12. Raven
Raven
He comes out of the bathroom in a towel, and I immediately realize I have made a tactical error somewhere in the last twenty minutes, but I can't identify which one.
I'm sitting on the edge of the bed with a bottle of water I don't want, fully dressed, boots still on, because I decided about forty minutes ago that I was going to be exactly as professional as this situation demanded, and I have been executing it beautifully.
Then he crosses the room to his bag, and I stop executing anything.
Because I have seen this man in a shirt for twelve days and I had a theory, and the theory was wrong in the direction of underestimating.
He is enormous. Not gym-enormous — there's nothing decorative about it.
It's the build of a man who has done physical work for twenty-five years and never once stopped, all shoulder and back, and there's a softness low on the ribs that a vain man would have starved off, and he clearly does not care.
And he's written on.
That's the thing I'm not ready for. I've seen Bratva ink in case files for nine years — I did a two-week course on it at Quantico that I mostly slept through and then a lot of reading afterward that I didn't — and it's a language.
It's the only criminal iconography in the world that's genuinely a language, and I can read about sixty percent of it.
Left shoulder: the stars. Eight points, both sides of the collarbone. I kneel to no one. You don't get to wear those, historically — you take them, and if you take them wrong somebody removes them with a blade.
Ribs, right side: a cathedral. Four domes.
Four.
That's a sentence count. Four terms. Except there's no record of Ilya Yaroslav ever being convicted of anything anywhere, so either the domes are inherited iconography he has no right to, or the record is wrong. I know which of those I'd put money on.
Forearm, inner: a rose on barbed wire, which is a birthday inside. Sixteen or under.
He was in something at sixteen.
And the scars, which are a completely separate document.
Two through-and-throughs on the left side, old, badly closed, the kind you get when a man with a kit does it in a room instead of a surgeon doing it in a theatre.
Something long and pale across the back of one shoulder that I'd guess was a blade.
A puckered mess low on the right hip that isn't a bullet and isn't a knife and I genuinely can't identify, and it's the only one that makes my stomach turn over, because I can't rule out the possibility that somebody did it slowly.
He gets a shirt out of the bag, doesn't put it on, and turns around.
"You are reading me," he says.
Caught. "I'm assessing a security asset."
"You are reading me. Go on, then."
"Excuse me?"
"You are the only person in eleven years to look at that and understand any of it." He drops the shirt on the bed. "So. Read it."
And here's what I should do. I should say something dry, go to the window, and get through the next eight hours like a professional adult.
Instead I stand up.
"Stars are the rank. You took them, you weren't given them, or you'd have them lower.
" I walk over — not close, four feet, then three.
"The cathedral's four domes, which is four terms inside, except you've never been convicted of anything on any continent, so either you're wearing somebody else's sentence, which would get you killed in the wrong room, or—"
"Or?"
"Or you did four, and none of them are in a file, which means they weren't here."
Something moves behind his eyes.
"Two in Russia," he says. "Both before I was twenty-one, both under a name that no longer exists. One in Georgia, which was six weeks and a misunderstanding. And one that was not a prison."
"What was it?"
"A room," Ilya says. "For nine months. When I was sixteen."
I look at the rose on the barbed wire.
"That's what this is."
"That is what that is."
Three feet is suddenly not very much room, and neither of us has moved, and I can feel the heat coming off him.
"And this one?" I put two fingers, barely, against the pale ruin low on his hip. He doesn't flinch and doesn't breathe. "Because that's not a knife and it's not a round, and it's the only thing on you I can't read."
"No," he agrees. "It's not."
"Are you going to tell me?"
"Not tonight."
"Why not?"
"Because you would look at me differently afterward," he says, "and I have been enjoying being looked at like this for approximately four minutes, and I'm not finished."
I take my hand off him.
I take it off because I have to, because if I leave it there for one more second I'm going to do something, and I put a whole foot of space between us and cross my arms.
"I need you to understand something," I say. "What happened in your office was — it was eleven days of nothing and a very long night. That's what it was."
"Is that true?"
"It's the version I can operate inside of."
"That is not the same as true."
"No," I admit. "It isn't."
We stand there.
