CHAPTER 10
Gael
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I drive into the rain with my hand loose on the wheel of the coupe and my teeth set against a feeling I don't have a word for yet — the kind of rain that hangs in the air, a gray cloth dragged across the whole Sound, the cliff road already behind us.
I have words for most things. It's a survival trait.
You name a thing fast enough, you get to decide what it is before it decides what you are.
But this one's been sitting under my breastbone since last night, low and to the left, right under the bird, and every time I reach for the name it slides off.
Amara's in the passenger seat in a coat the deep blue of a bruise three days old, her hair pinned up with what I'm fairly sure is a pencil, her mother's dented thimble winking at her throat every time the wipers throw the gray off the glass.
She's got a tin of pins in her lap and she's sorting them by length with two fingers, click, click, the way other people crack their knuckles, and she hasn't looked at me once since the gate.
She's thinking about Emil. I'd put the coupe on it.
I know the look; I've worn it. You walk out of a room you were sure of and into a room you aren't, and you carry that second room around for a day after, turning it over, hunting the seam.
Last night Emil came out of the library at one in the morning folding his glasses like they'd personally insulted him, walked past all of us in dead silence, and that told me everything.
Turns out the cold one runs warm underneath.
Good for you, brother. Welcome to the part that hurts.
I should be jealous. I keep checking, the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts, and every time the spot comes back clean.
That's the thing Lev will never understand about us: we don't compete for her.
We were three boys in a burning house once and we learned in our bones that the family is the only wall worth standing on, and a long time ago, half as a joke and all the way as a vow, we decided that if a woman ever came who undid all three of us, we'd share her before we'd let her break us apart.
None of us thought it would happen. And then she walked down a cold aisle and looked at me like I was a person.
"You're whistling," she says.
I am. Low, between my teeth, the way I do. I shut it off.
"Habit," I say.
"It's a tell. " She slots a long pin into the row of long pins.
"You only do it when something's about to go sideways.
You did it at dinner Thursday right before Lev mentioned the Council, and you did it in her dress-form room the first morning before you ran out the door like the cloth was on fire.
" She finally looks at me, hazel-green, dry as a folded hem.
"So which is it, Gael. Sideways, or running. "
God, she reads me like I'm printed in a language she learned as a child. It should make me bolt. Instead I want to pull the car over and put my mouth on her until neither of us can do arithmetic.
"Both, probably," I say, and grin, which is a lie shaped like a smile, and she knows it, and lets me have it.
The atelier's above the shuttered shop on Glass Street, and I clock the wrongness before I've got the coupe in park.
It's small. It's always the small things.
A van I don't know parked across the way with its mirror angled at the loft door, which is a thing you do when you want to watch a building and not look like it.
The light in the second-floor window — Bea's there, I can see her shape moving, loud and quick the way she moves — but the street door at the bottom is standing open two inches, and Amara never leaves it open, and Bea, for all her chaos, locks a door like she's mad at it.
The feeling under my breastbone turns over and shows me its other face, and the name slides into place at last, clean as a blade home in a sheath.
Fear, and it's all pointed away from myself, every grain of it aimed at the woman in the car.
"Stay in the car," I say, and it comes out flat, no music in it, a register she hasn't heard from me, and I watch her register that too, file it, go still.
"Gael. Don't."
"Lock it. If I'm not back out in three minutes you drive. You don't wait. You go to the house and you find Pavel. " I'm already out, rain finding the back of my neck, my hand already inside my coat where the weight lives. "Amara. Look at me. Three minutes. You go."
She doesn't argue. That's how I know she's afraid too, because the woman who struck a clause out of her own marriage contract has gone silent for the first time since I met her, her hand come up to close over the little dented thing her mother left her, the only armor she's got.
I hate that I put her there. I hate that I'm about to make it worse before I make it better.
I go up the stairs soft. I'm good at soft. It's the thing I'm best at that nobody ever thanks you for.
