CHAPTER 5
Amara
◆
The gown has a problem in the bodice and I know exactly what it is, which is the worst kind of problem, because a problem you can name is a problem you have to fix.
I'd left it on the form in the workroom an hour ago, the ivory silk-velvet pinned to a muslin understructure, the nap catching the lamplight like a thing alive, and I'd stood back and seen the bias pulling wrong across the left cup, the grain fighting me where I'd asked it to lie down, and instead of ripping the basting and starting the seam over like a sane woman I'd put down my shears, let the chain at my collar swing back against my sternum, and decided the velvet could wait.
That the seam I actually needed to take apart tonight wore a different name.
So now I am crossing the great hall in my stocking feet because my heels make a sound on marble that announces a woman who wants something, and I do not want to announce.
I want to arrive. The chandelier throws its cold light down the splitting staircase and over the portraits of dead Sokolovs, Yuri the newest, his painted gray eyes following me the way his son's real ones do, and I think, your brother ruined my father and you're all still hanging on the wall like you earned it, and I keep walking, because anger is a good fuel and a worse compass and I've learned to use it for one and not the other.
Two days I've been under this roof. Two days, and already the house has a weather to it I can read better than the sky outside.
Gael whistling somewhere over the stable this morning, the long low notes carrying across the gravel forecourt, and a chill going down me that had nothing to do with the cold, because I'm a fast study and I'd already learned that the youngest one only whistles like that before he means to hurt someone.
There'd been a man at the gate yesterday who didn't belong to the house — I'd seen Gael clock him from the atelier-corner window, seen the stillness drop over all that motion like a sheet over furniture — and no one had told me anything, which told me plenty.
The brothers think I don't see the surveillance.
The brothers think a lot of things about what I don't see.
All of that is true, and all of it is beside the point tonight. I'm walking to the study with my shoes in my hand and a renegotiation in my mouth.
The study door is oxblood leather over old oak, the color of a wound that's stopped bleeding, and there's a line of warm light under it.
I don't knock. Knocking is for staff and supplicants, and I've made it clear to this household I'm neither, so I push the door open on a room that smells of cedar and cold vodka and the particular dry must of leather that's been sat in by serious men for a hundred years.
Mateo is at the globe-bar, his back to me, pouring nothing — just standing with his hand on the open hemisphere where the bottles live, the cut crystal of the decanter throwing little broken rainbows up the wall from the lamp. He doesn't turn. He knew it was me from the absence of a knock.
"You walk quietly," he says. "I had to be told you were soft. No one mentioned you were also silent."
"I had shoes," I say. "I left them in the hall. It seemed rude to come negotiate while making noise."
He turns then. Six feet three of deliberate stillness, the silver coming in at his temples like frost on a black field, storm-gray eyes that go over me once, head to stocking feet, and somehow make the inventory feel less like a man undressing a woman than a Pakhan counting an asset.
I hate that I notice the difference. I hate more that some animal part of me wishes, for one disloyal half-second, that it had been the other thing.
"Negotiate," he says, and bends the word into a verdict in his mouth.
He sets the decanter down. The crystal stopper meets the lip of it with a small expensive sound.
"We negotiated on Saturday. You struck a clause.
You signed your maiden name in full under my family's seal, which I am told the priest is still recovering from. "
"That was the contract. " I come into the room properly, let the door swing half-shut behind me, and I do not sit, because sitting is what you do when the man behind the desk has the power, and tonight I intend to keep mine on its feet.
"This is the part of the bargain that contracts don't cover.
The living of it. " I fold my arms so they rest under the full heaviness of me, a thing I learned to do when I want a man to keep to my eyes and discover he can't quite manage it.
"My atelier downtown stays open. Costa and Marchetti. I keep working. I come and go."
"No."
He says it the way other men say good evening. Flat, unhurried, a door closing in a house with no other doors.
