22. Margot
MARGOT
In my defense, the cat was not going to rescue himself.
I have turned the decision over a hundred times since, and it holds up worse with every turn, and I would make it again tonight without a single heartbeat of hesitation, which is my whole character folded into one sentence.
Daniil left the safe house a little after dark.
He told me to stay. He told me the door would hold.
He told me a great many calm and reasonable things that added up, underneath all the calm, to sit still and be kept, and he said them in the voice that has been talking me out of my own better judgment for weeks. I lasted about two hours.
Then I made the mistake of thinking. I thought about Hemingway, alone in a dark shop that armed men had already walked through once, waiting on the register for a woman who was not coming back.
I thought about the only handwritten copy of the book I have been bleeding into for a year, sitting in a drawer in the back room, one flood or one careless match away from never having existed at all.
I keep backups of nothing, because I write longhand like a woman born in the wrong century, and I have always called that charming.
Tonight it felt like a countdown. So I put on my coat, and I left a note that said back soon, which is the exact kind of note people leave right before a documentary gets made about them.
Here is what no one tells you about breaking into your own bookshop.
It is still breaking in. It counts, believe me, and doubly so when the man who rebuilt your locks holds the only key that will turn them, and you are reduced to folding yourself in through the delivery window at the back with a tote bag over your shoulder, like a cat burglar who shops at the farmers market.
I land badly and knock over precisely one thing, and the crash of it in the dark shop is loud enough to wake the genuinely dead, and I freeze and wait for the sky to come down and it declines to.
The shop breathes around me, all cold paper and colder radiator and the specific hush of a room that has recently been frightened.
I do not turn on a light. I have learned that much from him, at least.
Hemingway is exactly where I knew he would be, enthroned on the register, and he greets his own daring rescue with the slow blink of a landlord who has decided to be disappointed in me specifically.
"I came back for you," I whisper, which earns me nothing at all, because gratitude is a language he has never once troubled to learn.
"There are men with guns who want to hurt the woman who feeds you.
I'm aware of the irony. Get in the bag."
He does not get in the bag. Of course he does not.
I have loved this animal for a year and a half and he has never once done a thing I asked on the first request, and a citywide manhunt is apparently not the occasion he has chosen to break the habit.
I gather eleven pounds of unbothered gray contempt against my chest, and he permits it the way royalty permits a nuisance, and on the second attempt he consents to the tote, where he settles in among my keys and the last of my dignity as though he has been waiting all night for the service to finally improve.
The manuscript is where I left it, a fat rubber-banded brick of a thing in the bottom drawer, and I zip it into the inside of my coat against my ribs, where I can feel the corners of a whole year of my life pressing into me, and for one stupid, warm second I feel like a woman who has gotten away with something.
That is when the headlights slide across the front window, slow and searching.
Headlights do not move like that unless the car behind them has decided your quiet street is worth a second look, and I have written enough dangerous men to know the difference between a car going somewhere and a car hunting.
I drop behind the poetry table with my heart trying to climb out through my teeth, and I watch two shapes get out of the car and stand on my sidewalk, unhurried, considering my dark shop the way you consider a room you have already decided to walk into.
And then a hand closes over my mouth from behind, and my soul briefly leaves the premises, and a voice I would know from the far side of my own grave breathes directly into my ear, low and level and humming with a fury he is holding on the shortest possible leash.
"Do not make a sound. It is me." There is a pause that plainly costs him something.
"We are going to discuss this. We are going to discuss it at considerable length. "
He gets us out the back the way water gets out of a cracked glass, without a sound, the cat and the manuscript and the reckless woman all extracted in under a minute while two of Grigori's men try my front door and discover, thanks to his vault-grade paranoia, that it does not open for them either.
We are three streets away in his car before I have finished being afraid of the first thing, and that is the moment the fear turns, as it always does with me, into fury.
"You followed me," I say.
"I came back to an open door and an empty room and a note.
" He does not look at me. His hands sit very still on the wheel, which I have learned is the most dangerous thing his hands ever do.
"Back soon. That is what you wrote. Do you know what an open door and a note say to a man in my position?
