29. Epilogue #3
"Eight years old. I found my mother dead, and the first thing I felt, before the rest of it, before I even understood, was that I was glad it wasn't Pop.
Because Pop was the one I wanted. He was never there, and I wanted him, and she was always there and I—" He stopped.
His jaw worked. "She was always there, Fin.
And I'd have traded her for him in a heartbeat at eight years old.
I got my wish thirty years too late and turned out I'd have traded him right back. "
There it was. The thing under the cold. Not the murders, not the warehouse, not any of the blood he'd shown me without flinching. This. A boy who'd loved the wrong parent because the wrong parent made him work for it, and had hated himself for it for thirty-two years.
"It still hurts," he said, like he was admitting to something shameful. "I thought it'd stop. I'm forty fucking years old and it still—" He pressed the heel of his hand against his chest. "Here. It doesn't stop."
"No," I said. "It doesnae."
I didn't tell him it would stop, because it wouldn't, and he'd have known I was lying. Lying to Aleksi at his father's grave was a poor way to start a marriage.
So I did the only thing that was true. I put my bad hand over his, the one still pressed to his chest. The ring he'd given me that morning sat dark against his knuckles.
"Ye know," I said, after a while, "for a man who cannae say a soft word to save his life, ye've a terrible habit of saying the softest things in the worst places."
"Shut up, Fin."
"Make me." I squeezed the hand. "Come on. Up off that knee before it seizes and I've to carry ye down the hill in front of yer whole family. That'd ruin yer reputation, that would."
By the time we came down the hill, EJ was sitting on the bonnet of the car with his tie off and his collar open, declaring his love for everyone present in slurred and increasing detail. The bottle was most of the way gone. Niko sat beside him, looking enormously pleased with his work.
"Aleksi!" EJ swung round and nearly went off the car. Gregori caught him by the shoulder without looking. "Aleksi. Mr. Laskin. Brother. Can I call you brother? I'm gonna call you brother."
"You're drunk."
"I'm a Laskin," EJ said, with the deep gravity of the very drunk, "and Laskins drink badly and in great quantities. Niko said."
“Right. Now who’s going to drive you home, you big French idiot?”
Niko opened his mouth to answer and hiccupped instead.
“I can take them,” Gregori offered. “That is, if you don’t mind driving the other car back, sir.”
"Take them," Aleksi said. "Get the kid a bucket before he's sick on the upholstery. I'll bring the other car."
Gregori helped Niko into the back seat, where he carried on a slurred conversation with himself in French, and folded EJ in beside him still declaring his love for the family, the vodka, the state of Ohio, and at one point the tree on the hill.
Then he pulled down the gravel track, careful as a hearse, and it was quiet again.
Aleksi held the other car door for me. The jacket was already laid across the back seat.
"Home, then?" I said.
"You hungry?"
"I could eat."
He shut my door and came round, and got in beside me. Then he reached into the back seat one-handed and dropped something soft and heavy in my lap.
I knew it before I looked. My hands knew it. Waxed canvas gone dark at the corners, my granddad's initials burned into the strap end, the weight of every tool sitting exactly where it had always sat.
"It was in the hold of his plane," Aleksi said, eyes out the windshield. "Tagged like luggage. Kostya's men found it Tuesday."
I undid the strap with nine fingers and there they were. The awls. The pricking irons. My da's half-moon knife, still stropped, because the bastard who stole them had at least known what they were worth.
"Aleksi."
"Don't make it a thing."
"It's a thing, ye great daft—" My voice gave out. I held the roll on my lap with both hands, the way he'd laid the jacket across his da's stone.
"And when you can talk," he said, "there's a commission going. Dmitri's people get something from us. I thought a case for a kit like his. If you’d make it."
"Aye," I said when I could. "Aye, I'll make it."
"There's a place I want to stop first." He put the car into gear. "That shop on the east side. The one you kept going on about. The bridle leather, the English stuff."
I went still in the seat.
"I'm no a charity case, Aleksi."
"Didn't say you were. Said I'm buying my husband some leather." He pulled out onto the county road. "Thursday you're a Laskin. Laskins have nice things. Get used to it."
And God help me—after the grave, after the ring, after a dead man's jacket and a wound that wouldn't close—the thing that got me, the thing that put the sting back behind my eyes, was a vor offering to buy me good bridle leather on the drive home from his father's grave.
I couldn't say no to that. I've never in my life been able to say no to good leather.
"...What's the place called?" I asked.
He smiled, the bastard, because he knew he had me.
But the joke was on him. He’d had me since the first.
What more of Fin and Aleksi?