CHAPTER 9
Amara
◆
There's a particular kind of sleeplessness that comes from a man leaving a sentence open in your doorway.
He wants you to be my weakness. I want to be wrong about whether he's right.
Mateo had said it the way he says everything, like he was setting a stone down very carefully because he knew exactly what it weighed, and then he'd walked off down the marble stair turning out lamps, and I'd lain in the four-poster for two hours watching the foghorn's light come and go on the ceiling while the sentence hung above me, unhemmed, the raw edge fraying.
I can't sleep on a fraying edge. I never could.
You leave a seam unfinished and it works itself loose in the night and by morning the whole thing has come apart at the join.
So at one in the morning I give up, pull my mother's old cardigan over the slip I sleep in, and go looking for a room with a fire in it, because the master suite has gone cold and my own head is colder.
The library is lit when I get there.
I should have expected it. Of course I should have.
The man keeps a different clock than the rest of the house — I'd learned that much in eight days — but I'd built a story where I'd have the room to myself, the fire and the beeswax-and-old-paper smell and the two storeys of dead men's books, where I could stand in the dark and worry the day apart thread by thread with nobody watching me do it.
Instead there is Emil Sokolov in the deep velvet chair by the hearth, ash-blond, glasses off, the firelight climbing the rolling ladder behind him and laying a long gold bar across the spines, and for the first time since I came to this house his black ledger is closed.
Closed and set on the arm of the chair under his folded hands, like a thing he's decided, for one hour, not to be.
He doesn't startle. Emil never startles; he recalculates. I watch him do it — watch the ice-blue eyes take in the cardigan, the slip, the bare feet on the cold floor, the hour, the probable cause, and file all of it before I've finished the second step into the room.
"You're not sleeping," he says, stating it flat, the way he states everything he already knows and refuses to waste a question on.
"You're not working. " I nod at the closed ledger. "That's new."
His mouth tilts in a way that on another man I'd have called a smile and on Emil I label, privately, a calculation he's lost. "I find I cannot model the variable that's keeping me from it. " He lets that sit. "So I closed the book. There seemed no point annotating a column I can't balance."
"That's almost a compliment."
"It's a complaint," he says. "I'm being precise. The two are easy to confuse if you don't read the syntax."
I read syntax for a living. Mine's a different cloth than his — cut on the bias, the way a person's shoulders give away what their mouth won't, the way fear pulls a face tight on the cross-grain so it tears where you least expect.
But Emil's is its own weave, stiff and finished and squared at every corner, and I've spent a week learning it well enough to find the one loose thread: his sentences get shorter when he wants something he can't justify. They're getting shorter now.
I cross to the fire because I'm cold and because it puts me near him, and I tell myself the cold is the only reason.
I sit on the low ottoman, knees together, the thimble cool against my sternum where it's swung loose of the slip, and I pick up the poker and push a log so the sparks go up, because my hands want a job and there isn't a needle in the room.
"Ask me your question," Emil says.
I look at him.
"You came down to worry at something. " He turns his glasses over once in his long fingers, a man rotating an instrument to check it for true. "You're not the type to do it alone in the dark when there's a better source in the chair. You read people. I'm a person. Ask."
So I ask him the thing I've been chewing for eight days.
"Tell me the whole of it," I say. "The seizure.
March third. I don't want the version where Lev's the only villain because that's convenient for you tonight, and I don't want the version where you all just benefited from weather.
I want the whole thing. What was done to my father.
By whom. With what. I want the truth and I want it ugly, because I'm tired of being handed it pressed and steamed and folded so it doesn't frighten me.
I'm not a bride who frightens. Give me the seam. "
A different man would have softened it. A different man would have reached for my hand, made his voice low and warm, performed gentleness at me until I felt managed instead of told. Experts have managed me. I know the feel of a kindness offered to make me easier to handle.
Emil does none of that. He puts his glasses back on — and I understand, watching him, that for Emil that is the gentleness; he's choosing to see me clearly while he cuts — and he gives me the truth with a scalpel.
