Chapter 22
TESSA
Peggy has stopped the video with her finger on Ethan's face.
I lean across the cutting table, a half-sewn sleeve caught between my wrist and the wood. On her screen, a woman in a torn wedding dress holds a plastic heart toward the camera. Behind her, near The Ninth Masque's bar, Ethan turns with his camera bag against his side.
His face is uncovered. Even paused halfway through a word, he looks like the man who helped us pack a backdrop and made Peggy laugh.
“Watch where he goes,” she says.
She lifts her finger. The bride sways across the frame, singing badly over the music, while Ethan walks out of view toward the side corridor.
He could be collecting equipment. He could be looking for a bathroom.
My own launch video showed Beatrice following a man that way, but this recording doesn't show her at all.
Then Peggy opens the broadcast details.
The saved stream started at six minutes past eleven on September twelfth. Ethan appears fourteen minutes into it.
I pull my wrist away from the sleeve. The needle catches my skin, a tiny sharp point that makes me drop the fabric.
“He told Alison half past ten.”
Peggy nods without looking at me. “I remembered it too.”
Outside the fitting-room arch, Matvei stands near the front door. The replaced window has paper bats taped across it, their wings trembling when the heating comes on. Yesterday I complained that they looked cheap beside the velvet display. Now I check the lock beneath his hand.
“Where did you find this?” I ask.
“A guest shared her old stream this morning and tagged us about a coat. I was answering her.” Peggy returns to the video. “I wasn't looking for him.”
She says it as though she needs to defend herself. I take the phone before she can watch him walk away again, resting it beside the pumpkin paperweight. Its speaker keeps playing the bride's song until I stop it.
Almost an hour separates the departure Ethan described from the moment on this screen. Perhaps the page has the wrong time. Perhaps he came back. I reach for each explanation because Peggy is looking at me now, waiting for one she hasn't already tried.
I can't give her a reason he never mentioned returning.
“We'll send Alison the original link,” I say. “Bogdan can have someone check the club records.”
Peggy sends Alison the link and a saved copy. I call Bogdan while she adds where Ethan appears, the little taps of her nails loud in the workshop.
Bogdan answers on the second ring.
I tell him about the stream and ask him to look at it with us. For a moment he says nothing, and I press the phone closer to my ear.
“Come to the club,” he says. “I'll have Klim here.”
I hear reassurance in his voice because I want it badly. After we hang up, I send him the link. By the time Matvei escorts us to the waiting car, I've put my coat on without fastening a single button.
The drive to the Seaport takes half an hour. Peggy sits beside me with her phone locked between her palms. She doesn't call Ethan. Once, she opens their messages, but whatever she reads makes her close them again before she reaches the keyboard.
I put my hand over hers. Through her cold fingers, I can feel the edge of the case.
At the club, we go upstairs past a worker carrying a box of black paper roses.
Their wire stems rattle against the cardboard.
Peggy lets Matvei show her into the private sitting room while I go to Bogdan's office.
She asks me to get her when he has an answer.
I leave her on the sofa with her coat still on.
Bogdan comes around the desk when I enter. Klim stands beside it with a phone in his hand and a page laid on the stone. Nobody has to ask me for the link again.
“Can the time be wrong?” I ask.
“Alison should verify the original,” Klim says. “It deserves checking.”
Bogdan takes my unfastened coat by the edges, drawing it gently off my shoulders. I let him. Being here makes the last hour feel manageable, and I want him to put his arms around me before he explains what we'll do.
He lays the coat on a chair. “There's something else you need to see.”
Klim's page has a date at the top. October thirteenth. Below it are notes about a payment outside Afterglint, with Ethan's name written beside the observation.
I read the date again.
“Tuesday?”
“Yes,” Bogdan says.
My hand stops halfway to his sleeve. The office seems to tilt toward the desk, all my attention pulled down to that page while the rest of me struggles to stay upright.
“You've known about him since Tuesday?”
“I've suspected he was passing information to Luka. We saw a payment. We haven't proved what it bought.”
Peggy is sitting in the next room without the warning that's been on this page for two days. On Tuesday, Bogdan stood in a waistcoat I was fitting and let me ask if there was anybody he could name.
I turn before he can offer another explanation.
At the sitting-room door, Peggy starts to get up as soon as she sees me. I cross to her and take both her hands.
“Klim saw Ethan taking money from one of Luka's men. Bogdan has suspected him for two days. Come and look at what they've got.”
Her fingers pull tight around mine. I wait only long enough for her to stand, then bring her back into the office beside me.
Bogdan has left the page uncovered. He shows us the payment photograph on his phone, followed by the invoice.
Fifteen hundred dollars for work at the ball, billed to Devon's office.
Klim explains that Devon refused a request to cover it, that the request led him to the studio, and that he saw the cash handed over.
He couldn't hear the conversation or establish the amount.
I make myself follow every distinction. Peggy needs what happened, even if I want to shove the papers at Bogdan and ask how he ate dinner with me afterward.
The club had already paid Ethan's own fee. Separate work is possible. The revised movement sheet went to him too. None of it puts a weapon in his hand or proves he sent the photograph of me.
It still should have reached us on Tuesday.
“Send me all of it,” I tell Klim. “Alison needs this with the video.”
He looks toward Bogdan, who nods. When the files arrive on my phone, I forward them and call Alison, putting her on speaker. Peggy stands so close that her coat brushes my arm throughout the call.
Alison confirms she has the recording, the link and the new material. I give her the date of Klim's observation. Bogdan doesn't interrupt when I say we learned about it today.
“I'll speak to Klim and check the recording,” she says. “Where are you both now?”
