4. Four
I woke up to the smell of butter and dill and onion softening in a pan.
My stomach clenched so hard that my eyes watered. I lifted my head from the pillow and inhaled. Someone was cooking real food in the next room, and I'd have sold a kidney for a bite.
The door opened. Aleksi stood in the frame, already dressed, suit and gloves, the whole armor of him in place. He'd changed since last night into a charcoal suit wool that needed the shoulders taken out. Same cold, blue eyes. He looked like he'd slept about as well as I had.
"Get up," he said, and crossed the room to unlock the cuff.
I rubbed my wrist where the steel had bitten in and took in the spare room for the first time in daylight.
Small, clean, everything expensive and none of it personal.
Solid wood nightstand, dovetail joints, no veneer.
Brushed nickel lamp with a linen shade, the kind of thing an interior designer picks when nobody's told them what the client likes.
Everything matched. Nothing meant anything.
My da's shop had a back room half this size with more life in it.
"Bathroom's across the hall," Aleksi said. "Then kitchen. Don't touch anything."
"How'm I supposed to do my business if I cannae touch anything?"
He was already walking away.
I pissed, washed my face, and confirmed in the mirror that I looked as bad as I thought. Then I followed the smell.
The kitchen was the only room with any life to it, and that life was an old woman at the six burner stove, cooking like mad.
She was properly old and shriveled, chest high at most, but still wiry and fast with that wooden spoon in her grip.
She was muttering to herself in rapid fire Russian when I arrived.
The old woman took one look at me before launching into a rant at Aleksi.
A plate landed in front of me before I'd even finished sitting, some kind of thick porridge in a blue bowl, eggs, and fried potatoes and onions with sausage. Milk, orange juice, and a steaming mug of black tea followed.
"Oh, granny, I could kiss ye." I wrapped both hands around the mug, and the heat soaked into my fingers, and I closed my eyes.
Tea. Proper tea, strong and black and scalding.
I'd been drinking nothing but water and whatever shite the Italians left in reach for six months, and this one mug was enough to make me believe in God.
"Eat," Aleksi said from the counter, coffee in hand. "Irina doesn't like it when people let her food get cold."
Irina said something in Russian. Aleksi grunted. She said it again, louder, spoon pointed at him. He took a plate and sat down across from me.
I ate. The kasha was rich, the potatoes were perfect, and the eggs were better than anything I'd had in so long that my throat closed up around the first bite. I was not going to cry over potatoes.
Irina refilled my plate before I'd finished the first. She pinched my cheek on the way past and said something that sounded like a scolding. I didn't understand a word, but the meaning was clear. Too thin. Eat.
My da used to do the same thing. Different language, different kitchen, same hands pushing a plate and refusing to hear no. I put my head down and ate until there was nothing left, then dug my insulin kit out of the bag Aleksi had set on the counter.
Irina tracked the needle going in and her face tightened, and she launched into something at Aleksi that ended with the spoon jabbed in my direction. He answered in two words. She didn't look satisfied.
Aleksi set his coffee down. I looked at him across the table, this man whose face had gone the color of a sunset when I'd touched his palm.
"The jacket's in the living room. Materials list is sourced. Most of it's coming from New York. Birch oil might take longer. A week, maybe more. Nikita's people found a supplier in Saint Petersburg."
"I cannae start without the resin or the birch oil, so in the meantime I'll examine the jacket and work up a plan. But I need a few things."
"Such as?"
"Shoes." I held up my foot. The trainers were filthy, and the sole was peeling off the left one. "I'm diabetic. My feet swell if I'm standing all day. Clark's, size eight UK, nine American. Leather sole."
He pulled out his phone and typed.
"Clothes. I've been in these for a week. Plain shirts, dark, cotton. Trousers. Socks. Pants."
He glanced up and then went back to typing.
"Shaving cream and a razor. I look like a hedge. The mattress is too hard. I need something softer, and an orthopaedic pillow. Ye want me to fix yer da's jacket with steady hands or shaking ones?"
He kept typing.
"And ice cream."
"Ice cream." He looked at me. "You're diabetic."
"Aye, and I manage it with insulin, no with deprivation. I count carbs, I dose accordingly, and I've been doing it since I was twelve. I'm no asking for a sweetie shop. I'm asking for a tub of vanilla." I leaned back. "Or salted caramel. Dealer's choice."
