25. Twenty-Five
I'd gone into Aleksi’s closet because I couldn't be in the rest of the flat anymore.
It was the one room that was properly his.
The living room was a showroom, and the kitchen was Irina's, and the bedroom we'd wrecked between us so many times it belonged to nobody.
The closet still smelled of him: cologne and leather and the cold iron smell that never quite came out of a man who carried guns for a living.
I stood in it the way you'd stand in a chapel.
I'd no business there, but I went in anyway.
His suits hung in their row, all the wrong cut, the ones I'd been on him about since the day we met. I ran the backs of my knuckles down a sleeve. It was good wool, ruined by a tailor who'd been phoning it in. The new suit he’d been measured for would be different. It’d be perfect because I’d insisted upon it.
Now, I was terrified I’d have to bury him in it.
Funny, wasn’t it? A year ago, my biggest worry was the weather—which, to be fair, is the biggest worry of every Scotsman. But now here I was, in love with an idiot who brandished a gun for a living, fretting he’d not return. I’d turned into my mum.
I took out my phone for the hundredth time.
The last message I'd sent him sat there with no answer under it. Sent. Not read. I'd typed it an hour ago, and it had gone nowhere. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. I didn’t know anything except that Mr. K would kill Aleksi the first chance he got and not feel an ounce of guilt.
It didn’t sit right with me, this moving the operation forward by several days. It reeked of a trap, but Aleksi had refused to listen. I wouldn’t have either. All I had was a feeling, and that was worth less than Aleksi’s confidence since he’d been doing this his whole damn life.
But it was after midnight now, and he hadn’t texted, called, or anything.
Even when he was being a cold bastard about it, even when it was nothing but eat something or go to bed, he texted.
Now there was nothing, and Gregori was parked on the door like a gargoyle who'd taken a vow of silence. The not-knowing was driving me mad.
So I was pacing. And I'd have gone on pacing till dawn if I hadn't heard the music.
It was coming from down the hall, from behind Niko's door.
Not his usual weepy French stuff, none of the soap operas.
This was something bright and fast and electronic, all sugar and no spine, the kind of thing they'd play in a club where the drinks cost more than the door.
I stood outside the door a moment, because a man's entitled to his own taste in shite music, and then I heard a second voice under it, light, and I thought: he's got somebody in there.
That stopped me. Aleksi'd cleared the flat for security, and here was Niko with a guest. I knocked once and pushed the door, ready to give him hell for it.
And then I stopped in the doorway. Niko was alone at the vanity with his back to me, singing along to the music, an open shoebox in front of him and a tube of lip gloss beside it, uncapped. I'd have backed out quietly, but he caught me in the mirror.
"Fin." He reached to close the box.
"Sorry. I knocked, but the music—"
"You can't tell Aleksi."
I came closer instead of answering. The box was Paris-stamped, the tissue folded back. Burgundy suede heels, soles red as a fresh cut.
"Are those Louboutins?"
"You mean my heels?" He said it slowly, watching me like I might be having him on.
"The suede? In the burgundy?" I had one out of the tissue before he could tell me no, turning it to the light.
The sole was the real lacquer, the proper stuff, not the painted-on rubbish I'd seen a hundred chancers try to pass off in that warehouse.
"Oh, that's the genuine article, that. Look at the pitch on it.
A hundred and twenty mil if it's an inch.
How in God's name does anybody walk in these? "
"You own it. That's the whole trick." Then, quieter, with his eyes on the shoe in my hands: "étienne bought them in Cannes. He likes me in—" He stopped himself. He took the shoe back off me, gentle about it, and set it in the tissue like it was sleeping. "Well. He bought them."
There was a whole country behind that unfinished sentence. I'd have walked into it if he'd left the door open another second, but he closed the box, and the easy mask came down over him like a coat going on. He reached out to turn down the music.
"Niko," I said. "Has he called you?"
"Who? étienne?"
"Aleksi. He's not texted me since the track. Not a word, Niko, and he always sends a word." I heard my own voice going thin at the edges. "It's gone midnight."
"He’s working." Niko shrugged, the easy masculine charm sliding back over him like he was pulling the wig off a second time. "These things run long. He’ll come home stinking of cordite at four in the morning and step on something of mine and we’ll fight about it, same as always."
"And if he doesn't?"
"He will."
"But if he doesn't, Niko." I wasn't letting him have the easy version. "You’re worried too. I can see it on you.”
He looked at me in the mirror rather than straight on.
“Worry isn’t the right word. Aleksi has always been…
” He sighed. “Cocky. And when someone moves the schedule forward rather than back, that always leaves less room to prepare and more room for things to go wrong. But you’re the one who knows this Mr. K better than me. How scary is he really?”
I sat down on the edge of the guest bed and thought about how to say it and found there wasn't a clever way, so I gave it to him straight.
"He left me chained to a radiator to die," I said.
"Not out of cruelty. That's the thing you've got to understand about him.