"Say the thing you actually want," Ilya says. "You have my word about what happens either way. That has not changed and it will not, and I'm not going to ask you again, because I asked you once and I meant it and I do not intend to make you do it twice."
And that's it. That's the whole thing.
He isn't going to keep asking. He's not going to circle it, or wear me down, or make it easier by deciding for me. He asked once, and the answer is standing there permanently available, and the only person who can pick it up is me.
"There's a boy asleep two doors down."
"There are three closed doors between here, and my son and I have never in my life been quiet about anything," he says. "So that is a genuine problem and not a reason."
I laugh. It comes out of me sideways, and I hate it.
"Fine," I say. "Fine. Yes. Get over here."
He doesn't get over here.
He goes to the bag.
"Sit down," Ilya says. "On the bed. Boots off."
And I do it, which tells me something about myself I'm not going to examine tonight, and when he turns around he's holding something small and I can't see what it is until he's a foot away.
It's a feather.
Long, dark, stripped down to a fine point at the tip, the shaft wrapped in something. It's a ridiculous object. It's the single most ridiculous object I have ever seen in the hand of a man who moves weapons in shipping containers, and I actually laugh.
"You brought a feather to Kansas."
"I did."
"You packed that. In a bag. On a Thursday."
"I did." Not a flicker. "You have spent twelve days in my house being extremely difficult to surprise, and I have thought about very little else, and I have concluded that the only thing you have no defense against is patience." He turns it over. "So we are going to find out."
"That's not—"
"Take your shirt off."
I take my shirt off.
"Lie back."
"Ilya—"
"You may tell me to stop at any point, and I will stop, and neither of us is going to discuss that again, because we settled it and I do not insult you by relitigating it." He kneels one leg on the bed. "Lie back. Hands above your head. And do not move."
"That's a lot of instructions for a feather."
"The instruction is the point of the feather."
He starts at my collarbone.
And the first thing — the actual first thing — is that it isn't sexual at all.
It's just strange. A line of contact so light it's barely contact, tracking the ridge of bone from the base of my throat out to the point of my shoulder, and my whole body goes stupid trying to work out what it's being told.
Then he does it again, the same path, the same speed.
Then again.
By the fourth pass I'm no longer thinking about the feather.
"Don't move," he says.
"I'm not moving."
"You moved."
"That was breathing."
"Then breathe less."
Down the inside of my arm. The crook of the elbow, which turns out to be somewhere I did not know I had. The underside of my wrist, and I make a noise, and the feather stops.
I open my eyes. He's watching my face with an attention that is close to clinical.
"Why did you stop?"
"Because you moved."
"I made a noise—"
"You moved." He is completely unhurried. "We go back to the start."
And he goes back to the collarbone.
Twenty minutes into this, I understand what he's doing, and it doesn't help at all.
Because the arrangement is not that he's teasing me; teasing has a destination.
This has no destination. This is a man with unlimited time who has decided the only thing that matters in the world tonight is whether I can hold still, and every time I fail we go back to the beginning, and there is nothing to push against, nothing to fight, nothing to win —
— and I have spent thirty-one years winning things.
Ribs. The line under my breast, which he does four times and I count all four.
The dip of my waist. The crease of my hip where my jeans still are, which he traces along the top of the denim for what feels like a year without going anywhere near underneath it.
Every slow pass leaves a trail of heat behind it, goosebumps rising as my skin tightens in the wake of his touch, my body memorizing exactly where he’s been.
"Ilya."
"Mm."
"You are being extremely unfair."
"I'm being extremely fair. I'm being the fairest man in the state of Kansas."
"You're enjoying this."
"I'm enjoying it enormously," he agrees, and drags the feather up the inside of my thigh over the denim, which shouldn't work and works, and my hips come off the bed about an inch.
The feather stops.
"No," I say. "No, no, come on—"
"You moved."
"I have been lying here for half an hour—"
"Thirty-four minutes."
"—thirty-four minutes, and you have not put a single hand on me—"
"That is correct."
"Is that the point?"
"That is the point," Ilya says.
And I break.
I'd like to say I held out. I'd like to say a great many things about myself, and about the woman who has stared down four men in a truck and a Pakhan with a knife at her throat, and none of them survive contact with a bird's feather and a patient man in a hotel outside Salina.
"Please," I say.