CHAPTER TWO
?
MARY
The rain caught us in the middle of the MacArthur Causeway, hard and flat and sideways, and the wipers went to their fastest setting and stayed there. Nicolas’s phone lit the leather between us and he answered it without saying hello.
“Miss Mary Warren’s room is ready. I’ll need to measure her tonight.”
The voice came out of the speaker with all its corners still on it. Corinne’s recipe book lay on my knees in its canvas bag. He said one word back to her in Russian and put the phone facedown on his thigh. So the house knew my name. My hands went cold on the canvas.
“Who was that?”
“Yelena Baranova. She runs the house.”
“She runs the house and she’s waiting up past midnight to measure a stranger.”
“She waits up. That part’s hers. The measuring’s mine,” Nicolas said.
The tire note changed under us, two blunt expansion joints, then smooth concrete. The bay was black on both sides and there is nowhere on that road to stop a car.
“Where is my brother right now?” I said. “I don’t mean where he’s going. Right now.”
“In an office behind the cage at the Coliseum, with a sandwich he hasn’t eaten.”
“You’re sure about the sandwich.”
“I’m sure about the sandwich.”
Nobody invents a sandwich. I believed him through two passes of the wipers and could not make it come out as relief or as a threat.
“Two point four million dollars of my brother’s debt, and you send a woman to measure my waist,” I said.
“Yes.”
I turned to look at him instead of the water. “What am I to you people? Give me the word for it, whatever the word is.”
“You’re in my car, crossing a bridge, at twenty to one in the morning.”
“That’s a location. I asked you a question.”
“You did. I’ll answer it upstairs, standing up, in front of my brothers, so you don’t have to take it from me secondhand,” Nicolas said.
The rain stopped, the wipers scraped dry glass, and the road went from silver back to black.
?
The garage was underlit and smelled of brake dust, under a glass tower at the north end of Ocean Drive. Nicolas’s driver stayed with the car and never said a word. Nicolas walked toward the elevator, and I stopped six feet short of it.
“In writing. All of it. Before I get in that elevator,” I said.
Nicolas turned around. Nobody grabbed my arm and nobody moved in behind me, and that was worse, because somebody had already done the arithmetic on where a woman goes from a garage at one in the morning.
“All of it,” Nicolas said. “You said all of it.”
“In writing. All of it. Before I get in that elevator.”
“By morning, notarized, in front of a woman you pick yourself.”
“That’s not now.”
He didn’t blink. “No.”
Nicolas held the elevator with the back of his right hand, the one with the old burn across it. A card reader sat beside the buttons, and the top button had no light in it.
“Then give me a card of my own,” I said.
“No. Ask me the next one.”
“Does this elevator go down as easy as it goes up?”
“For me.”
Nicolas put his hand out between us, palm up, and did not say what for. I gave him my phone, because the other way that goes is a man’s hand in my back pocket. He thumbed the list once.
“Who’d you call at nine o’clock tonight?”
“The gas company, twice. They didn’t pick up either time.”
It went into his jacket beside his own and stayed there.
And I got in. I had to keep Danny’s paper still, and if I didn’t walk into that elevator on my own two feet it started moving again tonight. I have never been angrier at anybody than I was at myself.
The car climbed without a sound and let out one soft tone at the top. The readout over the door said 51.
Three shallow steps led from the vestibule down into the great room and kitchen. The east bedroom hall stayed on the higher level. One floor, two heights, and more room than the whole building I had left behind.
There is no front door up there. The elevator opens into a vestibule, lit at ankle height, the whole city on three sides of the glass. It was too warm, and I had been cold since eleven.
Rian stood inside the doorway with his sleeves rolled above the elbow.
Six feet four of him, red-brown hair cropped, freckles, hands broken and reset.
Blood on one cuff. He looked at me the way a man looks at weather he has been waiting on, and I felt it up the side of my face like heat off an open oven.
“Huh.”
“That’s it? Huh?”
“I had money on you screaming.”
“The night’s young.” I put the bag down against the wall where I could still see it. “You’ve got blood on your sleeve. I’ve got salt and cold water, I do this for a living—”
“It’s not mine.”
Rian put no sentence after it, and the room went on around it like a chair nobody trips over. A laugh came up out of me before I had a vote in it.
Rian’s jaw moved. “What.”
“Nothing. It’s the delivery.”
“I’m not doing a delivery.”
“That’s the delivery.”
Rian looked at Nicolas like Nicolas had carried a raccoon in off the street, then pushed his sleeve over the cuff, which helped nothing.
“What happened to your hands?”
“Boxing. Then not boxing.”
“That’s the shortest answer anybody’s given me all night, and there’s been competition.”
Rian looked at the ceiling. “You’ll get shorter ones. Ask Luca if you want the long version of anything.”
The kitchen island is one slab of black stone with a chip off the near corner, and it was warm under my palm. I kept putting my hand back on it.
Luca sat on the edge of it with a leather folder and a black fountain pen lying across it. Green eyes. The only one of the three who smiled at me.