They do not say back soon. They say taken. "
"That's the whole reason I left the note."
"The note is the reason I nearly put my hand through a wall.
" Now he looks at me, one short flick of the eyes, and there is something underneath the anger I have not seen on him before, something standing in a room with the lights switched off.
"I thought they had you. The whole way here I thought they had you, and I did the arithmetic on what I would do about it, and you do not want to know the number I arrived at.
You do not want to be loved by a man who keeps that answer loaded. "
For one second the fight drains straight out of me, because that is the most naked thing he has ever said to me, and it lands precisely where he meant it to land.
And then I remember that a beautiful and terrible sentence is still a wall when a man is using it to keep me from asking the next question, and it comes back into me twice as strong, because I have spent my whole life being disarmed by exactly this kind of line, and I am so tired of how reliably it works.
"For a cat," he says, when I have nothing ready, and the anger slides back up over the other thing like a shade being drawn. "You walked into the one building in this city they are certain to be watching. For a cat and a stack of paper."
"That cat is the last living thing that still remembers my grandmother's voice.
That stack of paper is the only thing I've ever made that is completely mine, that nobody gets to rename or reprint or file under a property.
Don't sit there and rank my loves for me.
Don't you dare tell me which of them are allowed to be worth the risk. "
"You do not get to die for a cat." Each word arrives carrying its own small weight. "You do not get to die for a book, or a shop, or a point you are trying to prove to me in the dark. You do not get to die at all. That is the arrangement."
"There's that word again." I am louder than the car now, louder than I meant to get.
"The arrangement. You say it like I signed something in blood.
I didn't agree to be a thing you keep alive.
I agreed to trust you for now, and for now is wearing thin, because trust was supposed to run in both directions, and somehow mine is the only kind that ever leaves this house. "
"You're seventeen years older than me." I watch the number land, because we have both been so careful never to set it down between us out loud.
"And somewhere in all those extra years you decided they made you right.
Right about where I go. Right about what I'm allowed to risk.
Right about when I'm permitted to be frightened and when I'm just being hysterical.
You don't get to run my entire life because you've had more practice at fear than I have. "
"I am not running your life." His voice has dropped into the flat, level place it goes when everything under it is on fire. "I am trying to keep you alive long enough to have one worth running."
"Do you even hear that those are the same sentence when you say them?
" And there it is, the thing I have been circling since the night he rebuilt my locks and I let a dangerous man make my shop safer and decided the feeling was romance.
"That is the whole problem. Your protecting me and your controlling me are wearing the exact same coat, and I've lost the ability to tell them apart, and I'm beginning to think you lost it a long time before I did.
You keep me safe by keeping me small. You keep me breathing by keeping me in a room.
At some point safe is just a kinder word for cage, and you are the only one holding a key, and you have not once noticed that the shop and the safe house and your own arms have all started to lock from the same side. "
He does not answer straightaway, and the not-answering is its own kind of answer, and it makes me braver and more reckless than any amount of his fury ever could.
"Here's what I know," I say, quieter now, which is worse, and we both feel that it is worse.
"You have been lying to me since the night you walked into my shop and bought a dead woman's poems. Not small lies.
The kind with whole rooms behind them. I've let it go, again and again, because the lies kept me breathing and because I wanted you more than I wanted the truth, and I am ashamed of precisely none of that.
But I am done wanting you more than I want the truth.
If I am going to keep putting my life in your hands, I need to know exactly whose they are. "
He pulls the car to the curb and turns to face me fully, and for the first time since I have known him he wears the look of a man about to set down something he has carried so long that his hands have grown around the shape of it.
Whatever it is, it is enormous. I can see it filling him up to the back of his teeth.
"Stop managing me," I say, "and tell me the truth.
All of it." He nods, once, slow, a man laying down a thing he swore to himself he never would, and he opens his mouth to give me the whole of it at last, the thing that has stood behind his eyes since the first night he let me see his face.
And his phone rings. He looks at the screen, and the confession dies in his throat, and I watch the other man climb back into his body in the space of a single breath.
It is Grigori. He has found the safe house.