CHAPTER 11
Amara
◆
The foghorn wakes me at two in the morning the way it has every night since I came to this house — a long, low note out on the black water, then a stretch of silence, then the note again, patient as a man who knows you'll come to him eventually.
I lie in the four-poster in my own suite, in the warm dark that smells of beeswax and chalk and the rosewater I keep on the dressing table, and I do the arithmetic of why I can't sleep, the way Emil would, laying out the columns.
Two days ago a man with one of Lev's faces casing my atelier from a parked car.
Yesterday Gael walking me down the wet cove sea-stair with his hand at the small of my back, showing me the boathouse and the skiff inside it, bad goes down, you take this and you don't look back, malyshka, his knuckles still split from the work he'd done to keep my fabric safe.
The blood drying brown on his hand while he taught me the way out of a house I'm not allowed to leave.
That's the column on the left. Fear. It balances. It always balances.
It's the column on the right I can't make come out even. Because the truth — the one I've been smoothing flat against my thigh like a wrinkled seam every time it surfaces, the lie-tell I can't seem to break — is that Lev's men have nothing to do with why I'm awake.
I'm awake because three doors down the hall there is a man who put his hand around my throat against his own study door eleven days ago, kissed me like a verdict handed down, and then took his hands off me and said not until you ask, and I have spent every night since refusing.
I'm tired of refusing. That's the thing nobody warns you about armor. It's heavy. You wear it long enough, you forget you're allowed to set it down, and then one night the weight of it is the only thing keeping you awake.
I sit up. The thimble swings cold against my breastbone and I close my fist around it, the little dented relic my mother stitched a lifetime in, and I think: you didn't raise a coward. You raised a woman who reads a room and then walks into it.
I get up. I don't put on a robe over the thin slip I sleep in. That's a decision, and I make it knowingly, the way you decide on the bias before you cut — once you've chosen the grain, the whole garment follows.
The hall is cold and unlit, just the gray fog-light from the tall window at the end.
I walk it barefoot on the runner. Past Emil's door, dark.
Past the stair. And I stop in front of the plain dark door at the end of the master wing, the one I've walked past a dozen times and left untouched every time, the door behind which the Pakhan of the Sokolov bratva sleeps, or lies there awake.
I know he doesn't. I've heard him. Two in the morning, the floor creaking under a heavy, careful tread, a man walking the inside of his own house like a sentry on a wall.
I don't knock. If I give myself the second a knock buys, I'll talk myself out of it, and I have come all this way down a cold hall in a slip to do the thing my good sense keeps voting against. I turn the handle.
It gives. Of course it gives. The man leaves his door open to the house.
He's the wall; what would he be locking out.
Mateo's room stops me on the threshold.
I expected the rest of the house — the oxblood and the cut crystal of his study, the weight of money lying over everything.
This is a cell. A single good bed, made tight as a barracks bunk.
A bare nightstand with the brass watch lying open on it, ticking, the engraved falcon catching the low light.
A chair. A window with no curtain, just cold glass and the fog beyond it and, far out, the unhurried wink of the lighthouse.
No portraits of dead Sokolovs in here. Nothing on the walls at all. A man who carries the whole house on his back and gives himself four bare walls and a watch to sleep beside.
He's standing at the window. Of course he is. He's dressed in dark trousers and nothing else, his back to me, broad and heavy-shouldered, the silver just starting at his temples gone to pewter in the dark. He doesn't turn around. He heard the door. He hears everything.
"You should be asleep," he says. Low. Even. A stone dropped down a well.
"So should you," I say. "Neither of us is. There's a pattern there. I read patterns for a living."
Now he turns. Storm-gray eyes find me in the dark, find the slip, find my bare feet on his bare floor, and something moves in his face that he doesn't let reach the rest of him — a flinch of want pulled up short, the way you'd catch a needle a half-stitch from your own thumb.
He's good. He's so good at the stillness.
But I've spent three weeks learning the weave of this man, and I know now where the tension lives in him, and I can see it gather.
