16. Tasha #2
We went like that for the better part of an hour, wrist escapes into strikes, strikes into a clumsy shove-and-pivot he called "getting off the line" that I mostly executed by falling sideways in a manner I chose to describe to myself as intentional.
My shoulders ached. My hair had come half loose from its clip and stuck damp to the back of my neck.
Somewhere in there I stopped thinking about Fedya as Grisha's easygoing coworker who whistled while he did perimeter checks and started thinking of him as someone genuinely good at what he did, patient in a way that surprised me, correcting my footing with two fingers instead of words half the time because, he said, my body would remember it faster than my brain would.
"Last one," he announced, rolling his shoulders. "This is the one everybody wants to learn and nobody's actually ready for. Somebody's got you around the middle from behind. Show me what you'd do."
I had approximately no idea what I would do, which I told him honestly, and he grinned like that was exactly the answer he'd been hoping for.
"Good, means we get to start from zero." He came around behind me, wrapped both arms loosely around my middle, and talked me through it slow, weight low, chin down, a stomp to the instep, an elbow back into the ribs, hips dropping and turning all in one motion until, in theory, I'd be facing him instead of pinned.
That was the theory, anyway. In practice, the first three times I overcorrected and ended up twisted into something that felt less like a self-defense maneuver and more like an argument I was losing with my own knees.
The fourth time, I got the sequence right, dropped my weight, turned through my hips the way he'd shown me, and put enough real force behind the turn that Fedya, laughing, let himself go down rather than fight it, and in the general chaos of both of us moving too fast for the amount of control either of us had, I ended up flat on my back on the mat with the wind knocked half out of me and Fedya sprawled half beside me, both of us staring up at a sky gone bright and cloudless above the fence line.
"Okay," I wheezed, "that was not the plan."
"That was an excellent plan. You just haven't learned the part where you stay upright afterward.
" He propped himself up on one elbow, grinning down at me, entirely unbothered by having just been thrown by a woman he outweighed by fifty pounds.
"For what it's worth, that turn was textbook.
You just don't have your balance under it yet. Give it three more sessions."
"Three more sessions and you'll have taught me to actually hurt someone."
"That's the whole idea, boss's girl." He said it easily, without any weight behind it, the kind of nickname that had clearly already made its rounds through the security office whether I'd heard it yet or not.
That was the moment I noticed Grisha standing at the edge of the yard, arms folded, leaning against the chain-link with an expression I couldn't fully read from flat on my back, somewhere between amusement and that specific unreadable quiet he got when he was cataloguing a scene for later.
I had no idea how long he'd been there. Long enough, apparently, to have watched at least the part where I ended up horizontal.
"How long has he been standing there?" I asked Fedya.
"No idea. He does that. Ghosts up on people.
" Fedya scrambled to his feet first and offered me a hand, hauling me upright with more strength than the gesture needed, and by the time I was standing and brushing dirt off the back of my jeans, Grisha had pushed off the fence and was walking toward us at an unhurried pace that did nothing to disguise how closely he'd been watching.
"She's got a good wrist escape," Fedya reported, entirely too pleased with himself. "Strike needs work but the instinct's there. We were just getting to takedowns when she put me on my back."
"She put you on your back," Grisha repeated, one eyebrow lifting a fraction.
"In fairness, I let her."
"You did not let me," I said. "You absolutely did not let me. I felt your center of gravity go, and it was real. Don't take that from me."
"Okay, mostly I let her." Fedya held both hands up, grinning at Grisha with the easy defenselessness of a man who had never once been afraid of his boss and clearly never would be.
"Look, boss, I'm sorry, I think I might have broken your girlfriend a little.
She's walking fine. Probably going to be sore tomorrow.
I promise I was gentle about the parts that count. "
"I'm not broken," I said, rolling one shoulder to prove it, which sent a small, honest twinge down through the joint that I decided not to mention. "I'm thoroughly beaten and extremely proud of myself."
Grisha looked at me for a long beat, taking in the dirt on my jeans, the hair stuck to my neck, the flush still sitting high in my cheeks from an hour of getting knocked around by a twenty-six-year-old who whistled while he worked, and something moved through him at the sight of it, warm enough that I felt it land somewhere low in my stomach even standing ten feet away in broad daylight.
"Good," he said simply. "Same time tomorrow, Fedya."
"You got it, boss." Fedya was already coiling up a loose length of rope from the corner of the mat, whistling something tuneless and cheerful under his breath, entirely unbothered by having just been dismissed with two words. "See you tomorrow, killer."
I did not see Sasha until later that afternoon, and I only caught the tail end of it, coming down the east hall with a folder of provenance photocopies under one arm and finding him and Grisha already deep in it outside the study, voices pitched low the way they went when the subject wasn't meant to travel far.
"Still just initials," Grisha was saying. "R.K., same mark as before, same hand as the ledger pages Tasha's grandfather kept. No name attached yet. We've run every combination the family records give us and none of them land clean."
"Then we work without a name," Sasha said.
His voice had none of its usual unhurried calm in it, though he kept it low enough that I doubted anyone two doors down would have caught the change.
"I'm not waiting for a name to start being careful.
Double the gate by nightfall. I want two more men on the drive and eyes on every vehicle that isn't already cleared, gala guest or not, starting tonight.
If whoever this is decides to get curious before we have a name to put to it, I'd rather have too many men standing around looking bored than not enough. "
"Already moving on it," Grisha said.
Sasha's gaze caught mine over Grisha's shoulder, and for just a second the controlled patriarch slipped enough that I saw something underneath it, not quite fear, but close enough to its neighborhood that it stayed with me the rest of the walk back to the cottage.
The light had gone that particular soft gold it only holds for a few minutes at the very end of the day, the kind that makes even the ordinary parts of the property look like something worth cataloguing, and I was thinking about nothing more complicated than a hot shower and my aching shoulder when I came around the last bend in the path and saw it sitting square in the middle of the cottage step.
It was a small box wrapped in plain brown paper, no return address, my name printed on top in block letters so careful they looked almost typed.
It sat there in the shadow the roofline threw across the step, and something about the stillness of it, the way it hadn't been left leaning against the door or tucked under the mat the way a delivery usually would be, made me stop three feet short of it and just look for a moment before I forced myself up the last two steps to pick it up.
It was lighter than I expected and colder, the paper faintly damp at one corner as though it had sat out since before the dew burned off, which meant it had been there since well before I'd left for the training yard that morning.
I carried it inside, set it on the small kitchen table under the window, and worked the tape loose with a thumbnail because I couldn't find scissors fast enough and some part of me, some part I didn't examine closely, didn't want to wait.
Inside, nested in a bed of tissue gone soft with age rather than care, lay a single tool.
I knew it the moment I saw it, the way you know your own handwriting.
It was a frame-opening spatula, narrow and slightly curved, its brass handle worn smooth along one edge where a thumb had pressed against it a thousand times, the blade end thinned almost to nothing, the exact instrument a restorer uses to ease a painting free of its frame without marking either.
It looked old, older than any tool I currently owned, the kind of thing that gets handed down, or taken.
Under it, folded once, lay a plain card with the same careful block printing as the address outside.
The Sparrow always did like a locked door, it read. Let's see what's really behind this one.
I stood very still in my own kitchen with the tissue paper crumpled in one fist and the cold brass tool lying flat against my palm, and the last thing my grandfather ever called me, a name he'd used only when we were alone, a name I hadn't heard or spoken or seen written anywhere since the week he died, sat there on the table in a stranger's careful hand as the gold light went out of the room around me.