CHAPTER NINE
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VICTORIA
The prepaid was face-up on the long table, ringing, with a photograph already open on the screen behind the call.
Somebody had typed a caption under the picture. RUSSO, V.
My own name, last first, the way a file gets labeled. Victoria Russo, half past seven on a Friday morning, looking at a page out of my grandmother’s book on a phone Marcus had brought me before dawn on Thursday.
Ruled lines, brown ink, and a hand I would have known in the dark.
I answered it, because not answering it would have been worse.
“Good morning, Ms. Russo. I hope they are keeping you warm.”
The fog had come up the Ironline in the night and stopped at the height of a man’s chest. Through the roll-up door the yard looked sawed in half.
“How did you get this number.”
“I would rather speak about the photograph,” he said. “You have seen the first one. There is a second.”
The phone buzzed against my ear, small and polite, twice.
“Ten days. The equinox.”
I put my free hand on the table to keep it somewhere.
“I am not asking you to carry anything,” he said. “I am asking you to stand in a room and put your hand on a page.”
“No.”
“You had it in your office. Why send notices to our gate?”
Out in the fog a gull came down onto the roll-up door and screamed at nothing.
“A box is not a release,” he said. “I require your hand through my name, at Sparrow Point on the twenty-second. Your friends require their livelihoods. We can satisfy both requirements.”
“I want my name struck from that book so I can taste the world again, and your friends’ lives are a price I am prepared to pay.”
“You are not obliged to decide this morning. I have been patient for a very long time, Ms. Russo, and I intend to be patient for the rest of it.”
He never got louder. He never got faster. He talked the way a man reads a menu he already knows, and behind me the forge blower ticked as it cooled, and gulls went over the roof, and I could taste iron along the back of my tongue.
“Please look at the second photograph. Not now. Later, when you are alone.”
Then the line was dead, and it had been dead a while before I noticed.
Marcus came around the end of the long table with his coffee still in his hand and his rings catching the caged light. He stopped a step short of me instead of closing it.
“Phone.”
My fingers had locked down around it and stayed there.
He took it out of my fist, one finger at a time, and said nothing at all while he did it. Then he put it to his ear, listened to nothing at all, and set it down face-up between us like a card he had decided not to play.
“Somebody sold him a number you got yesterday. That’s a person, little courier, and people cost money, and I’ve got money.”
“And then what.”
“Then I go have a conversation.” He was already lifting his jacket off the back of the chair. “Don’t touch those pictures till I’m back.”
Then, over my head, to the room: “She doesn’t go past the gate today.”
“Copy,” Bex said from the far end of the bar.
Nobody put the question to me. The gate is the only way out of this yard, and both of them knew that while they were saying it, and neither one of them looked at me once, and something low down in me sat back and liked it.
He went out through the roll-up door with that long flat walk of his. Out in the yard a bike caught, and somebody rolled the throttle over twice and let it drop again. The panther in him never showed anywhere except in how he crossed a room, and it showed then.
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So I did what I do. I inventoried.
Tuesday. Harborlight Tower, the sixty-third floor, a room with a window wall and twelve dead orchids on the sill. The gray book in its case, the case in my two hands, my name on the manifest in my own writing.
And the receipt. Mireille had folded the receipt around my tag; I had moved both into my jacket before leaving the apartment. I took the paper out now and flattened it beside the phone.
It had been signed. It had not been signed with a pen.
It was a rubber stamp. Black, a little off-square, the loop of the E filled solid where the rubber had worn down.
I had held that paper and I had not looked at it.
“That’s his stamp on my own receipt, and I stood there and—”
Nobody answered it. I had said it out loud to an empty shop, and I did not finish it.
I turned the receipt over. A second copy lay behind it, thin enough that I had mistaken the two for one. My own name occupied the same box on both. I could not make the routing codes agree.
I photographed them and sent them to Marcus. CHECK THE RECEIVING PARTY, I wrote. NOT JUST THE TIME.
The coffee had a skin on it by then. I stood up to carry the cup to the sink, because carrying a cup to a sink is a thing a person can do with her hands.
I got two steps.
The cup went down on the tabletop before I chose to put it down. The handle was wet where it had slipped through my fingers, and it rang — one clear note, like somebody striking a bell in an empty church.
