Chapter Seven
HE DIDN'T COME down for two days.
On the third morning he opened the drawer of the bedside table for the foil sleeve and it was empty.
Sasha stood there holding it.
Not lost — empty. Six left in the strip and every one of them punched through from behind, the foil pressed back down flat, neat, deliberate, so that the sleeve had lain in that drawer for three days looking exactly like six days of grace.
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
He was very calm for about forty seconds. He noted the calm and understood what it was. Then his hands started and he put the sleeve down before he crushed it, because it was evidence, and he was the kind of person who thought evidence before he thought help.
Facts.
He'd taken Tuesday's. It was Friday. Two days missed and he had known, distantly, since yesterday afternoon — the flush at the back of the neck, the way his own skin had started to feel like an item of clothing that didn't fit. He'd put it down to the fight. It was not the fight.
Twelve hours. Ten, maybe. He had been late once before, in his twenties, and it had come on like weather: pressure dropping all day, and then all at once, and then nothing that anyone could reason with for three days.
Second fact. Somebody in this house had come into this room and done this with their hands.
Third fact, and this was the one that made him get up:
I am about to be, for seventy-two hours, exactly as helpless as everyone in this house has been imagining me since the first morning. And the person who arranged it is still here.
***
He found Matteo in the office. Of course he did. Matteo had not slept properly in three days either, by the look of him, and he stood up when Sasha came in and started to say something and Sasha put the foil sleeve on the desk.
Matteo looked at it. Looked at him.
Then his face — the shut, careful, eleven-years face — came apart in a way Sasha would remember for the rest of his life.
"When."
"Between Tuesday night and this morning. They're punched from the back. Somebody stood in my room and did it slowly." Sasha's voice was doing well. He was rather proud of his voice. "Before you ask: yes, I'm sure, and no, I don't know who, and yes, this is what I was trying to tell you."
"I'll get more. Tonight. I can have a doctor at this house in—"
"Ten hours, Matteo. Maybe less. And it's Friday and it's a scheduled drug and you would have to send someone, and I don't know which someone is safe, and neither do you." He said it steadily. "That's the position. Please don't make me say it twice, I'm doing my best."
Matteo came round the desk and stopped a metre away, hands open at his sides, plainly not trusting himself any closer, and it was that — the metre, the open hands — that broke something loose in Sasha's chest.
"Tell me what you want," Matteo said.
"I want to be somewhere with a door that locks from the inside and I want the person outside it to be somebody I chose.
" Sasha's eyes were burning. "That's the whole of it.
That's the entire ambition. It's not romantic, I'm not romantic today, I'd very much like you to understand that I'm doing arithmetic. "
"I know you are."
Matteo stood up. He went past Sasha to the door -- wide, not touching him, a berth so deliberate that Sasha noticed it and filed it -- and opened it and said, "Rocco."
Rocco came.
"Everyone out. Tonight. Not the morning."
"Boss--"
"Nobody sleeps in this house. Peter takes the gate from the outside. You call me, you don't come in." He shut the door.
"There are eleven men in this house," Sasha said.
"There'll be none by nine."
"And one of them did this." He was on his feet without having decided to be.
"One of them stood in my room with a pin and you're about to drive him to the end of the street and wave.
Tonight is the only night you will ever have where you know -- you know, Matteo, it's not a theory -- that he's under this roof, and you're emptying it. "
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because in nine hours you won't be able to make a decision," Matteo said, "and I am not going to have eleven men in the building when that happens. I'll take the thief. I'd rather have the thief than the other thing."
He swallowed. "It can be me outside the door. Sasha. It can be a chair in the hall and a locked door and nothing else, for three days, and I will sit in that chair and I will not come in. I want that on the table properly. That's a real option and I'll do it if you ask."
Sasha stood in the middle of the room and looked at him.
"Would you get through it?" he said. "Three days. In a chair. In a hallway. Off suppressants or on them?"
Matteo didn't answer.
"On them," Sasha said, "you'd manage. You'd hate it and you'd manage." He drew a breath. "So say the other thing. Say the thing you're not saying."
The clock in the hall.
"If I stop taking mine tonight," Matteo said, "I'll be in rut by tomorrow morning.
It's been eleven years. I don't know what I am underneath it.
