CHAPTER 13
Amara
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I gave my father's ghost away this morning, and now, past two, the four-poster won't let me sleep on the bargain.
Sokol House has stopped pretending to be a home; after this hour it remembers it's a fortress, and I lie in it counting the foghorn's slow pulses out on the Sound the way I used to count basting stitches I couldn't get past — one, and the long dark gap, and another. The records are gone from the atelier.
I carried the box of his honest paper down to Emil with my own two hands and set it on a strategist's desk like a body laid out for someone who finally believed it deserved a burial.
You want my father's ghost to do your work, I'd told him weeks ago.
Earn it. He'd earned it. I'd watched him find the seam in the forgery in an afternoon, the forged berth-assignment glowing under his pen like a dropped stitch in a hem, and I'd felt the floor of my whole grief shift a half-inch toward solid ground.
So I should sleep. I have done a true thing and I am, for once, not the one left holding the coat.
I don't sleep.
I'm awake when the gravel of the forecourt starts to talk — tires, low, too fast for this hour — and awake when a door bangs somewhere two floors down and a voice I'd know in a hurricane says a word that would curdle Nadia's milk, and awake, fully and coldly, before I've decided to be, with my mother's thimble already pressed cold against the hollow of my throat and three pins between my lips that I don't remember taking from the bowl on the nightstand.
My body knows the shape of trouble before my mind catches up. That's the kind of girl I am now. That's the kind of house this is.
I'm down the back stair in a robe and bare feet before I can talk myself into being a wife who waits.
The infirmary is the one room in this beautiful cold pile that smells like a working space instead of a museum — antiseptic, surgical steel, the rubber of the exam table — and tonight it smells like all of that with something rusted and metallic laid over the top of it, and under that, faint and wrong in this room, the gun oil and cedar that means a Sokolov man has come home from doing the thing they decide.
Gael is sitting on the table swinging one boot like a kid kept after school, and he is bleeding.
"There she is," he says, and grins, and the grin is the first thing that scares me, because I've learned to read that grin the way I read the bias of a cloth — the wider it goes, the deeper the tear underneath.
This one is very wide. "Go back to bed, malyshka.
Reyes has got me. It's nothing. You should see the other—"
"Sit still. " Dr. Reyes doesn't look up from the suture kit she's laying out, and her voice has the flat patience of a woman who has been telling these men to sit still for years and gets obeyed roughly never on the first ask.
There's a butterfly of blood high on his left cheekbone, a split through the tail of his eyebrow that's going to want stitches, and a longer shallow opening along his forearm where the blackwork sleeve disappears under a field dressing somebody slapped on in the car.
His knuckles are wrecked. His knuckles are always half-wrecked, that's a constant, like fog, but tonight three of them are open to the bone and he keeps flexing the hand like he's checking it still closes.
"What happened," I say. I let it land flat as a verdict; somewhere in these months I traded my questions for statements, the way you trade asking permission for taking the scissors yourself. That's growth, or it's armor; some days I can't find the seam between them.
"Lev's boys went back to the atelier. " Reyes answers because Gael won't, threading a needle with the bored economy of someone who does this on a payroll. "Three of them this time. Came to leave a message in the windows. He decided to leave a message back."
"Bea—"
"Bea was home in her bed, trouble, the place was dark.
" Gael's swinging boot stops. For one beat the charm slides off his face like wet paint and the thing underneath looks at me, steady and green and old.
"Nobody was there. I made sure nobody was going to be there.
That's the whole point of me. " Then the paint goes back on, fast, a man pulling a coat over a wound.
"Reyes, sweetheart, I love you, but you've got the bedside manner of a bollard.
Give the needle to the one who sews for a living. "
I look at the tray. At his eyebrow. At the four-inch surgical scissors gleaming there, the bright cold beak of them, and something in me that has spent twelve years closing seams on the most important days of strangers' lives stands up and squares its shoulders.
"Give it to me," I say to Reyes.
She does look up then. Forty-five, unimpressed, paid to be discreet and not to argue.
She takes my measure the way I take a client's — across the shoulders, down to the hands — and whatever she finds in my hands makes her decision for her.
