CHAPTER 7
Amara
◆
The armored sedan smells of cold leather and Pavel's chewing gum, and for the first time in six days I watch the gate of Sokol House shrink in the side mirror instead of rise up in front of me, and something behind my ribs unclenches a notch I hadn't known was wound tight.
Six days a married woman. Six days a guest in a house that watches me eat.
I'd told myself the dread was the whole of it, and then two nights ago Emil Sokolov stood among his dead mother's orchids and gave me more truth than he'd planned to, and I walked away knowing exactly what those three men want from me.
Past the body they all study like a thing they'd been told they couldn't have, what they're truly after is my father's ghost.
They want the records I still have boxed in the back of my own atelier, the manifests in Tomas Costa's neat hand, the berth assignments, the paper that could prove Lev forged the seizure that killed my father in a court corridor while I stood there holding his coat.
Earn it, I'd told Emil. He'd looked like a man no one had ever once handed that word.
So this is the concession, won off Mateo at the cost of an argument I'd half lost and a kiss I refuse to think about.
Guarded visits. Pavel at the wheel. The downtown world for one afternoon, the world where I'm Amara Costa the couturière again, free for a few hours of the Sokolov bride, the rented problem in the satin-lined box.
Pavel lets me out at the curb under the shuttered shop and stays with the car, which tells me someone else already has the inside.
I read it the way I read a seam before I press it, the wrongness sitting flat until you put a hand to it.
There's a second set of breathing in my loft.
My fingers close over the cold steel under my collar once, on reflex, the little dented shield my mother left me, and I climb.
"There she is. " Bea comes at me out of her own chaos with her arms full of tulle and her mouth running, the way she's run it since we were nineteen.
"There's my ghost. You vanish into a cliff fortress, you don't call, and I have a bride with a forty-inch bust who wants illusion netting and the structural integrity of a suspension bridge, both, today, and I'm supposed to do that alone?
Look at you. You look like a woman who's being fed and not sleeping. Married life."
"Bea. " I let her crush me. She smells of chalk and her terrible rosewater and the outside, the whole outside, and I hold on a second longer than I mean to. "I missed your noise."
"My noise is a profession. " She pulls back, holds me at arm's length, and her loud face goes, for one second, very quiet and very careful. "You okay, A? Like — actually."
"I'm alive. I'm fed and not sleeping. " I summon the dry tone that has gotten me through every fitting where the bride's mother says something cruel about the bride's arms. "I'm negotiating."
"That's not a yes."
"It's a Costa yes."
She snorts, because she knows exactly what that's worth, and lets me go to deal with her suspension-bridge bride. And over her shoulder, leaning in the doorway of the cutting room with his arms crossed and a grin already loaded, is the reason Pavel didn't come up.
Gael Sokolov, in a black coat, surveying my workroom like it's a body he's deciding where to touch first.
"Security," he says, when I raise an eyebrow at him. "Didn't you hear? After dark nobody comes through that gate without my say. Out here it's the same principle. Nobody comes near the merchandise without me."
"I'm the merchandise in this scenario."
"You're the whole inventory, sweetheart. " He pushes off the doorframe. "Bea. You're a vision. Go terrify that poor bride."
"I like him," Bea announces, to no one, and takes her tulle into the front room, and the machine she's left running in there keeps up its low needle-chatter through the wall, a sound so woven into my whole life that my pulse has kept its time for as long as I've owned this trade.
The pad of my left index finger remembers the night that rhythm caught me, the needle through the nail, the silver scar I still wear.
The room sounds like home. I hadn't realized how starved I'd been for the sound of my own life until it's running in the next room.
Gael does not, in fact, go terrify anyone. He prowls.
I've seen men in my atelier before. Fathers paying, grooms who weren't supposed to be there, the occasional husband who thought the place was decorative because the women in it made beautiful things.
They never knew how to be among the cloth.
They stood like furniture and touched nothing, afraid of the lace.
Gael touches everything. He walks the long worktable trailing two fingers down the bolt of midnight duchesse satin like he's reading it in braille.
