Chapter 8
ISAAK
The salon on Rodeo opens early for me because I own the building it leases. I've stopped noticing that kind of thing. Nora notices it loudly. She reads the lease history off a brass plaque by the door, out loud, in the voice of a woman finding a hair in her soup.
"You own the floor under the dress shop."
"I own the floor under a lot of dress shops."
"That's worse. That's so much worse." She follows me in anyway, boots loud on the marble, dressed like she's about to load hay and daring the room to say something. "Does she know? The owner. That her landlord walked in to buy a wedding dress for the wife who can't stand him?"
"Can't stand me." I hand my coat to a woman who's been trained not to react to anything. "You looked at me a long time last week, with the lights off and your book upside down. You weren't looking away because you couldn't stand the view."
That shuts her mouth for a clean three seconds, which on Nora is a personal record, and the color that comes up her throat is the best money I'll spend all day. Then she recovers, because she always recovers.
"That was a clinical assessment. Livestock. I was checking the soundness of the animal before purchase."
"And?"
"Sound enough." She picks a flute of champagne off a passing tray, looks at it, sets it back down untouched. She doesn't drink. Again. I've noticed it three times this week and decided to let her keep her secret until she's ready to lose it. "Overpriced. Bad temperament. Bites."
The consultant glides up before I can tell her she's wrong about the temperament and right about the bites.
She's elegant, discreet, the kind of professional whose entire job is to make rich people feel that spending obscene money was their own clever idea.
She takes in Nora's jeans, then my watch, then sorts us into spender and tagalong the way every room sorts me the second I walk in.
"Mr. Radulov. We've pulled a range. If the bride would like to follow me." She lets a soft little pause do its work. "Did we have a budget in mind?"
"No," I say.
"No," Nora says, at the exact same moment, with the exact opposite meaning, and the consultant's smile goes still as she tries to work out which no wins.
It's a good question. I've had the woman under my roof a couple of weeks and I don't know the answer yet either.
She works the rack first, before she'll try anything on, flipping tags the way she'd check a horse's teeth. Every few seconds she makes a small wounded noise.
"This one," she says, holding out a sleeve to me like evidence in a trial, "costs more than my truck.
My actual truck. The one that runs." She lets it drop.
"Who buys this shit?" She waves a hand at the row of them.
"Who looks at a number like that and thinks, yes, this is a reasonable amount of money to wear once in front of three hundred criminals who'd shoot me for my shoes? "
"You. In about an hour."
"I won't."
"You will, and you'll be the only thing in the room that makes the room look cheap.
" I watch the compliment slip past her guard before she can stop it, watch her cover the hit by scowling harder.
She's good at furious. She wears it the way other women wear perfume, and she's never more dangerous to my self-control than when she's deciding whether to throw something at my head.
She tries on the first three without comment.
The quiet is its own warning. The first dress is too much.
The second is too little. The third makes the consultant clasp her hands like she's seen a saint, and Nora steps off the dais.
"How much?" She doesn't ask it like a question.
She asks it like the opening of a fight.
Here is the thing I will never tell her, not under torture, which I have survived, so I know the comparison holds. When she came out of the fitting room in the third dress, I forgot the ex.
I forgot, for the length of one breath, the entire architecture of threat I keep standing between this woman and the world.
She walked out barefoot, hair still in the band she ties back to work horses, no makeup, scowling at the hem like it owed her money.
The only real thing in a room built to sell illusions.
I have wanted women before. I have never had the floor tilt under me in a dress shop on Rodeo at ten in the morning while a stranger pinned silk to the small of a back I've had my hands on exactly one time.
I keep my face shut. A lifetime of practice at it. It's the only thing that saves me.
The consultant glances at me. I give her nothing, so she gives Nora the number.
It's not a large number, by the standards of the life Nora married into.
I watch it hit her anyway, watch her take it square in the chest and refuse to flinch.
Her chin comes up. Her arms cross over a dress that has done something violent to my concentration, and she ruins the sight of it by getting ready to take it off.
"Not a chance," she says. "That's a used truck.
That's two of Dewey's surgeries. I'm not wearing a used truck to marry a man I'm not sure I.
" She stops at the cliff edge of the sentence, looks at the consultant, who's found a sudden professional interest in the middle distance.
"To marry a man," she finishes. "It's obscene. "
"It's a wedding dress." I stay where I am, in the chair built to make clients feel small, which has never worked on me.
"You wear it one day. After that it lives in a box and your daughters fight over it.
That's the entire point of the expense. You're not buying fabric.
You're buying the one day nobody can ever take back. "
"I don't have daughters."
"You might." I leave that alone in the air a half-second too long, watch her decide not to touch it, want it then, plainly, a kid of hers with my dirt on its boots, a whole long life I trapped her into and want anyway. "Take the dress, Nora."
"I'll pay you back."
"With what?"
"With." Her teeth click shut. We both know the answer.
Everything she has, she has because the debt I forgave used to own it.
It's a cruel trick to play on a proud woman, and I'm the one who built the trap.
I'd build it again, too, because the other option was a luxury car at her gate and her father's killers walking up the drive.
"I'll find a way," she says again, lower, like saying it twice makes it true.
She does it again, the thing I keep walking into with her and can't leave alone.
Every other person I've handed something to took it with both hands and started planning how to get more.
She takes a gift like it's a hook with bait on it, looking for the line that runs back to my fist. It makes me want to pour every account I own onto the marble just to watch her refuse it.