"Index and middle, brace the skin, pull toward yourself, not down.
He'll flinch. Don't let him make you chase it.
" She peels off her gloves and snaps fresh ones onto my hands.
"The brow's the one that matters. The arm's already mine. Eyebrows I'll grant a couturière."
"You're handing me to the seamstress," Gael says, delighted and appalled.
"I'm handing you to the only person in this house you'll hold still for," Reyes says, dry as chalk, and goes to work on his arm.
Here is a thing nobody tells you about loving dangerous men: the work of it is so often quiet.
The gun and the gravel are the loud part, the part that gets remembered.
The real labor comes after, in the hush — a needle and a small clean tray and your own breath going slow on purpose while you make a man's torn face whole again with the same six motions you've used on ten thousand inches of French seam.
I clean the brow first, and he hisses, and I don't chase it.
I anchor the skin with two fingers the way Reyes said, the needle-scar on my left index a thin silver line against his blood, and I think, absurdly, first commission, sixteen, the machine bit me and I finished the hem anyway, and the thought steadies my hand.
The first stitch goes in. He goes very still under me, which is its own kind of trust from a man who is never still, who flips a switchblade just to give his hands a job.
"You're good at this," he says, low, watching my mouth instead of my hands.
"It's the same as a hem. " I tie off the first throw, neat, set the next.
"Enter, exit, mind the tension, don't pucker.
A wound wants what cloth wants. Even edges.
No gather. Don't pull so tight you make a ridge it can't lie down from.
" Snick — the surgical scissors, the same small beak I've used a thousand times on basting thread, trimming the suture tail close.
The sound of them is so deeply mine, so much the sound of my real life, that to hear it cutting a thread out of Gael's skin instead of out of a bodice makes something turn over in my chest. Blood and gun oil, sitting on top of the rosewater and tailor's chalk of my own kit that someone — Nadia, bless her — has carried down here and set on the counter, because of course they know by now that I'd come.
Two worlds, laid one on the other like a lining basted to a shell. The brutal and the made-by-hand. My whole marriage in a smell.
"You're angry," he says.
"I'm working."
"You're working angry. I can see it. You've got the same line between your eyebrows you get when a client gains a size two weeks before the wedding and lies about it. " He smiles when I jab the next stitch a hair harder than I need to. "There she is."
"You went back," I say, and my voice comes out lower than I want, thinner. "You knew they'd come back and you walked into it with that—" I gesture with the needle, at all of him, the whole reckless gleaming length of him. "That grin."
"It's my job, velvet."
"A job is a thing you can quit, and you'll never quit this.
" I tie the third throw. One more to go on the brow and then I am going to be very calm and walk back upstairs and not do anything stupid.
"You let three men get close enough to do this to your face so that nobody would do anything to a building full of my mother's chair and my pins and my partner's loud, ridiculous, alive heart, and you came home grinning about it, and you want me to — what.
Pat you. Sharpen you. Send you back out for the next one. "
The grin finally goes. All the way, this time.
"Nobody patches up the knife," Gael says, and it comes out so light, so off-hand, that it takes me a second to feel the weight of it land.
"They just sharpen it and send it back in the drawer.
I'm not complaining, trouble. I'm telling you why you should go to bed.
There's no point sewing a thing that's just going to get used again Tuesday. "
I set the needle down on the tray. I look at him — really look, the way I looked at him that first week, reading the wound under the charm, the hurt I named aloud once and watched undo him.
The split skin. The knuckles. The falcon I know is inked over his heart under the bloody shirt, the bird that mates for life sitting on a man who's certain he's the one nobody keeps.
Adrenaline is still running in him; I can see it in the fine tremor of the swinging boot that's started up again, in the too-bright eyes, in the way he can't quite stop moving even held together with my thread. He's all live wire and no place to put it.
And under my fury — and it is real fury, the kind that means I'd burn the house down for him and hates that I would — under it, my body has made its own loud illegal decision, the way it did the first night and every night since, the way it will apparently keep doing no matter how good my reasons are.
"Don't," I say, mostly to myself.