"Amara. " Just my name, careful, the verbal equivalent of a palm raised between us. "It's late. Whatever it is, it can wait for morning."
"It's waited eleven days," I say. "I'm done waiting."
He goes very still. He's not a man who gets loud when something lands.
He gets quiet, and the quiet has a temperature, and right now it has dropped about ten degrees and gone bright at the edges.
The watch ticks on the nightstand between us.
I am aware of my own pulse in the scar across my left index finger, that old needle-line, throbbing the way it always throbs right before I do something with my hands that can't be unpicked.
"Say what you came to say," he says.
So I do. I came down this hall to do it on my terms, framed as what it actually is — a choice I'm making with both hands open, mine to give and mine to keep, because I will not hand this man my spine wrapped in tissue like a wedding gift — and I make myself say it plain.
"You told me, in your study, that you wouldn't have me until I asked.
" My voice doesn't shake, which surprises me, because the rest of me is one long live wire.
"You said a thing taken I could hate clean, and a thing asked for I'd have to own.
You were right. I hated that you were right.
I've hated it for eleven days. " I take one step into the room and let the door swing shut behind me on its quiet hinge, and the small click of it is the loudest thing in Cape Brevik.
"I'm not asking you for protection. I have three of you tripping over each other to protect me, and I didn't come down here to be guarded.
I came down here because I've decided to stop pretending I don't want this.
Understand the difference, Mateo. This is me reaching across a table and taking something I've decided I'm allowed to have. "
For a long moment he says nothing at all. Out on the black water something sounds, far off, and dies into the silence between us.
"You understand what asking me costs you," he says finally, and he doesn't frame it as a question because he already knows the answer. "I am not a kind man. I am a careful one. When I have a thing I keep it. You'd be choosing to be kept by the man whose family ruined yours."
"I'm choosing it with my eyes open," I say.
"Which is more than my father ever got. Don't insult me by pretending I don't know exactly what I'm walking into.
I read every clause of your contract. I struck the one I wouldn't sign.
I know how to read a thing before I put my name to it.
" I lift my chin. "I'm asking, Mateo. There. The word you wanted. I'm asking."
He crosses the room.
A lunge would be beneath him. He crosses it slow and deliberate, with the same measured tread he brings to a ledger or a threat, a man no one alive has ever managed to hurry, and somehow the slowness is worse, the slowness undoes me faster than speed ever could, because it tells me he has decided and now nothing will stop the decision arriving.
He stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes.
He smells of cedar and cold and something underneath that's just him, warm skin in a cold room.
"Then I want it said clearly, once, so neither of us can lie about it after.
" His voice has dropped to almost nothing.
His hand comes up and his knuckles, just his knuckles, brush down the side of my throat where his palm sat eleven days ago, and my whole body lights like a struck match. "Say yes, Amara."
"Yes," I breathe.
"Look at me when you say it."
I look at him. Storm-gray, steady, terrifying, a man whose control I have never seen falter holding himself on a leash I can feel humming. "Yes," I say again, into his eyes. "Yes. I'm asking. Yes."
Something in his face cracks open — quiet, a hairline fissure running up the wall, and through it I see how much this man has wanted and refused himself, eleven days of it, maybe longer, maybe since I signed my maiden name under his seal in full like a refusal.
And then he kisses me, and where the kiss against the study door was a sentence pronounced, this one is a man finally setting down something heavy — the slow and thorough taste of him, his hand sliding into my hair to tilt my head exactly where he wants it, taking his time, taking all of it, like a man who has been given leave to do the one thing he's been disciplining himself out of and intends to do it properly.
I make a sound against his mouth I didn't authorize.
He swallows it. His other hand finds my hip, the wide give of it under the thin slip, and my whole adult life has braced me for the flinch that comes next — for someone like you, not bad for a big girl, the apology dressed up as a compliment — yet he only spreads his fingers and holds the breadth of me in his palm like he's measuring something he means to keep, and a small, old, armored part of me goes quiet and astonished in the dark.
"Bed," he says against my mouth. An offer wearing the shape of a command, which I'm learning is his whole grammar.