22. Twenty-Two
The tailor had pins in his mouth and resentment in his eyes, and I'd earned the both of them fair and square.
"That seam's no' sitting right at the shoulder," I told him, twisting my neck to see it in the three-way mirror. "Ye've eased it wrong. Pull it out and try again."
He took the pins out of his mouth one by one with the slow patience of a man who'd been hating me for forty minutes. "Sir, the shoulder is correct to the measurements—"
"Aye, the measurements are grand. The ease is wrong. Look at it, man. It's pulling across the back when I move my arm." I rolled my shoulder to show him, and the wool went taut in exactly the place it shouldn't. "There. See it now?"
His expression soured, but he said, “I see it.”
Aleksi sat on the leather banquette behind me with one ankle on the opposite knee and his arms crossed. He had a smug expression on his face, too.
"Take it off," the tailor said wearily. "I will redo the shoulder."
"That's the spirit." I shrugged out of the jacket and handed it back. "Ye'll thank me when ye see it sit proper."
He took the jacket and disappeared into the back.
I turned to the mirror in my shirtsleeves and waistcoat and had a proper look at myself for the first time.
The houndstooth had been my idea. Aleksi had wanted charcoal.
Charcoal would've buried me. The houndstooth made the copper in my hair look like a choice instead of an accident, and the cut of the waistcoat sat me up taller than I'd stood in months.
The maimed hand hung at my side, and I didn't tuck it away.
In the mirror, behind me, Aleksi watched me look at myself.
"Enjoying the show, are ye? " I asked, smoothing my hands over the fabric.
"You’re running that poor man ragged."
"I’m only tryin’ to get yer money’s worth. Yer payin’ for the damn thing. Besides. The service ‘round here’s terrible. What’s that yer drinkin’? Smells like rubbing alcohol, it does."
"That’s because it’s vodka."
“Vodka,” I scoffed. “At a fitting? Ye bloody morose Russians. Where I come from, you have wine at a fitting and a proper Irish whiskey at the pub after.”
I turned. He looked me up and down the way he did when he was working out whether to eat me or kill me, and at this point I knew it was usually the first and I was usually grateful for it.
"It suits you," he said.
"Aye?" I turned a slow circle for him, hands out. "Ye like what ye see?"
"I always like what I see when I’m looking at you."
"Smooth bastard." But I felt the heat climb my neck anyway. I'd been a man who got told he was handsome by other men before, in pubs in Edinburgh and once in a hostel in Berlin, and it had never gone in like this. "Ye keep that up, I'll start believing ye."
"You should."
I didn't have anything for that, so I turned back to the mirror to give myself something to do.
The tailor came back through the curtain with the jacket draped over his arm and a face that said he'd taken the seam apart in the back and discovered, to his disgust, that I'd been right.
He didn't say so. He held the jacket open, and I shrugged into it, and he set to work pinning the shoulder again, faster this time, the pride pricked out of him.
I watched his hands in the mirror.
He was good. He'd been good before I'd wound him up, and he was better now that he was angry, the way some craftsmen go.
He worked the easing in along the sleeve cap with two pins and a thumb, and I felt the wool settle into where it ought to have settled the first time.
It was a small thing. Three millimeters of cloth.
The kind of thing nine men in ten wouldn't have clocked even wearing it.
"Sleeve length," the tailor said, professional now. He was through with me. He just wanted me out of his shop. "Arms forward, please. Both."
I brought my hands up.
The tailor measured my wrist, and his eyes flicked to the missing finger and stayed a half second too long for my comfort.
There was a part of me that wanted to cover it up when I knew he was looking, and a part that wanted to slap him for even daring.
I suppose if I’d been Aleksi, I’d have done the latter, and had I been who I was eight months ago, I’d have done the former.
Being who I was in that moment, I did neither and instead let him look his fill.
The stump Nikita’s order had left me with wasn’t a punishment anymore.
It was a promise as good as any ring. That was, if Aleksi could bring himself to say the words.
The tailor wrote the measurement on his pad and his hand and said nothing at all about the finger.
When the tailor was satisfied with the shoulder and the sleeve and the dozen small things he'd had to fix because I'd made him fix them, he stepped back and folded his hands and waited to be released.
"Trousers," I said.
"Sir, the trousers were—"
"Aye, I know what ye'll tell me. They were measured. They're grand. Humor me." I held the bad hand out to the side and turned at the waist. "Ye've cut it too generously in the back. I'll look like I'm wearing me da's trousers."
"It's all right." Aleksi's voice came from behind me, mild, the way it gets when he's done being entertained. "He'll let you off the trousers."
I turned my head towards him. "Will I?"
"You will."
I held his eyes for a beat. He didn't blink. I huffed out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh and turned back to the tailor, who had the look of a man who'd just been told he could leave a burning building.
"Fine," I said. "The trousers stay. But I want the buttonhole on the left cuff working."
"Sir, that is an extra—"
"I ken what it is. I want it working. So I can roll a sleeve without looking like a peasant."
The tailor closed his eyes for a half second, gathered himself, and wrote the note. "Working buttonhole. Left cuff."
"Both cuffs."
"Both cuffs."
"Grand. Are we done then?"
"Sir. Yes. We are done."
"Good man." I clapped him on the shoulder with the good hand, like he expected me to bite him. "Ye'll do lovely work on it. I'll come back and tell ye when it's right."