“I’m Luca. I’m the one who’s going to be kind to you, and you should find that more frightening than him.”
“Which him?”
“Either one. It’s a small house.” He turned the folder square to the edge of the stone. “The bratva my father brought over doesn’t exist anymore. What’s left is three brothers and a great deal of paper.”
“That’s a sales pitch.”
“It’s a disclosure. In this house nobody’s going to lie to you about what’s in front of you, though I’d say that not lying and telling you everything are two entirely different—”
“Stop. What does pakhan mean?”
Rian answered from the doorway without looking up. “It means nobody in this building tells him no. Including me.”
“I was getting there,” Luca said.
“You were three streets away.”
Rian made a sound that was not quite a laugh. Yelena came in through the swing door with a yellow cloth tape over one shoulder and looked at none of us.
Nicolas took his jacket off and did not sit down.
“Ninety days.”
The words went down on the stone between us and nobody picked them up.
“This address. My name over you in this city. The family’s protection, which is not a courtesy, it’s a wall. And for ninety days you’re mine, and the word means what it sounds like.”
Something low in me answered before I had an opinion about it, a pulse deep between my thighs at a word said out loud in front of his brothers and his housekeeper.
I stood there and let three men hold me in their eyes at once, and not one of them looked down and not one of them looked away, and I have spent twenty-nine years being looked at in the other two ways.
I should have wanted the floor to open under me. What I wanted was that word on the stone again.
Yelena went on folding a cloth. Luca capped a pen that was already capped. Rian did not move. That was how I knew it had been settled in some other room, before the car, before the bakery, before me.
“And if I’d said no in my own kitchen?”
“You didn’t.”
That was the door, and I was on the inside of it.
“You’ve gone the color of the counter,” Nicolas said. “Say it.”
“There’s a bed made up,” I said. “Somebody put corners on a bed for me before I knew I was coming, and there’s a woman awake at two in the morning with a tape, and my brother’s got a sandwich he isn’t eating, and I haven’t eaten since four o’clock, and that’s the part I can’t—” I stopped.
“That’s the wrong order. I know it’s the wrong order. ”
Nicolas stayed on his feet. “Tell me which part of this frightens you. I’ll either stop it or make it worse, but I’m not leaving you to guess.”
It was the first thing anybody had offered me all night.
My phone went off in his jacket, two buzzes and a third. Nicolas read the screen and put it back.
“Who was that?”
“Nobody you need tonight.”
?
Yelena took a nightdress out of a hall drawer and put it in my hands.
A drawer, not a closet. Plain cotton, washed soft, somebody’s and nobody’s.
I changed in the guest room, and when I came out she lifted my kitchen clothes off my arm without asking and carried them away, and I had nothing of my own left on my skin.
They had smelled like the shop. She did not speak again that night.
She put my arms out with two fingers under each wrist. The tape came off her pocket warm, warmer than my own skin, and the warmth was what I had not braced for. It went around my waist twice, once over the cotton and once with her thumb under it, and the number stayed on the tape.
“This is the most anybody’s touched me all year,” I said, “and it’s a housekeeper with a tape measure, so let’s all sit with that.”
Luca said, “I’d volunteer, but my brother would take my hands off at the wrist and I’d be writing with my teeth.”
Nicolas did not look at him. “Luca.”
The tape came up under my breasts and closed. My nipples had gone tight against the borrowed cotton before it got there, and there was no argument to be made about that to anybody standing in that kitchen.
Rian was in the doorway, looking at my nipples through a borrowed nightdress at two in the morning and not pretending he was looking anywhere else, and Luca smiled down at the floor, which is the polite thing, and did it a second too late.
Rian brought his eyes up to my face and took his time about it. “You can put your arms down. I’d still be looking.”
“Then I’ll leave them up, and you can keep at it, and we’ll find out which one of us gets tired.”
I kept them out. It cost me. My arms shook toward the end, my face stayed hot, I did not cover anything, and nobody in that room had been asked to leave, and nobody left.
When she was done I put my hand out for the tape. Yelena had it around her own neck before I got there. She won. I want it noted that I tried.
Here is the worst thing. My hands were steady. My heart was going the way it goes when the timer reads ninety seconds and the caramel is the color I want it—up, and not sideways.
I had planned to be frightened and rehearsed it in the car. What I had instead was the flat, terrible ease of a woman who has carried a family alone for a long time and set it down for somebody else to pick up. I did not have to decide anything tonight, and my body knew it before I did.
I set Corinne’s recipe book on the shelf under the island myself, spine out. Nobody helped me.
Luca came around the stone, set the leather folder down in front of me, and put his hand flat on it. The fountain pen went into his breast pocket.
“This is the contract. You’ll read it in the morning, on this stone, and you can put a line through anything you don’t—”
“When was it written?”
Luca looked at the folder and not at me.
“I wrote every page of it last night, and I have not slept, and I’d do it again.”