2. Two #2
"They had maybe a dozen workers, most of them trafficked in from Eastern Europe.
Shipped the product out through a company called Keystone Logistics, registered in Delaware, which is the kind of detail that tells ye somebody with a law degree was involved.
The buyer was a distribution network on the East Coast. I never got a name, but I can describe the man who came to inspect every two weeks, right down to his shite taste in watches. "
"How do you know all this?"
"Because they made me do the leatherwork. The fine stuff, the pieces that had to pass as real. Stitching, finishing, hardware. They didn't trust anyone else with it because nobody else could do it well enough."
"You're a leatherworker."
"I'm a craftsman." My da's word. His da's word before that.
Three generations of Gallagher men cutting and stitching in a shop on Victoria Street, and I was the last one alive, chained to a bed in a country I'd never planned to visit.
"My family makes bespoke accessories. Gloves, belts, wallets, bags.
Hand-cut, hand-stitched, every piece made to measure.
My uncle Calum was a tailor up the other end of the street—cloth, no hide.
I grew up running between the two shops, a needle in each hand before I could spell my own name.
So aye, I know a suit. I just dinnae make them. "
He went still. I'd been tracking his hands without thinking about it, and the shift was subtle, but I caught it. He glanced down at his gloves and then back at me.
"Like these," he said.
I reached out and took his hand.
The two men by the door moved fast, hands going to waistbands, bodies stepping forward.
The boss raised his free hand without looking at them, and they stopped.
He kept his hand in mine. It was heavy, warm through the leather, bigger than I'd expected.
The heat of his skin bled through the calfskin, and when I turned his hand over, he curled his fingers against my palm like a reflex he couldn't quite control.
I ran my thumb along the stitching at the index finger, slow, tracing the seam where the fourchette met the trank.
The leather was tight here, straining at the joints.
The stitching was machine-done, but whoever set the tension knew their business.
I pressed the leather between my fingers, rubbed it, and worked the grain with my thumb in small circles.
The calfskin was decent quality, but they'd sealed it with a synthetic finish instead of a natural wax.
The slickness under my fingertips was wrong, too smooth where there should have been warmth.
"These are Italian," I said. I kept my voice low, the way I talked to clients when I was working.
The fitting voice, my da used to call it.
"Workshop outside Florence. Mid-range. They charge four hundred dollars for a glove that'll crack at the knuckles inside a year because they cut corners on the finish. "
I turned his hand palm-up. He let me. He opened his fingers, and I traced the seam along his lifeline with the tip of my index finger, following the curve of it from the base of his thumb down to his wrist. The leather was thinner here, worn soft from years of gripping.
The wear pattern said steering wheels. He drove hard, and often.
His breathing changed. It slowed a fraction in the quiet room.
I pressed my thumb into the center of his palm, and he twitched against the back of my hand.
I spread my own fingers across his knuckles, testing the stretch, and the leather pulled tight over the joints.
The fit was wrong. I'd known it from across the room, but up close, with his hand in mine, every place the glove fought his body was obvious.
"The fit is shite," I said. I ran my thumb across his knuckles, slower than the job required, feeling the ridges of bone through the leather.
"Yer ring finger is longer than the standard pattern.
Ye can feel it pulling every time ye grip, aye?
That's because whoever made these never measured yer hand.
" I turned his hand one more time, cradling it in both of mine, and smoothed the leather flat across his palm with my thumb.
"They made a glove and ye put yer hand in it. That's no the same thing."
I looked up. He'd gone dark pink across the cheekbones, and the color was creeping down toward his jaw. He'd parted his lips, the edge of his teeth showing. He looked like he was trying to remember how to breathe.
I held his hand for one more second. Then I let go.
He pulled his hand back and pressed it flat against his thigh, like he was trying to erase the feeling of my fingers.
"A bespoke pair would move with ye instead of against ye," I said.
My voice had gone rough, and I let it stay that way.
"Ye'd forget ye were wearing them. And they'd last a decade, no ten months.
" I pushed myself up on my free elbow and the room tilted, but I held it.
"I could make ye a pair that would make those look like something ye'd buy at a petrol station. "
The room was very quiet. The two men by the door looked at each other. The boss looked at me like I'd started speaking a language he'd been waiting his whole life to hear.
"Who are you?" he said.
"Finlay Gallagher. My family has been making gloves for men like you for three generations.
My da made gloves for people who'd have ye killed and smile about it over dinner, and his da did the same before him.
" I lay back down because the room was spinning and I was about done pretending I was fine.
"So here's the thing. Whatever information I've got about the Italian operation, ye'll have it inside of a day.
After that, I'm useless to ye as an informant.
But I can make ye the best pair of gloves ye've ever put on yer hands, and that's a skill that doesnae expire. "
He leaned back in the chair. The leather creaked under his weight. He'd walked in here expecting a victim or a prisoner, someone to squeeze for information and discard. Now he was looking at something else and trying to figure out what to do with it.
"Get some rest," he said. He stood up, and the chair scraped against the floor. "We'll talk tomorrow."
"Does tomorrow come with breakfast? Because I havenae eaten in God knows how long and the insulin works better with food. Just so ye know. Medically speaking."
He stopped in the doorway. He kept his back to me.
"I'll send something."
The door closed. The lock clicked. I lay in the dark and listened to his footsteps fade down the hall, steady and even, the footsteps of a man who owned every room he walked through.
I'd bought myself another day. Maybe two. The information would keep him interested, and the gloves had planted a seed, something to think about, a reason to keep me breathing past the point where the intelligence dried up.
But it was the blush I kept coming back to.
That color creeping down from his cheekbones to his jaw, the way he'd pressed his hand flat against his thigh afterward like he was trying to scrub my touch off his skin.
A man like that, built like that, running an operation like this, and a stranger's fingers on his palm had turned him red.
My da would've called the glove work a fitting. You measured the client before you measured the hand. You figured out what they wanted, what they needed, what they didn't know they were missing. Then you made yourself the only person who could give it to them.
The information would last a day. The gloves might buy me a week. But if the boss liked being touched that much, if that blush meant what I thought it meant, then maybe I could make myself useful in ways that didn't have an expiration date.
I'd done worse things to stay alive.
I rolled onto my side and pressed my face into the pillow. Somewhere outside this room, in a city I didn't know, the men who'd killed my da were still breathing.
But so was I, and I'd just found the thread. All I had to do was pull it.