The Pakhan’s Bride Bargain (Curvy Queens of the Bratva #7)

CHAPTER 1

Amara

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There are women you can read off the bolt, and there are women cut on the bias, and the one standing on my fitting block is the second kind.

She holds still while I pin, but the stillness is the wrong stillness.

It pulls on the grain. A body at peace lets the cloth fall plumb; a body lying to itself drags everything off-true, and you spend the whole fitting chasing a wrinkle that isn't in the fabric at all.

"Breathe out," I tell her, three pins between my lips so it comes out soft and lisped. "All the way. I can take it in, but I can't take it in around a breath you're holding for the rest of your life."

She laughs, watery, and lets the air go. The bodice settles. There it is. The seam runs true the second she stops performing for the mirror, and I slide a pin home through the dart, the steel finding cloth the way it always finds cloth, easy as a key in its own lock.

She's marrying a man who frightens her a little, I think, and she doesn't know yet whether the fright is the bad kind.

I could tell her it doesn't have to be. I could tell her that the fright and the wanting live in the same drawer and you spend your whole life sorting them.

I don't. I make wedding gowns. I do not make promises about the marriages that wear them.

"You're staring," she says.

"I'm measuring. " I take the last pin from my mouth and set it in the cushion strapped to my wrist. "Hold your arms out. Like you're about to be very, very happy and slightly embarrassed about it."

She does, and I walk the hem, kneeling, the floor cold through my skirt, the chalk line breaking and re-forming under my thumb.

Down here the light is bad and honest. The atelier loft holds the last of the afternoon the way a cup holds the last of the tea — going cold, going gray, the windows full of fog so thick it has swallowed the street lamps below us whole, just smudges of sodium-orange where the world used to be.

Above me the skylight has started to tick. Sleet, the first of it, ice pebbles flung at the glass in little fistfuls, ticking like impatient fingers on a counter, like someone out in the night drumming to be let in.

I ignore it. I have a hem.

My knees ache and my back has opinions and I am, by the measure of every magazine in this city, too much woman to be folded up on a cold floor like this — too wide at the hip, too soft at the belly, too full everywhere a body is allowed to be full.

I made my peace with the math of myself a long time ago.

The cloth never lies about it and I have stopped asking it to.

There is a great deal of me. I take up the room I take up. The thimble at my throat — my mother's, dented steel on a fine chain, swinging when I bend — is the only piece of armor I have ever needed, and not once in all the years of wearing it has it told me I was the wrong size for the world.

"There. " I sit back on my heels. "Stand. Look. Don't suck in."

The bride looks. Her eyes do the thing eyes do, and I look away to give her the moment in private, because that part isn't mine.

That's when Bea comes up the stairs too fast, and I know before she says a word, because Bea on the stairs is a fabric too.

I've read her for nine years. When she's selling, she takes them two at a time and arrives talking.

When she's scared, she comes up flat-footed and quiet, one hand on the rail, and arrives not talking at all.

She's not talking.

"Finish her," Bea says to me, low, and then, bright and false to the bride, "you look like a dream, sweetheart, like an absolute dream, let's get you out of it before you cry on the silk.

" She has Marchetti hands, my Bea, fast and warm, and she has the girl unpinned and robed and out the door with a fitting card in eleven minutes flat, and the whole time her eyes keep cutting back to the worktable, where she has set down a thing I didn't see her carrying.

A cream envelope. Heavy stock, the kind you can feel the rag content of from across a room. No stamp. Hand-delivered.

"There was a man," Bea says, when the street door has closed and it's just us and the ticking glass.

She rubs her arms. "Good coat. Better than the coat had any business being, down here, in this.

He didn't come up. He gave it to me at the door and he said, for Miss Costa, personally, and he waited until I said your name back to him to make sure I had it right, and then he left. " She swallows. "Amara. The seal."

I cross to the table. I don't pick it up yet. I look at it the way I'd look at a length of cloth a stranger swore was silk — prove it. The flap is sealed with wax the color of old blood, and pressed into the wax, wings spread, talons down, is a falcon.

