CHAPTER 17
Amara
◆
I know what a man looks like when he's bracing for a no.
I've seen it across a fitting-room mirror more times than I can count.
A bride's mother who's already decided the gown will be wrong, the price will be cruel, the daughter will be disappointed; she comes in armored against me before I've so much as threaded a needle.
You learn to read the set of a shoulder the way you read the bias of a cut of cloth — the grain that's already lying down before you've laid a hand on it, the seam that's deciding, on its own, where it means to give way.
Gael has been wearing that set for two days.
It started after Pyotr left. Nadia told me about it the next morning over black tea, the old brigadier and his cigar and his gravel and his pronouncement, and she told it like a victory, because it was one, and I let her, because she's earned her victories in this cold house more than anyone. But she didn't see what I saw.
She didn't see Gael at dinner that night, loud in all the right places, filthy and quick, the switchblade going open-shut under the table like a metronome — and a hollow behind his eyes the whole time, a man performing a man, the way you baste a hem to hold it until the real stitching goes in, except this time the real stitching never followed.
He's been avoiding me, and he's been doing it warmly, which is somehow worse — Gael couldn't be cold if you packed him in ice; even his retreat comes with a smile.
He's been busy. Suddenly there are gate rotations that need walking.
Suddenly Pavel needs a thing taught to him at the precise hour I'm in the kitchen.
Suddenly the man who used to find a reason to be in my doorway twice a day has found three days' worth of reasons to be anywhere I'm not.
I know retreat when I see it. I've made a whole garment out of it before.
He thinks he's not going to be picked.
The thought comes to me at midnight on the seventeenth, while I'm at the machine in the workroom with a length of ivory silk-velvet pinned to the form, the nap drinking the lamplight the way skin does.
I've got three pins between my lips and the cold steel of my mother's thimble riding under my collar and the needle-chatter going under my hands, and somewhere in the run of the seam I understand it, all of it, with the awful clarity that comes at midnight.
Mateo, he believes. Emil, after the library, after the storm, he's begun to let himself believe, the cold mind grudgingly conceding the data.
But Gael — Gael, who fell first and will say it last, who caught a knife with his hand and called it Tuesday, who has spent thirty years being the blade the family reaches for and not, in all that time, the man it keeps — Gael has already counted himself out.
He's laid himself down in the drawer with the other tools. He's decided to be the hand in front of the knife and nothing more, and he's decided it for me, generously, so I won't have to do the hard thing of breaking him.
I take the pins out of my mouth and set them in the cushion, one by one.
The hell he will.
I don't sleep on it. That's the part I'm proud of, later — that I don't talk myself into morning, into doing it gently, in daylight, with coffee and a careful preamble.
Because a careful preamble is just a longer way of letting him brace.
I pull a robe over the slip I sleep in, the deep green one, and I take the back stairs down through the dark house, past the great hall where the dead Sokolovs watch from their frames, past the cold marble, out the side door into the wet October night.
The forecourt gravel is freezing through my slippers.
Fog has come up off the Sound and swallowed the gate lamps to soft drowned coronas; the stone bird over the gate is just a wet shape, hunched.
Out on the water a foghorn lows, far and low, the world's one indifferent note.
I cross to the old stable block and climb the outside stair to the rooms over the garage, and I don't let myself rehearse a single word, because the only honest sentence I have is short, and I'm saving it.
There's light under his door. A record turning — I can hear the warm crackle-hiss of it through the wood, that old player of his, the needle worrying at something low and slow. I knock once.
Quiet. Then the scrape of a chair. Then the door opens, and there he is, dark auburn hair a mess, green eyes going wide and then deliberately, immediately, lazy — the shutter coming down, the grin coming up.
"Trouble," he says. "You lost? Big house.
Easy to wander into the help's quarters.
" He leans on the frame, all loose insolence, and his gaze does the thing it always does, drops and warms over the give of me under the green silk, the round of my hip, the full soft swell at my chest — open, unhidden hunger, the kind that used to make me wait for the but.
With Gael the but simply never arrives; there's only want, undisguised, and tonight there's something underneath it he's trying to whistle past.