He stops at the silk-velvet, ivory, the nap I keep for the gowns that matter, the bolt I guard like a relic, and lays his whole scarred palm flat to it, the knife scar across the right one pale against the cream, and drags it slow, with the grain and then against, and makes a low sound in his chest when the nap catches the light and changes.
"That's the good stuff," he says. "I can feel it's the good stuff. It does a thing when you pet it wrong. " He tilts his face up at me from under his auburn hair, green eyes lit. "You make brides out of this."
"I make armor out of that. It just looks like a dress."
"Course it does. " He moves on. The dress forms stand in their row down the middle of the loft, headless, shoulderless, the patient torsos I've dressed and undressed a thousand times, and the late light coming in low and gold through the loft windows throws their shadows up the long brick wall behind them, huge, stretched, a council of giants leaning over the small bright human work of the room.
Gael walks into that field of shadow and his own throws up beside theirs, the biggest of all of them, and I watch him notice it, glance at the wall, at the dark shapes of the forms thrown ten feet tall above us, and grin.
"It's like a church in here," he says. "All these saints with no faces."
"They're patient. They hold still while I pin them."
"Now there's a skill. " He comes around the nearest form, the one already draped with the beginnings of the gown I'm building for myself, my own armor, the same ivory nap basted at the bias and pinned raw at the side seam.
He leaves that one untouched. He studies it a long moment, the unfinished thing, the white shape of a bride with no face, and then he turns to me. "You're making your own."
"I won't wear a bought dress to my own sale."
"No," he says softly, all the grin gone out of his voice for a second. "No, you wouldn't."
And then his gaze comes up — at me, the whole of me, the way a man looks right before he says the thing.
I know the thing. I've known it since I was fourteen and grew into this body the world decided to have an opinion about.
The thing comes dressed forty ways and they all mean the same: you, for a big girl.
The compliment with the splinter in it. The desire offered like a favor.
I feel my spine set. My hand goes, without meaning to, to my mother's thimble. I brace.
"I have been trying," Gael says, slow, coming around the dress form into the gold light and the giant shadows, "to be a gentleman about this for six days, and I want you to know I think I've done a heroic job, because all I have wanted, since you walked down that aisle in that bloodred coat and looked at me like I was a person and not a knife somebody set down on the table, is to get on my knees in front of you and put my mouth on you until you forget your own name and then teach you the new one. "
The splinter never comes.
I stand there with my fingers still curled at my collar and my whole armored brace going useless and wrong, because he's said it in exactly my language, exactly the way I'd say a thing I meant — fast, filthy, an open hunger with no apology folded around it and no despite hiding underneath.
He wants. He's said so, and he's said it clean, the wanting offered whole with an asterisk nowhere in sight.
"That's not gentlemanly," I manage.
"I said I tried. I didn't say I had the constitution for it.
" He stops an arm's length off. His hands stay at his sides, deliberate, like a man showing you he's not reaching for the blade.
"Tell me to leave, trouble, and I'll go.
I'll hate it. I'll go down those stairs and stand in the cold and think filthy things about you in private like a gentleman.
" A crooked tug pulls at his lips. "You're not telling me to leave. "
The machine chatters in the next room. Bea's voice rises and falls over it, telling her bride about structural integrity. The shadows of the faceless forms lean over us, enormous on the brick.
"Gael. " My voice comes out lower than I mean. "What do you do with your own — this isn't fair to you —"
"Tonight's not about me. " He says it like it's the simplest fact in the world, like a man stating his name.
"Tonight's about you. I'm not asking for a thing.
I'm asking to give you a thing, and you can take it or you can throw me out, and either way I drive you home and stand guard at your door and want you exactly this much.
There's no bargain in it. You spend your whole life being a bargain, velvet.
This is the one thing that isn't. This one's free. "
This one's free. I have built a life on the certainty that nothing is.
That love is a transaction, that to be wanted is to be the chip somebody pushes across the table, that you always, always end up the one who paid and got nothing back.
He stands there in the gold light offering me the one thing I'd decided didn't exist, and my body, which has never asked my permission about these men, is already three steps ahead of my pride and pulling toward him.