of the mattress, lowered herself down beside him, dipped the spoon, and lifted it to his mouth without a word.
Fin turned his face to the wall.
She held the spoon there for a moment. Then she set it down, reached out, and caught his cheek between two knuckles the way she'd done across my kitchen table the first morning, when he'd been a half-dead stranger eating like a man who'd forgotten he was allowed to.
She said something low and fast in Russian.
I caught maybe a third of it. Too thin. Something about his mother I wasn't going to translate, because he didn't need the words to get the shape of it.
He didn't move.
Irina looked at the bandaged hand resting over his heart, and her mouth went tight, and she said one more thing, quieter, not to him and not to me.
Then she patted his cheek once, picked the tray back up, and carried it out.
She'd be back in an hour. She'd been back every hour for four days. He hadn't taken a bite from her yet.
"She's worried about you," I said.
"Aleksi." He closed his eyes. "I'm no hungry."
I sighed. "You need to eat, or your blood sugar will tank."
"When's yer boss sending me back?"
I frowned. "Back where?"
"Wherever ye keep the ones ye're done with.
" He turned those flat, empty eyes on me again.
"I'm no use to ye now. A leatherworker's only as good as his hands, aye?
And mine's no good anymore." He worked his thumb against the bandage where the rest of the finger should've been.
"Cannae feel the grain right wi' it gone.
Cannae trust the hand to hold a line. So I'm asking ye plain. When?"
I squeezed the empty glass the whole time he talked, hard enough that my hand ached. I set it down before I cracked it.
"Nobody's sending you anywhere," I said. "You hear me? Nobody puts a hand on you again. Not while I'm breathing."
"Why?" he asked.
He might as well have slapped me. "Why, what?"
"The way ye talk. As if ye'd put yerself between me and your own men if they came for me. But we both know the truth. You wouldn't, would ye?"
"Fin—"
"I don't blame ye," he said, closing his eyes. "If yer holdin' me here and carin' for me out of some sense of obligation, don't. I know I'm nothing to ye."
"What did you want me to do, Fin? Shoot Nikita? He's—"
His eyes snapped open, but this time some of the old fire had returned. "I just said I don't blame ye, didn't I? I don't want nothing from ye. Ye did me no wrong. Ye did as a vor should. I expect no less."
"You're going to eat," I said.
"I told ye, I'm no—"
"I'm going to make you a sandwich. And if you don't fucking eat it, I'm going to strain that soup, get a funnel, tie you to this bed, and pour it down your throat myself. You understand me?"
The silence stretched out long enough that I figured I'd misjudged it, pushed too hard, and I was already turning for the door.
"Dinnae promise me a good time wi' rope," he said, weak and hoarse, to the ceiling, "if ye don't intend to deliver."
I stopped.
There it was. Faint, half-dead, but his, mouth I'd been missing so bad I hadn't let myself name it. Four days I'd have given anything to hear him be a little shit again. I wasn't about to let him see that.
I turned around in the doorway.
"You want to play with rope?" I said. "Get the fuck out of my bed and get some sunlight. Shower. Eat a real meal. Then we'll talk about the rope."
He didn't answer right away. But his eyes tracked me across the room this time, all the way, and that was more than I'd gotten in four days.
"That a promise," he said, "or another one of yer threats?"
"Eat the sandwich and find out."
I went and made the sandwich.
That's the part nobody warns you about. You spend twenty years building a reputation, you've got crosses on every finger and a body count you've stopped keeping straight, and one day you're standing in a galley kitchen at four in the afternoon arguing with the mustard because your hands won't quit shaking.
They weren't shaking from the cage. They were shaking because a half-dead Scotsman had cracked one filthy joke at me and I'd damn near put my fist through the wall from relief.
I built two sandwiches the way I liked them when Irina had a day off: rye bread from the Jewish bakery, thick cut garlic bologna, mayo, mustard, pickles and a slice of Kraft American because it was cheap and I'd grown up eating the stuff.
"What the fuck is that monstrosity?" Nikolai said from the doorway.
"It's called a sandwich, idiot."
"With bologna and American cheese?"
I twisted to scowl at him. "Sorry. I'm fresh out of beluga caviar."
"You can't feed him that. You'll kill the poor bastard." Nikolai opened my fridge and started pulling out things I didn't even know were in there: a stick of butter, imported Dijon mustard, a cucumber, prosciutto and salami, and a cheese I couldn't pronounce.
