CHAPTER 2 #2
"Mr. Sokolov. " She keeps her hands to herself, folding them over the strap of the bag on her shoulder, and the refusal is so smooth that for a second even Lev fails to register that he has been left holding the air.
"Which one are you? There are a lot of you.
I'd like to learn the seams before I sew. "
I have watched Lev Sokolov take a knife away from a man twice his size. I have never, until this morning, watched him take half a step back.
"Lev," he says, recovering, the ring turning faster now. "Their uncle. The one who arranged your... good fortune."
"Ah. " She looks at him the way you look at a fabric sold to you as silk that's going to pull at the first wash.
"The architect. I've heard the building's lovely.
I'm told the foundation's a problem. " And she turns her back on the most dangerous man in the room, the one who ruined her line, and looks at the contract on my desk like it is the only thing in Cape Brevik worth her attention. "Is that it?"
"That is it," Emil says.
"Then let's read it. I don't sign anything I haven't read, I read every word, I read slowly, and I don't care how many of you are armed."
Gael laughs out loud from the window, one bright bark, and presses the back of his hand to his mouth like a man trying to behave at a funeral. The widest grin. I am beginning to understand what it means on him, and it is not what people think.
She reads it slowly. She means it. She goes through Emil's three pages line by line, one finger tracking the type, a thin silver scar across the pad of that finger, an old one, and I find I want to know how she got it, and I file the wanting in the column where I keep the things that will get someone killed.
She strikes nothing for two pages. She reads the consideration, the surgery and the debts cleared and Inés Costa protected, her business and her name preserved, and her jaw works once, a small muscle, and her two fingers find the little dented thing at her collar again before she catches herself and lowers her hand, and I think: she hates that the mercy is real.
She would rather it were only a cage. I understand that better than she could know.
I have spent my life being grateful to no one.
Then she stops. Her finger stops. The room feels it.
"This one. " She reads it aloud, and her voice is perfectly level, which is somehow worse than anger.
"The wife shall conduct herself in accordance with the order and obedience of the household.
" She looks up, past Emil who wrote it and straight to me, the one who would enforce it. "Obedience of the household."
"Standard language," Emil says, and even he sounds less certain than he likes.
"It's standard for a servant. Or a dog. " She uncaps a pen, her own, drawn from her own bag; she reaches for her own ink and leaves mine on the desk untouched and unasked-for.
She draws one clean line through the clause, edge to edge, a tailor's confident cut, and beside it in a small firm hand she writes a word I cannot read from here.
In the corner, Father Anton makes a small sound, a wince, a man of God watching a bride amend a sacrament in ink.
"You bought a wife," Amara says, capping the pen, meeting my eyes flat across the desk that was my father's. "You did not buy obedience. Those are sold at different counters. If you wanted the second thing you should have gone shopping somewhere with worse light."
The study is very quiet. Lev's ring has stopped turning.
Gael has stopped breathing, I think, in the window.
Emil is looking at the struck clause with the particular stillness of a man whose model has just thrown an error he cannot route around, and he takes his glasses off to clean them, which means he does not know what to say, which I have not seen from my brother in years.
I look at the line through the clause. I look at her.
"Leave it struck," I tell Emil. His hands go still on his glasses.
"It is in the document now," I say. "In ink.
In front of the priest and the elder. We initial it.
All of us. " I set my initials beside her cut, and the weight that is always on me, the wall and the debt and the chair I sit in because better men are dead, shifts a fraction, the way a load shifts when a second pair of hands takes a corner you did not know you were carrying alone.
She watches me do it. Her eyes narrow, testing me the way a tailor tugs a fresh seam to see whether the stitch holds under strain. "Huh. You actually did it."
"I did," I say. "I will not insult you by pretending I find obedience attractive. I have enough of it. It is the cheapest thing in this house."
The chapel is cold.
It was deconsecrated before I was born, and what is left is stone and shadow and the old iron bell in the squat tower that nobody rings because it cracked the winter of the fire and gives, now, only a flat dead note, more thud than peal.
Father Anton lights the candles anyway, because Lev wishes the elders to hear there were candles, and the cold candle smoke hangs in the air without rising, a gray ribbon laid along the dark like something already grieving.
We stand at the front on bare flags. No flowers.
No music. Amara in her oxblood coat with her chin up and the steel thimble at her throat catching the one good candle; me in the dark suit I bury men in; Emil with the contract folded into his coat over his heart like a second ledger; Gael along the back wall, arms crossed, his whole body a drawn bowstring; Lev in the second pew with the signet turning, turning; and Father Anton between us with a book he does not need, reading words that fall flat into the stone like coins onto a table — no ring of true silver in them, only the dull clink of metal that has changed hands.