He tells me Lev wanted the Costa berths.
That my father's line ran clean for thirteen years and that the cleanliness was the offense, because clean berths Lev didn't control were berths he couldn't move money through, and Yuri had blocked the route Lev wanted for years out of an old-man's honor that Lev mistook for weakness and then murdered.
He tells me the customs seizure was bought.
Two officials, a forged set of manifests, a federal letterhead that had cost less than the gown I'm building upstairs.
He tells me the date — March third, twenty-three forty, Pier 9 — flat, like a coordinate, and then he tells me the part nobody had handed me before, the part with the ugly in it I'd asked for: that it had been engineered to be slow.
That Lev could have frozen the assets in a day and chose six weeks instead, because a fast ruin is mercy and Lev wanted my father to feel the floor give one board at a time.
The impound first. Then the lines of credit. Then the house mortgaged to keep the ships, then the ships gone anyway. Six weeks of a man bailing a boat with a hole cut in it on purpose.
"And then your father died holding the consequences," Emil says, "in a court corridor, in June, of a heart that had been asked to carry more than a heart is rated for. That is the whole of it. Lev built the ruin. " He pauses, and the pause is a man refusing himself an exit.
"We only profited from it. We took the bargain it created.
I drew the contract that brought you into this house knowing your father was already dead and that the marriage would shield you and use you in the same stroke.
I haven't lied to you, and I won't start by leaving that part out.
You asked for the seam. That's the seam. "
The fire ticks. Somewhere far down the house a clock does its small private work.
I sit with all of it laid open in my lap like a pattern finally pinned out true, every dart and notch of how I'd been ruined, and I wait for the old feeling — the one I know, the one I've worn like a second skin since June, left holding the coat, used and abandoned and stupid for not seeing it coming.
The old feeling stays away, or it arrives and finds something already standing in front of it.
Because here is the thing about the truth, the real ugly unmanaged truth: it's the only currency that's ever bought my trust, and the man who's just spent it on me had nothing to gain by it and everything to lose.
A lie would have been safer for him. A kindness would have been smarter.
He's handed me the knife that cuts him because I asked for it, and that — God help me — is the most intimate thing anyone in this house of dangerous men has done to me yet.
More than Gael's mouth on me against the dress-form wall. More than Mateo stopping at the study door with his verdict-kiss and saying not until you ask. This. A cold man telling me the true shape of my own wound because I told him I could hold it.
"You're looking at me," Emil says, and his voice has changed — fractionally, a tension dropping a half-step, the way a thread goes from drawn to slack — "the way I imagine a person looks at a number that won't resolve."
"I'm looking at you," I say, "like cloth."
"Elaborate. " It comes out fast. Wanting.
"You finish every edge. " I set the poker down.
I stand, because sitting has become a thing I'm doing to keep from doing the other thing, and I come to the side of his chair, close, close enough that the firelight has to choose between us.
"You overcast every seam so nothing can fray and reach you.
You think if you square every corner and balance every column you'll be safe, the way you made yourself safe when you were small in this house under that man.
You told me the truth tonight because it was the only thing you couldn't model my reaction to, and you wanted — for one hour, with the book closed — to find out what happens when you don't run the outcome first."
He goes very still. The fire moves on his glasses so I can't read his eyes, which I suspect is the point of the glasses, has always been the point of the glasses.
"Take them off," I say. "You want to watch me clearly and hide behind glass at the same time, and those are sold at different counters."
He takes them off. He folds them — that small dry click of the steel hinge, the sound I've come to know as the sound of Emil deciding something — and sets them on the closed ledger, on top of the book he won't finish tonight, and looks up at me with nothing between us, ice-blue and naked and, for once in his exact and frozen life, unsure.
"If I touch you," Emil says, "I need the word. I've built my whole life on inference, and I will have you be the one variable I never assume. Tell me yes, Amara."
"Yes," I say.