"I'm not lost," I say. "Let me in, Gael."
The grin flickers. "Yeah? What's the emergency. Somebody need stabbing?" He doesn't move out of the doorway. "I'll get my coat."
"No emergency. " I look at him. I read him the way I read cloth — the tension in the weave, the place it'll tear if you pull wrong. He's braced so hard he's practically humming with it, the whole jaunty length of him strung tight as a warp on the loom. "Let me in."
He lets me in.
His rooms are exactly the chaos I remember from the once before — weights in a corner, knives laid in a precise row on a cloth on the dresser (precise, I note; the one orderly thing he owns), books in stacks, the record player turning in the lamplight with its needle riding now toward the run-out, that soft repeating tick where the song has ended and the groove just circles.
He doesn't lift the arm. He stands marooned at the center of his own room like he's not sure it's his.
"So," he says. "Midnight. The slippers. The look on your face.
" He flips the switchblade out of his pocket and open and shut, open and shut, the small snick-snick of a man who needs his hands occupied so they don't tell on him.
"You came down here to tell me something, malyshka, and I already know what it is, so let me save us both the —"
"You don't know what it is."
"I'm the youngest," he says, fast, lightly, like it's a joke he's told a hundred times because the hundredth time it might stop hurting.
"I know how this goes. You've got Mateo, you've got Emil, and that's — that's good, that's right, they're the ones you keep, and me, I'm the —" the blade, snick "— I'm the security detail with a filthy mouth, and that's fine, trouble, I'm a big boy, I don't need the —"
"Gael."
"— I don't need the speech, is what I'm saying, you don't have to come down here in the fog and do the kind thing, I'll save you the —"
I cross the room while he's still talking.
I take the switchblade out of his hand. Just lift it out of his fingers, gently, the way you'd take pins from a child, and I fold it shut and set it on the dresser in the orderly row with his knives, and the loss of it in his hand stops him mid-word like I've cut a string.
"There," I say. "Now your hands are empty. Look at me."
His eyes come up to mine. The grin's gone.
Without it his face is younger and rawer and harder to look away from, because it's true — the boy under the weapon, the one who got told a long time ago that he was a thing to be used and not a person to be kept, and who built an entire reckless beautiful charm over the top of it so no one would ever get to see this.
"Kindness has nothing to do with why I'm here," I tell him. "Ask Bea how kind I am. I came to do the true thing, and you're going to stand there with your empty hands and let me."
"Amara—"
"I picked you."
It lands in the room like a dropped pin in a quiet shop — that small, that loud. The record ticks in its groove. Somewhere past the wet glass, the night holds its breath. He doesn't move.
"What," he says. It comes out flat, not really a question at all, just a man making sure his ears worked.
"I picked you. " I step in. I put my hand flat on his chest, over the falcon I know is inked there under the shirt, and I can feel his heart going like something trying to get out.
"This has nothing to do with the contract handing you to me, or with you being convenient, or coming bundled with the house, or with me having to take all three to get the surgery and the name and the rest of it.
I picked you, Gael Sokolov. On purpose. With my eyes open. I'm choosing you."
I watch it hit him. I watch it the way you watch a difficult fabric take a dye — slow, then all at once, the color flooding through the fibers whether they wanted it or not.
His throat works. His hands come up and hover at my waist, not landing, like he's not sure he's allowed, this man who has always taken for granted that everything was his for the asking.
"You don't —" His voice has gone rough at the edges. "You don't have to say that. Pyotr said his thing, everyone's feeling generous about the —"
"This has nothing to do with generosity.
" I fist my hand in his shirt, the way I did with Mateo in the study that first time, except this time I'm calm instead of furious, I'm certain, and certainty in my hands holds steadier than rage ever did.
"Generous would be letting you lie down in the drawer with the other knives, because it's easier for everyone, including you.
I'm being selfish. I want you. I came down a dark stair in my slippers to tell you that to your face because you've spent two days deciding the answer was no so I wouldn't have to.
Well. The answer is yes. I'm telling you to your stupid handsome face. Yes."