He'd no feeling in it at all. I'd stopped being useful and moving me was a bother, so he left me for the cold the way you'd leave a chair you didn't fancy carrying down the stairs.
" My thumb had found the gap where my finger used to be without me sending it there.
"He had eleven women shot at their machines because it was faster than walking them out.
He shot my da in a doorway and stepped over him and took my granddad's tools off the bench while my da was still warm on the floor. "
Niko had gone very quiet.
"So no, he doesn't scare me the way you mean," I said.
"He doesn't shout. He doesn't enjoy it. He's worse than that.
He's a man who does his sums, and people are only ever a number in the wrong column, and he'll cross them out without a flicker and sleep like a bairn after.
" I looked up at him. "And Aleksi walked into that man's schedule a day early because he wanted to look good for Nikita.
So, aye, Niko. I'm frightened. You should be too. "
Niko was quiet for a long moment. He looked at his own face in the mirror like it belonged to somebody he used to know.
"What would you have me do, Fin?" he said. "This is his operation. Nikita made that clear. I’m not…" He stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath through his nose. “I’m not the man I used to be.”
"No," I said. "You're not. And whose fault is that?"
His eyes came to mine in the glass.
"You were the man over the whole of Paris," I said.
"Aleksi told me. Pakhan, the lot. And now you're down the end of his hall waiting for some prick named étienne to ring and tell you it's safe to come home.
He's never going to ring, Niko, because the longer you sit here being no trouble to anybody, the longer he keeps your chair warm with his own arse in it.
" I stood up from the bed. "You want to know what you can do?
You can stop waiting. That's the whole of it.
You've spent however long it's been sitting on your hands letting other men decide your life for you, same as you're doing right this minute while your brother bleeds somewhere you've decided you can't find. "
"You don't know that he's—"
"I don't know that he's not. And neither do you.
And you'd rather sit here not knowing, admiring your pretty shoes, pick up a phone and be a problem for somebody.
" I let that land. "That's why you're on the sofa and not the throne, pet. Not the accounts. Not étienne. You. You act like yer ma raised you to be somebody’s bitch. Did she?"
Niko’s jaw muscles worked and his face hardened.
Then he closed the shoebox and slid it into the bottom drawer of the vanity, and out of the top one he pulled a sleek black Glock.
He racked the slide. “Nikolai Laskin is nobody's bitch.” Then he turned to me.
“Go take your shot, Fin. We're going to go paint this town red.”
I waited in the living room. When he came out, he was in a suit and gloss, and I said nothing about either. Mr. K wasn't worthy of the red soles, anyway. I followed him out the front door, where Gregori had parked himself in the hall. He stood when he saw Nikolai was armed. "Mr. Laskin—"
"Bring the car around, Grigori." The Parisian had gone clean out of his voice. "We are going to find my brother."
Gregori frowned. "Aleksi told me to keep him here." He nodded to me. "His words. Keep the boy in the apartment."
Niko gave Gregori a bored look and then reached out to pick some lint off his lapel. “Gregori, darling. Your loyalty to my brother is impressive. I respect it. I do. But I’d hate to have to go to Nikita and tell him you refused a direct order from his third in command.”
Gregori’s face twisted. “Third in command?”
“That’s right. Or did you think I’d settle for something less? In Ohio? In this economy?”
Gregori looked at me as if he expected me to help him.
I shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I’m not a bloody Russian.”
Gregori held out for another second. Then his shoulders slumped, and he reached for his keys. “Fine. I’ll drive you, but if Aleksi feels like taking it out of someone’s ass, it’s going to be yours, Fin.”
“Aye, as it should be,” I agreed.
He wrinkled his nose. “Ew. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Too late, Gregori.”
He sighed, defeated. "And where exactly am I driving you?" Gregori said, thumbing the lift button. "You want to find him, fine. Columbus is a big fucking city, in case you boys didn't notice."
"You staged the crew tonight," Niko said. "You know where they went out from."
"I know where they staged. A depot off Joyce." Gregori's jaw worked. "And I know the job was out by Winchester, because I'm the one who books the cars and somebody had to know how far to fuel them. A private strip. That's all I've got. I wasn't told the rest."
"Then we start at Winchester."
"It's forty minutes. More, this time of night."
"Then stop talking and go pull the car up."
We went down in the mirrored lift, the three of us, and none of us spoke.
I watched the floors count down. Niko stood with the Glock tucked away under his suit and his face gone smooth and far off, and Gregori stared at the doors with his jaw set like a man driving to his own disciplinary hearing.
And I was in the middle of them in borrowed clothes, no weapon, nine fingers, going out into a city the size of a country to look for a man who hadn't sent me a word.
The dread had stopped climbing. That was the strange part.
Somewhere between the bedroom and the lift it had gone quiet and cold and settled, the way it used to settle in the warehouse before a long night, when there was nothing left to be frightened of because the thing was already happening and all you could do was meet it.
I'd told Aleksi I'd be his trophy wife, and I’d meant it. I’d be damned if I let that surly bastard die before he found the stones to put a proper ring on me, finger or no.