"I look forward to it," the tailor said, and meant nothing of the sort.
I turned and saw a hat sitting on a rack, a perfect little charcoal fedora. I picked it up without looking at the price tag and set it on my head before turning to the mirror. It looked off, so I tipped it to one side. There. Perfect. “Well?” I said to Aleksi. “How do I look?”
“Like trouble,” he said fondly.
“Aye, then we’re on the money.” I took the hat off and held it out to the tailor. “I’ll be taking that with me today if ye’d be so kind as to box it up for us.”
The tailor took the hat with both hands, like I'd handed him a small dog, and disappeared into the back to box it.
I went back behind the curtain and changed out of the half-pinned suit into my own clothes, careful with the pins, and came out tucking my shirt in just as the tailor reappeared with the hat in a navy box tied with a ribbon.
He set it on the counter and rang up the total on a little card reader, and Aleksi reached inside his jacket and pulled out his wallet.
But it wasn’t his usual wallet. Gone was the expensive black leather thing he usually carried, and in its place was the ugly bifold I’d stitched up for him three nights past.
Something warm went through me that had no business being there in a tailor's shop at the end of a working day. It started low and climbed and settled behind my ribs and stayed. He thumbed the bills out and handed them over and didn’t make a thing out of it, so I wouldn’t either.
Aleksi folded the wallet shut and tucked it away inside his jacket, took the hat box from the tailor and turned to me. "Ready?"
"Aye," I said, and had to clear my throat. "Aye, I'm ready."
He held the door for me. The bell rang above us going out.
The street was wet. It had rained while we were inside, the kind of quick city rain that leaves the asphalt looking lacquered and the streetlamps doubled in it.
The car was at the curb with Gregori at the wheel, reading something on his phone, and he straightened when he saw us and got out to open the back door.
Aleksi handed him the hat box before sliding into the back after me.
“Home now, Boss?” Gregori asked.
“No, I think I’d like to go out to the track today,” Aleksi said.
Gregori nodded and pulled us out into traffic, and I turned to Aleksi.
"Ye've got a track."
"I have access to a track."
"Aleksi Laskin." I shook my head at him, slow. "Ye've got more lives than ye've ever let on. How many do ye have? Three? Four? I've been living in yer flat for two months and I'm only just now finding out about the bloody track."
"You knew about the warehouse."
"The warehouse isnae a personal interest, ye great daft man, it's yer place of work. I'm talking about the things ye do when nobody's paying ye to do them."
Outside the window the city slid past, wet and orange under the lamps, and his hand found my thigh under his coat and stayed there.
"I'll show you," he said.
"Aye, that's the idea, is it no'?"
"That's the idea."
He didn't say anything for a minute after.
Outside the city kept sliding by, wet and orange, and we passed a leather goods store with its lights still on.
A woman in the window was arranging belts on a rack the way I used to arrange them in another life, in another city, and for a half second the warehouse came up under me like a draft from a basement.
I'd be doing that. If Aleksi hadn't pulled me out of that room — if he'd done what he'd been sent to do — I'd be in some other room exactly like it, putting belts on a rack for a different boss, and not knowing this man at all.
"What kind of track is it then?" I asked, going for light. "One of them oval ones the Americans like? Going round and round to nowhere?"
"Road course."
"Aye? With proper turns?"
"With proper turns and straightaways."
"And ye go out there and ye do what, exactly? Drive in circles by yerself?"
"Sometimes."
I watched the side of his face. The lamps lit him in passes, and he was looking out the window at nothing.
"Aleksi Laskin." I said it softly. "What is it ye go out there to outrun?"
His jaw worked. He didn't answer for a long stretch. The hand on my thigh tightened, then eased. "Nothing in particular."
"Liar."
His phone buzzed in his coat pocket.
He didn't reach for it.
It buzzed again.
"Ye not going to get that?"
"It can wait."
"It cannae wait. Ye've not let a phone go two rings since I've known ye."
He held my eyes a second longer. Then he reached inside the coat and pulled the phone out, and read the screen. Then he thumbed something back one-handed and tucked the phone away.
"Thursday?" I asked. “Did ye get confirmation Mr. K’s coming in?”
Something cold settled in my gut just speaking the bastard’s name.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it? Aleksi, that cunt kept me like a slave for six months. He shot my da, stole his tools, and killed all those innocent…” I paused to take a breath and collect myself. “You cannae tell me not to worry about my demons, Aleksi. It only makes me worry more.”
“I’m taking care of it,” he said firmly.
“Course ya are. On Thursday. And I’m comin’ with.”
Aleksi shot me a hard glare. “No. Absolutely not.”
“But—”
“I said no, Fin.” He pulled his hand away. “You’re not going anywhere near that fucker. Not until he’s dead. Then, if you want to kick his corpse, you can kick all you want. But not until after.”
"Aye," I said. “Fine then. Ye want a trophy wife? Then I’ll be yer trophy wife. But I’ll warn ye. I’m expensive, so ye better bring me something nice."
He watched me for a long second before his hand came back to my thigh. “I’ll bring you his finger,” he promised. “The left ring finger, with a nice silk bow tied on it and those French truffles Niko got you hooked on.”
I sighed and leaned my head on his shoulder. “Ye really know how to treat a lad, Aleksi Laskin, don’t ye?”