Then he shouldered me out of the way, grabbed the rye bread and started assembling a sandwich like he knew what the hell he was doing.
"What the fuck are you doing?" I growled at him.
"Making a proper fucking sandwich. What's it look like?"
"A proper fucking sandwich doesn't need a skillet."
"This one does."
He buttered the bread on both sides. Both sides. Who the fuck does that?
He cooked it in the skillet, butter going gold and loud in the pan.
"Papa made these," Nikolai said, pressing the sandwich flat with the back of a spatula.
Not looking at me. "When he came to Paris.
Mama hated the smell, so he'd cook them late, after she went up.
Just the two of us in the kitchen at midnight, eating like thieves.
" He flipped it. The other side was perfect, dark and even, and I hated that it was. "He ever do that for you? In Columbus?"
I thought about it and couldn't ever remember seeing him cook. The man was a ghost who showed up with money and left with most of it.
"No," I said. "He wasn't around much."
Nikolai nodded slowly. "Half a father each.
That was his trick. Two houses, two wives, an ocean between so neither one ever counted the gaps.
" For a second Niko wasn't a leash or a little bastard or a frozen account in a borrowed Mercedes.
He was just a man who'd gotten the same absence I had, in a different language.
"We could have hated each other for it. The two halves. I used to think we were supposed to."
"Maybe," I said.
"Maybe." He slid the sandwich onto a plate, cut it clean down the middle, and held half out to me on the flat of the knife. "Here. Taste what your boy is not getting."
I took it and bit into it, ready to tell him how inedible it was.
God help me, it was the best food I'd put in my mouth in a year. Crisp where it should be crisp, the cheese gone to liquid, some sharp bright thing cutting the fat that I figured was the Dijon.
"Good?" Nikolai said.
"It's fine."
"It's perfect. Say it's perfect."
"It's good," I said. "Don't push it."
He grinned, took the other half off the plate, and bit into it himself. His eyes rolled back, and he made a vaguely sexual noise, like he was getting off on a damn sandwich. Then he clapped me on the shoulder.
"Now you know what you're missing," he said around a mouthful. "Both of you."
He took the good sandwich and went back to the couch.
I carried the plate down the hall, feeling like a man bringing a steak knife to a gunfight. It didn't help. It looked like what it was. Cheap food made by a man who'd grown up on cheap food.
"Brought you this," I said, and set it on the nightstand. "It's not as good as Nikolai's. He made some French thing in a pan. I didn't bring you that one because he ate it." I heard how that sounded. "Long story. Just eat the one you've got."
Fin pushed himself up against the headboard and looked at the plate. Then he went still in a different way than he'd been still all week.
"Bologna and Kraft," he said.
"I know. I'll get you something better tomorrow, I just—"
"No, this is perfect." He picked the sandwich up like it was something precious.
"My da ate this. Exactly this. Every Sunday after the shop closed, sat at the bench with the leather still out, bologna and the orange cheese and too much mustard, and my maw gave him hell for the smell.
" His thumb pressed into the bread. "He'd give me the corner.
Said the corner was the best bit. I never knew if he believed that or just wanted me to have it. "
He took a bite and closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the headboard.
"Okay, you don't have to pretend it's good," I said.
He shook his head. "It's not. It's a Kraft single and cold bologna and too much mustard. It's not good." He opened his eyes, and they were glassy. "But it's just right." His eyes met mine. "Tell yer brother his French sandwich can get fucked."
I laughed and sat down beside him. "I'll make sure to tell him."
He finished the sandwich and set the plate aside. "Where've ye been sleeping?"
"Guest room."
He went still again. The guest room had been his before. Down the hall, the door he used to shut against me, the bed he'd slept in alone when he still thought he could keep me at arm's length.
"That's a shite bed," he said.
"It's fine."
"It's no fine; it's got a spring that comes up through the middle. I know because I slept in it." He moved over to the far side of the mattress. "Ye can sleep here. If ye want."
I stared at him and tried to think of one good reason to say no. Nikolai was in the next room. He'd know, and he'd never let me live it down.
Fuck that guy.
I toed my boots off and lay down on top of the covers beside him, close enough that the heat came off him, careful of the bandaged hand resting between us. "You want to watch a show or something? We can binge that soap opera Nikolai's watching and spoil the ending for him."
Finally, his face broke into a smile. "I like the way ye think, Aleksi Laskin," he said before grabbing the remote and turning on the TV.