It makes me want to find whoever taught her that being given to always has a price, and have a long, quiet conversation with them.
I already know who taught her. His name is sitting in a text on her phone she thinks I haven't seen. I'll get to him.
She takes the dress. Not because I won the argument.
Because I let her win the next four, the veil, the shoes, a coat she actually needs and pretends she doesn't, until the size of the wedding dress got lost in the noise of smaller surrenders.
It's the only way to give this woman anything.
You bury the gift under a fight she can win, let her keep her pride while you keep your wife in a dress that takes ten years off my self-control.
My phone goes while the consultant boxes everything in tissue. Lev, who texts the way other men send telegrams, charging by the word.
Deputy came around Halo. Asking about your wife. County, not city. Name of Hutchins.
I read it twice. Halo is the rescue where Nora still works two shifts a week because I made the rookie mistake of telling her she didn't have to.
A county deputy driving forty minutes out of his own jurisdiction to ask questions about a horse-rescue volunteer isn't a man following a thread.
It's a man hired to find one. I write it down in the part of my head where I keep names I'm going to need, and I feel the temperature of the morning change.
"What?" Nora says. She's watching my face, because she always watches my face, the one woman alive who reads me back. "You went somewhere. Who was that?"
"Lev. Florist drama." The lie is small, clean, and bitter in my mouth.
But she has enough men in the dark around her this week, a dead father, a debt, an ex crawling out of a leased car.
She doesn't need a sheriff added to the list until I know what the sheriff is.
"He thinks the peonies are a security risk. "
"They might be. Have you smelled a peony? Aggressive." She lets it go. She half believes me, the most she's ever given me, and we're almost back to the car when the phone goes again. Not Lev this time.
Dima. My brother's face on the screen, grinning the grin that has stripped me of more dignity than the entire Bratva combined.
"Don't," I tell the phone. I answer it anyway, because he's the one person on earth I answer for. "What do you want?"
"Is that any way to greet the only family you've got?" Russian, fast, delighted. "I hear you got married, little brother. I hear she's beautiful and she hates you. Both very good signs. I'm coming to meet her."
"No," I tell him.
"I've already booked it."
"Then unbook it."
"Too late, the ticket's the cheap kind, no refunds, you raised me to be frugal.
" A pause, and under the noise of him I can hear the thing he actually called to say.
He misses me. Neither of us will ever put that in a sentence.
"Three weeks. Maybe four. I want to see the woman brave enough or stupid enough to take you on.
" He hangs up before I can refuse again, because he learned a long time ago that the way to win with me is to not give me the chance.
Nora is watching, eyebrows up. "Florist?"
"My brother." The word comes out stranger than I mean it to. I have a household, a city, three hundred men who'd open a vein for me. I have exactly one person who calls to insult me for free. "He's coming. To meet you."
"You have a brother." She says it like I've confessed to a second head. "An actual brother. A blood one, not a guy named Brother who breaks thumbs."
"Dima breaks nothing. Dima talks. It's worse.
" I pull out into the Rodeo traffic, all of it gleaming, overpriced, pretending the rest of the country isn't on fire.
"He'll arrive with no warning, eat everything in the house, charm the staff into mutiny, then tell you things about me I've spent considerable money keeping buried. "
"I love him already."
"I know you do. That's the problem. The two of you in one room is the only thing in California I'm actually afraid of.
" It comes out lighter than the truth under it.
I mean every word. I've spent two years building a man for her to be afraid of, and my brother will dismantle him over one dinner. "Try to remember whose side you're on."
"I'm on the side of whoever tells me the bowl-cut story first."
Something moves across her face, quick, gone before I can hold it. Not dread. Worse, for me. Interest. "You have a brother," she says slowly, like she's found a door in a wall she'd mapped as solid. "A brother who knows things. Childhood things."
"He knows nothing."
"He raised that?" She tips her head at the phone still warm in my hand.
"He knows everything. Look at your face.
" She's enjoying this. The grief, the deputy, the ex, all of it set down for one bright second while she watches me squirm.
The worst part is how much I'd give up to keep her looking at me like that, lit up and merciless.
"What was little Isaak like, I wonder?" She twists to look at me from the back seat.
"Did you have a bowl cut? You had a bowl cut. "
"Get in the car."
"You had a bowl cut and you cried at something.
A dog. A movie." She climbs into the car grinning, the dress boxed across her lap like a hostage she's decided to keep, and I shut her door because I don't trust my own hands to do anything else useful right now.
Through the glass she's still talking, narrating the imagined childhood of a man she's decided is secretly soft.
She has the whole shape of it close enough to scare me.
There was a dog. I'm not going to be the one to tell her about the dog.
I walk around to my side slower than I need to, in the cold clean Beverly Hills light. A forty-year-old man who has buried problems bigger than the GDP of small countries, taking a moment to be honest about the size of the trouble he's in.
A sheriff is asking questions I don't have answers to.
An ex is circling. In three weeks the only man who ever loved me before I was useful walks into my house to tell my wife every soft, stupid thing I've ever been.
The truth I'd never say out loud is that under the dread, some traitor part of me can't wait for her to hear it.
I get in. I drive my wife and her hostage dress home. She tells me about the bowl cut the whole way, inventing details, getting all of them somehow close. I let her run with it, because a man who has waited his whole life for an invoice will take being teased for free and call it a bargain.