I flattened my hand on the wood. It kept going anyway. It jumped against the table like it belonged to some other woman who was busy.
Bex came through with a case of bottles on her hip, saw it, and did not break stride.
“Sit down before you fall down, and don’t apologize to me, I swear to God.”
I sat down. I did not apologize.
“Should I go get somebody?”
“No.”
“Not offering it again,” she said, and started putting bottles up on the rail.
“Bex.”
“Mm.”
“How many of them know why that notice came here?”
“Adrian, Luca, Marcus. Me now.” Bex put a bottle on the rack. “The cage clerk says it’s a storage reservation, not a delivery. Marcus says reservations don’t usually threaten people.”
“That wasn’t the question I asked.”
“It was the answer, though. You just wanted a longer one.” A bottle went up. “Honey, you’re sleeping in a house full of shifters and you’re standing here white to the lips over a telephone.”
“It’s not the telephone.”
“I know what it’s not.”
She set the case on the bar and went to the roll-up door instead, because something was moving out in the white.
A van came down Rosewood at a walking pace with its lights off. Crane Meridian on the panel, gray on gray. It did not slow and it did not stop, and at the end of the block it came up on the throttle and turned.
“Maryland tag,” Bex said, loud, to a room with nobody else in it. “8LH 4291. Somebody write that down.”
“Adrian still isn’t talking to me.”
“Adrian isn’t talking to anybody. He’s up on the roof being the alpha at a bunch of fog.” She picked her case back up. “Go stand by the forge. You’re the color of the floor.”
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The concrete under the forge shelter was colder than the air in the yard and it was still the only warm room in the building, because Luca had the ward-forge raked down to coals and the coals were breathing.
He was working the rake one-handed. Right-handed.
The left arm stayed in tight against his ribs, over the tape, over the hole a nail gun had put through the meat of that shoulder.
He could not raise it past the bottom of his own ribs and he had not said so, and I had watched him not say it all morning.
He lifted his head when I came through and scented the air once, the way all of them do and none of them mention, and whatever he got off me he kept.
He looked at the cup in my hands before he looked at my face.
“Give me that.”
He did not pry it loose. He put his whole hand over the whole of it and mine came away, and he set it on the horn of the anvil like a tool he was finished with.
“You’ve been holding that cup for an hour and you haven’t drunk any of it.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sure.”
He did not ask what was wrong. He did not ask anything. He stood in front of me and let me shake, and then he laid his right palm over my sternum, over the zipper of my jacket, and left it there.
“I’m putting my hand here. That’s all I’m doing yet.”
I caught the front of his shirt and drew him down. His mouth found mine, and I stopped pretending I had only come to ask about the photographs.
Behind him, the shed door swung shut. Through its wired glass I could see Karim taking the next watch. I left my jacket and the rest of my top layers on the hook beside the bench.
Yet.
Everything under his palm went loose before I had an opinion about it. The shaking did not stop. It changed into something that ran instead of rattled.
“Up,” he said, and turned me by the hip, and put me on the workbench.
Not lifted. Put. The bench edge bit the backs of my thighs through the denim and his mouth came in under my jaw, beard first, hot.
“Hands flat. Leave them there, trouble, I’ll tell you when.”
I put my hands flat on the bench.
He got my boots off one at a time. Then the button, then the zipper, then my jeans and my underwear together, dragged down my legs with one hand and no hurry in him whatsoever, and he took long enough about it that I heard myself breathing over the coals.
“You’re going to come before I’m inside you. That’s the order it’s happening in.”
His thumb found my clit and took its time about it.
“That’s the top of it. Right there. I’m going to hold it exactly like that, and you’re going to hate me for about a minute.”
“Luca —”
“I know,” he said, and changed nothing at all.
I got my head back against the pegboard behind me. “That’s not — you can’t just —”
“I can.” His thumb went around my clit again, the same width, the same speed, a man tightening something by feel. “Hands flat, trouble.”
He told me what he was doing while he did it. Where his thumb was sitting. How wet I already was on his fingers. What he was going to do about it and in what order, all of it in the voice he uses for talking to an engine that will not start.
I argued, and the argument came apart in my own mouth.
He slid two fingers down the outside of my pussy and back up, slick to the knuckle, and settled on my clit again without ever losing it once.
“There. Now you’ve got it. Don’t you go quiet on me.”