I tell her. She asks us to stay with our escorts and preserve any further contact from Ethan. There's no declaration that we've caught a killer, no answer about Beatrice. We have an account that doesn't fit the footage and a payment that needs explaining.
After the call, Bogdan turns to Klim.
“End Ethan's access. Here, Gilt & Gallows, the workshop. Tell the staff before he can turn up with a case and a booking.”
Klim steps onto the landing to make the calls. Bogdan starts toward me, but Peggy's phone vibrates against her coat and we all stop.
She takes it out. Her screen shows Ethan's name above a new message.
How's my favorite girl?
Peggy presses her lips together. I've watched her grin at that phone over the cutting table, then pretend she was only reading something filthy. I hate him for the way she turns the screen toward her body now.
“I'm ending it,” she says.
I put my arm around her. She lets me hold her while Klim returns and confirms the pass is disabled and the club teams and workshop guards have been told. The desk is still between us and Bogdan when Peggy taps Ethan's name and starts the call.
She turns on the speaker herself.
“There she is,” Ethan says. “I was starting to think you'd forgotten me.”
Her breath catches, but she gets the words out. “We're finished. I saw the launch video. You were still there after eleven. And I know about the money from Luka's man.”
The little pause that follows makes my hand tighten against her shoulder.
“Peggy, it's work. Who's been talking to you? Let me explain it without Volkov standing over you.”
She stares at the invoice. “You told the detective you'd left.”
“Come over. I'll show you the bookings. We can talk properly.”
“I'm not meeting you. Don't come to the shop.”
“You're going to throw this away because he says so?”
Peggy ends the call with her thumb still trembling. For a moment she keeps the phone raised, as though some answer might arrive without his voice attached to it.
“He didn't say he came back,” she whispers.
I take the phone when she holds it out. The last screen is their call history, his name beside all the times she was glad to hear from him.
She folds forward into me. Her forehead presses against my shoulder, and I hold the back of her coat while she cries without making much sound. I can smell the peppermint gum she was chewing in the car. She's bitten her lip hard enough to leave a red mark.
“I thought he liked me,” she says into my sleeve.
“You didn't do anything wrong.”
I mean it, although I can't stop remembering how pleased I was for her. On Sunday she'd told me she was falling for him. I told her she deserved to feel wanted. She still does, and nothing on that desk gets to take it away from her.
Bogdan brings a glass of water from the office sideboard. Peggy accepts it without looking up at him. A little spills onto her coat, darkening the wool beneath her fingers.
Klim goes downstairs as I take her to the sitting room. I stay until she can drink without shaking the glass. Matvei remains by the open doorway. When she asks for a minute to herself, I return her phone, tell her I'll be in the office and step across the landing.
Bogdan is waiting beside the desk.
I close the door behind me. The latch makes a small sound, and the tears I've managed to keep back begin to run before I can speak.
He reaches me in two strides. His hand cups my cheek, warm against the wet skin, and I lean into it before I remember why I'm crying.
“I had men with her,” he says. “More cover at the jobs and both homes. They knew to stop him getting her alone.”
“They knew?”
His hand stays against my face. “They needed his name to protect her.”
I move away from his palm. For two days, the men beside Peggy knew to watch the man she was excited to hear from. I picture her phone ringing, the smile she can't help giving the screen. I keep imagining her making some silly joke about him while somebody who'd been warned listened.
“I would've told her,” I say. “She wouldn't have had to sit here finding out everyone knew before she did.”
“I wanted to be sure. I gave Klim until this afternoon.”
Thursday. He can give the choice a deadline as easily as he gives a man an order. In the meantime, I went home with him. I put my clothes beside his and slept with my face against his shoulder.
“I asked you,” I say. “On Tuesday. Right here.”
Bogdan looks toward the chair where my coat hangs.
“You said nothing was confirmed.” My throat hurts around the words. “Then you came home with me.”
“It wasn't confirmed.”
I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, tasting salt where a tear reaches my mouth. I know what the papers prove. I've just made myself listen to it for Peggy's sake. He could've told me exactly that and let me put my arms around her two days sooner.
Instead he's still explaining the invoice.
“She was falling in love with him, Bogdan.”
He stops looking at the coat.
“I would've kept her safe.”
The certainty in his voice is part of why I wanted him.
At the farm, I loved standing beside him while the men who grabbed me backed away.
When he offered me his house, I wanted the room he made for me there.
I've enjoyed every unembarrassed minute of being loved with his money and his hands and the force of his attention.
Now he needs me to believe the guards made those two days harmless, and I can't.
“I don't know how to look at you right now,” I whisper.
He comes close again. This time I don't step back, even when his fingers touch the damp hair beside my cheek. His eyes move over my face, and for one aching second I want him to kiss me until I can stop seeing Peggy crying against my shoulder.
I lift my hand to his shirt as he lowers his head. The cloth is soft beneath my palm. His breath touches my mouth, and I nearly close the last small distance myself.
Then I turn my face.
He stops, his forehead resting briefly against my temple. My hand stays on his chest because moving it will make us separate, and I'm not ready for how much that's going to hurt.
“Tessa.”
I shut my eyes. I want my name to be the start of an apology. I want him to tell me he understands why Peggy's tears matter more than the guards he hired.
“Let me take you home,” he says.
I open my eyes against his collar. Upstairs in that house, my things wait among his. The toothbrush beside the basin. My dresses, my workbag, the little spaces I'd stopped treating as borrowed.
My fingers loosen on his shirt. He lets me move away, though his hand follows mine until the contact breaks.
“I'll come back to the house tonight,” I say. “I'll pack in the morning.”