I read him the way I read cloth — for the weave, for the tension, for the place where a thing will tear if you pull it true — and what I read in Mateo Sokolov is a man who has already lost this argument inside his own head and means to make me drag it out into the room anyway, because that dragging is the only kind of giving he knows how to do.
"That's a wall you've just built, and a wall is a poor excuse for a reason," I say. "I make my living finding the seam in a wall."
"Security. " He moves out from the globe-bar, around the front of Yuri's old desk, and leans back against the edge of it, ankles crossed, hands loose, and the loose hands are a lie because nothing about this man is ever loose.
"There are men watching this house. You saw one of them yesterday.
My brother saw you see him. You think the gate goes up and down for groceries.
" A pause, weighted, the pause he uses like punctuation.
"You are a Costa in a Sokolov house, standing inside a thing you do not yet understand the whole shape of.
The downtown loft has one door, two windows, and a fire escape any child could climb.
I will not put you behind glass at a known address and call it freedom because the word makes you feel better. "
"Don't. " The word comes out sharper than I planned.
I make myself slow down, gather it, turn it on the dry edge I keep for cornering men who think volume is the same as winning.
"Don't dress a leash up as a kindness. You're not the first to try.
My father got offered protection too, by your family, for years, and when he kept saying no your uncle protected the breath right out of his line.
" My fingers close over the thimble at my collar before I've decided to move them — cold under my touch, the steel my mother wore on the one finger that does the work, dented from a lifetime of pushing a needle through what wouldn't give.
"So forgive me if for your safety lands on my ear like a bill I've already paid. "
Something moves in his face, the smallest possible amount, as it always seems to with Mateo — a tightening at the jaw, a stillness going stiller, the surface of deep water changing when something turns over far below it.
He goes very quiet, and I've been under this roof long enough already to read that silence for what it is: his version of shouting.
"I did not engineer your father's ruin," he says.
"You married the wreckage of it."
"Yes. " He holds my eyes steady, refusing me the insult of a flinch.
"I benefited. I won't pretend I didn't, because you'd hear the pretense and it would cost me more than the truth does.
" He uncrosses his ankles. He doesn't come toward me yet, but the room has gotten smaller, the way a room does when a large careful man decides to stop leaning.
"But understand the shape of what you're asking, Amara.
You want to come and go from a building Lev's men already know how to find.
You want me to agree that your pride is worth more than your throat.
I am not built to agree to that. I have buried everyone I was meant to keep.
I will not add your name to that list to win a negotiation. "
It lands. I won't pretend it doesn't. There's a grief under the granite of him, old and clean and load-bearing, and the dressmaker in me wants to put my hands on the seam of it and feel where it was sewn.
The Costa daughter in me, the one who held her father's coat in a courthouse corridor while the warmth went out of it, wants to set the whole house on fire and warm her hands at it.
I let neither of them speak. I let the negotiator speak instead.
"Then guard it," I say. "Leave the door, and post a man at it — I'm asking you to keep it a door instead of bricking it shut.
Send a man. Send your terrifying brother who whistles.
Send the driver — Pavel — let him sit in the car with a gun on his knee and the engine running and I'll come and go on your leash and call it a compromise instead of a cage. " I lift my chin.
"But I keep the loft. I keep the name on the glass. I am not going to become a woman who used to make things."
Mateo studies me. The lamp catches the cut crystal behind him and lays a thin broken rainbow across the oxblood spine of the desk, and somewhere in the room his pocket-watch is ticking, the brass one, Yuri's, the one he thumbs open and shut when he's deciding a thing — I can hear it now in the quiet, that small mechanical heartbeat, steady as a metronome under the room's held breath.
"Pavel drives you," he says. "Pavel waits.
You do not vary the route. You do not go after dark.
You tell Emil before you go and Gael when you're back, every time, so two of the three of us always know exactly where in the city your body is.
" His gaze doesn't move off mine. "Those are not negotiable.
Inside those, you keep your loft and your name and your refusal. Yes?"
It's a win. It's nearly the whole win. I should take it and go.
I stay rooted where I am instead.