I know that bird. Everyone on this coast knows that bird.

It crowns a gate up on the north cliffs that I have driven past with my jaw set and not looked at.

It is the mark of the family that took a clean shipping line my father built out of one leased freighter and froze it dead in a single night with a customs seizure that was no more a customs seizure than I am a customs official, and then stood around with grave faces while the line they killed went into the ground, and my father went in after it. Sokolov.

The sleet ticks. My thumb goes to the cold dented steel under my collar without my permission. I make it stop.

"Leave it sealed," Bea says, which is how I know she's already decided I shouldn't open it at all.

"I do, actually. " I slide my shears under the flap — I would no more tear good paper than I'd tear good cloth — and the wax cracks clean down the middle of the bird, splitting it wing from wing. "Not knowing is just a slower way of being surprised."

There are two sheets inside. The first is a single page, and the hand on it is beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful, every letter raked at the same arrogant angle, ink that someone let dry properly before they folded it.

I read it out loud, because Bea is standing there with her arms crossed and her face doing something I don't like, and because reading a thing aloud is how I find the seam where it's been sewn to deceive me.

"Miss Costa," I read. "Forgive the manner of this delivery; some words are better said on good paper than across a table.

The waterfront has been at war with itself for a year, and your family and mine have both bled for it.

I write to propose an end to the bleeding.

A peace. In the old way, peace between two houses is sealed not with a signature but with a marriage.

I propose that a daughter of Costa join the house of Sokolov — that you, specifically, wed the head of my family — and that in so doing we make the waterfront whole again.

The honor I am offering you is sincere. The protection is real.

I remain, with respect and the warmest hope, your servant —" and then a name I will not give the satisfaction of saying twice, and beneath it, pressed again, smaller, the same bird with its talons down.

I lower the page. "Make the waterfront whole," I say. "You ruin a thing on purpose and then you offer to make it whole. There's a word for a man who breaks your leg and rents you a crutch."

"What word," Bea says.

"Several. " I pick up the second sheet.

The second sheet is where the bird shows its talons.

The first page was courtship. This one is a schedule.

It is typed, the cold even strike of a machine, because mercy is freehand and the bill is always typeset.

There are two clauses, and I read them once silently and feel the floor of my stomach drop out from under me clean, like a trap with a well-oiled hinge.

The first clause: upon the marriage, all outstanding Costa debts — the mortgage on the house, the bankruptcy arrears, the impound fees rotting on two ships I will never see again — are settled in full.

Forgiven. Gone, as if they'd never frozen a single asset, as if a man had never died in a court corridor over the arithmetic of them.

The second clause: upon the marriage, the house of Sokolov will fund, in full, at the best surgeon their money can buy, the cardiac surgery my mother needs and that I cannot pay for and that the city's charity list will get her to sometime around the spring she may not live to see.

I read the second clause again. The sleet ticks at the glass over my head, harder now, an impatient drumroll, and the fog has eaten the last of the lamps so completely that when I look up at the skylight there is nothing beyond it but black water running on black sky and the ice ticking down.

They ruined my father. And now they are holding out my mother's heart in one hand and asking me to climb into the cage to reach it.

"Amara. " Bea has come around the table. "Your face. Talk to me."

"It's a ransom note," I say. My voice comes out very level, which is what it does when the rest of me has gone somewhere to be furious in private.

"It's a ransom note with calligraphy. They took everything my father had, and they let my mother get sick on the wreckage of it, and now they're offering to give me back my own mother for the price of myself, and they had the gall — Bea, they had the gall to write the warmest hope. "

"Then no. " Bea's hands close over mine on the table, warm, fast, certain. "Then it's no. We'll find the money, we'll find a way, we have before —"

"We haven't. We've scraped together small money against slow trouble.

This is big money against a clock that's already running.

" I look at her, and I make myself say the true thing, because Bea has earned the true thing.

"The list won't move fast enough. You know it won't. I've watched her on the stairs.

I've watched her stop on the landing and pretend she's admiring the wallpaper because she can't get her breath, in a building with no wallpaper worth admiring. "