There are two of them in the loft. One I don't know, big, dock-shouldered, going through the long flat boxes where she keeps her cut pieces, bored he hasn't found whatever it is.
And one I do know, by the burn-scar map of the left side of his face and the way he holds his stillness like a man who enjoys it: Roman. Lev's hand.
The one who does for Lev what I do for Mateo, except every order Lev ever handed Roman was already a thing Roman hungered to do. That's the whole difference between us, and I've never been so glad of a difference in my life.
Bea's backed against the cutting table with a pair of shears held out in front of her in both fists, swearing instead of screaming, low and Italian and venomous, which is the bravest thing I've seen all week and exactly the wrong move with men like these.
"Wrong shop," I say.
The whistle's already in my teeth. I don't decide to do it. It just comes, low and tuneless, the sound my body makes when the math is done and only the moving's left.
Roman turns. He smiles. He's got a smile a lot like Lev's, the warm one, the one that comes out right before. "The little brother," he says. "They send the puppy to fetch the bride. How is she. Soft, I hear."
"Bea," I say, not taking my eyes off him. "Go down to the car. The blue coupe. Get in it."
She goes. The dock-shouldered one steps to cut her off and I'm already moving, and here's the truth they leave out of the stories about men like me, the ugly grubby part: it's fast and it's mean and it's mostly over before anyone's decided it's begun.
I take the big one's wrist as he reaches, turn it the way it doesn't want to go, and put his face into the edge of the cutting table once, hard, and he folds, and I've got my forearm across the back of his neck and my mouth at his ear before Roman's hand is halfway to his own coat.
"You touch her things," I say, conversational, while the man under me makes a wet sound into the floor, "you touch her people. You came into the one room in this city that's hers. " I lean. "Tell Lev the puppy says the bride is under the falcon now. Tell him what we hold, we keep."
Roman hasn't drawn. He's watching me with his head tipped, the burn-scar pulling his smile crooked, and he's recalculating, the way they do, and I let my own grin come up wide because I want him to see it.
"You'll bleed for her," Roman says, almost kind. "All three of you. He'll make sure she watches."
"Counting on it," I tell him, and I mean the bleeding part, and something in my face must say so, because Roman lifts both hands, slow, palms out, and steps back toward the stair like a man stepping back from a dog that turned out not to be a puppy after all.
"Another day," he says.
"Any day, malen'kiy," I say. Little man. He doesn't like that. Good.
He goes. I let the dock-shouldered one up — bloody nose, two of his fingers wrong, walking but he'll remember — and put him out the door behind his master with a hand twisted in his collar, and I stand at the top of the stair listening to the van doors and the engine and the rain swallowing them until there's nothing but Bea's machine in the corner, still running, the needle chattering at nothing, tk-tk-tk-tk, the most ordinary sound in the world.
My hands are shaking. They always do, once it's over. During the thing itself they go to stone; the tremor only finds them in the after, when there's nobody left to put down.
Bea's in the coupe with Amara when I come down, the two of them a knot of fast low talk that stops dead when I open the door, and Amara's out before I've got it all the way open, in the rain, both hands coming up — to me, at me, I can't tell — and then she sees my right hand and stops.
The knuckles are split. Two of them, open and welling, the skin gone to the cutting-table edge and the man's teeth. I'd forgotten. I genuinely forgot they were mine.
I wait for it. I've waited for it my whole life, the flinch, the half-step back, the rearrangement of a face that just understood what it's standing next to.
I am the blade. People are glad of the blade right up until they see it's wet.
I made my peace long ago with being the hand the family closes around the blade and pushes forward.
I made it years ago. I called it Tuesday.
She holds my eyes and stays exactly where she is.
She reaches back into the car without looking, comes out with a length of clean muslin from her kit — she keeps her kit on her, of course she does, rosewater and chalk and thread and the steel scissors meant for cloth — and she takes my ruined hand in both of hers, there in the rain on Glass Street, and turns it over the way she turned it over the first morning, the wrong hand, the scary one, the one with the old knife scar already silvered across the palm.