He put the phone away, and something moved behind those blue eyes. It might've been amusement in a man who allowed himself that.
"Anything else?"
"That'll do for now."
He walked out. I followed because he hadn't told me not to.
The jacket was on the dining table, spread flat, the bullet hole visible from across the room.
Gun gone. Vodka gone. Outside the kitchen, the apartment was a different world.
White walls, expensive furniture, nothing scuffed or used.
Irina's kitchen had life. The rest was a showroom.
I sat down and pulled the jacket toward me. Aleksi leaned against the doorframe, arms folded.
"Come here," I said. "I'll talk ye through what I'm seeing."
He crossed the room and stood close enough that I could smell his cologne: warm leather and smoke, too much of it. My da wore Brut for forty years and my gran used to say she could find him in a blackout. Some men wore scent like a signature. Some wore it like a wall.
I turned the jacket over and ran my finger along the inner seam. He leaned in. His sleeve pulled tight at the elbow, the same way a glove pulls when the pattern's wrong for the hand inside it. His tailor was guessing. I could read the guesswork in every seam.
I kept that to myself. For now.
"Yer da's tailor knew him," I said. "These measurements are perfect. Sleeve, shoulder, rise in the back. Ye dinnae get this from a fitting room. Ye get this from years of making for the same body. Somebody built this jacket for one man only, and he wore it until the day it stopped him."
He pulled back.
"The debrief," he said, all business. "Start talking."
I gave him a taste. Enough to trust me, not enough to replace me.
My da's rule for first fittings. Keystone Logistics, registered in Delaware.
Shipping was on Tuesdays and Fridays, rotated between three docks on the east side.
The inspection man came every two weeks, short, Italian, fake Rolex I'd clocked from across the room because the weight was wrong and the crystal was mineral, not sapphire.
Black SUV, Pennsylvania plates. Workers called him Mr. K.
Aleksi made a call and relayed everything in rapid Russian before hanging up.
"What else?" he said.
"That's enough for today."
"That's not how this works."
"Aye, it is. I give ye everything at once and I'm useless by dinner. Piece by piece and ye've got a reason to keep feeding me."
His jaw tightened. Then he went to the kitchen to make coffee, and the conversation was done.
I sat with the jacket in my lap. The Italians would've backhanded me for asking for water. This one hadn't said no to a single thing.
The afternoon filled in. Gregori brought the shoes, the right brand, right size. Then clothes, everything I'd specified, and a razor and shaving cream.
I showered for the first time in a week. Aleksi unlocked the cuff long enough for me to wash. I stood under the spray and gripped the tile and pressed my forehead to the wall and shook. I was not going to cry in a Russian gangster's shower.
I shaved and put on clean clothes. The shirt was cotton, dark grey, soft against skin that had been in the same polyester for months. My da would've said I looked like death warmed up and made me a cup of tea. That was what he did. He fixed things.
When I came out, Aleksi was at the dining table on his phone. He looked up.
The phone stopped moving in his hand. He didn't scan me this time.
He just looked, and the look had weight to it, a slow, heavy drag from my wet hair to my bare feet that I could feel on my skin like a fingertip tracing a line down my sternum.
He caught on the open collar of the shirt, on the strip of collarbone showing where I hadn't buttoned the top, and stayed there.
Two seconds. Three. Long enough that the back of my neck went hot and something pulled tight low in my stomach that had nothing to do with strategy.
Then he picked up his coffee, and his face was like stone.
"Better?" he said. His voice was strained.
"Aye. Almost human." I sat down across from him. "While we're waiting for materials, there's something I've been meaning to say."
"What?"
"Yer suit doesnae fit."
He put the phone down.
"The gloves were wrong, and I told ye. The suit is wrong and I'm telling ye. Shoulders are fine. Everything else is off. Chest too tight, collar sitting wrong, trousers breaking too high."
"My tailor has been doing my suits for fifteen years."
"Then he's been getting it wrong for fifteen years. Stand up."
"Excuse me?"
"Stand up. I'll show ye."
He stood. Taller than me by a good margin, broader through everything.
Standing next to him was like standing next to a structure someone had built to last and wrapped in wool.
I circled him once, reading the suit. Shoulders fine.
Back fine. Everything else was guesswork by a tailor who'd been phoning it in for a decade.
"Here." I stepped in front of him and reached up.
He went still. Every muscle locked.