I genuinely don't know, and I'm not being modest, I have no data.
" He said it the way another man would confess to a crime.
"That's the risk. That's the whole risk and I'm not going to dress it up.
You'd be asking for something I can't guarantee the shape of. "
"Yes," Sasha said. "I know. That's why we're going to agree the shape now, while I can still think, and you're going to hold to it tomorrow when I can't."
And he pulled out the chair on his side of the desk, and sat down, and put his hands flat on the wood the way he did when a client's numbers were bad and someone had to be the adult, and he said:
"Sit down, Matteo. We're going to negotiate."
***
It took forty minutes.
Sasha would think, afterwards, that it was the most naked he had ever been in his life and that he had been fully dressed for all of it.
He set the terms out in order and Matteo wrote none of them down and repeated every one back, and after the fourth one Sasha stopped, and got up, and went round the desk to the drawer where the pads were.
"What are you doing?"
"Writing it down."
"No."
"Yes."
"Sasha." Matteo's hands were flat on the wood.
"Do you know what a document is, in this house?
A document is a thing that exists after everyone in the room is dead.
I don't write anything down. I have never written anything down.
There is not one piece of paper in this building with my intentions on it and that is not an accident, it's the only reason I'm thirty-six. "
"I know exactly what a document is," Sasha said.
"It's the only honest diary anyone keeps.
I told you that in this room and you made me say it twice.
" He was already ruling a margin. "You're not writing it.
I'm writing it. It's my handwriting, my terms, my list, and if it ever turns up in front of anybody it's an omega's shopping list and you've never seen it. "
"And if I don't hold to it?"
Sasha looked up.
"Then there'll be a piece of paper," he said, "in a house where you told eleven men that I was worth nothing to you damaged. That's the point. I'm not asking you to sign it. I'm asking you to be a man who could be shown it."
He set the terms out in order and Matteo repeated every one back.
What Sasha wanted. What he would want tomorrow and did not want today, and which of those two Matteo was to believe.
That the door stayed locked from the inside and Sasha held the key.
That water, every hour, no negotiation. That if Sasha said the word — they picked one, absurdly, in that room, at four in the afternoon: Altona — everything stopped, including tomorrow, including at the worst of it, including if Sasha was not making sense when he said it.
And:
"No bite," Sasha said.
Matteo's hands were locked together on the desk. "No."
"Say it back."
"No bite." His voice was very low. "No bond, no claim, nothing you'd have to wear out of this house in March. I understand exactly what you're protecting and I'd protect it too."
"It isn't—" Sasha stopped. Started again, and this was harder than any of the rest of it.
"It isn't that I don't want it. I want you to know that.
It's that I'd be agreeing to it inside a chemical event, in a house I was sold into, days after you decided I was a spy.
I'd never know. For the rest of my life I'd never know, and I'm not going to spend forty years auditing my own—"
"Sasha," Matteo said. "I said no."
Sasha put his face in his hands for a second. Then took it out.
"All right," he said.
At the bottom, below the eighth, Sasha wrote a ninth line and did not read it out.
Matteo turned the page round and looked at it.
It was four characters long and it was not in any alphabet he had ever seen.
"What's that?"
"Shorthand."
"Whose?"
"Mine." Sasha capped the pen. "It's not a term. It doesn't require anything of you. It's a note to myself and it'll keep."
Matteo looked at it for a moment longer -- four marks in blue ink at the foot of a page, in a private language, in a house where he had spent eleven years making sure nothing was written down -- and did not ask again.
***
He got as far as the turn of the stairs before he heard them.
"--not tonight. Matteo. Not tonight, of all the nights, you don't want this house empty."
"It's decided."
"Then let me stay." Gennaro's voice did the thing it did, the warmth coming up under it like heat under a pan.
"Not for him. For you. You're going to be in a building with an unbonded omega in heat and no one in it who can tell you to stop, and you have not been near this in eleven years, caro, you don't know what you are when it's on you--"
"Out, Gennaro."
A pause. Just slightly too long.
"As you like," Gennaro said.
The front door. Then the second one, the heavy one. Then nothing.
Sasha stood on the landing with his hand on the rail and thought: that's the first sensible thing anyone in this house has said all day. He was already too warm to think it twice.
***