CHAPTER 19
Amara
◆
Two nights ago a man died for telling Emil the truth, and tonight I am standing outside Emil's bedroom door with my hand raised to knock, which tells you something about the kind of house this has become and the kind of woman I've let myself turn into inside it.
The official is dead. Emil told me at dinner the way he tells me everything now, flat and exact, no cushioning, because he learned early that I read the cushioning as the lie and the flatness as the respect.
Roman cleaned him up the day after he signed the confession into Emil's ledger.
He talked, and then Lev made sure he couldn't talk again, Emil said, and folded his glasses, and that was the eulogy.
My mother is in a guarded flat across the Sound with two of Pavel's men on the stair.
The brothers are aligned now, all three of them, on the only play that ends with Lev stripped instead of crowned.
The forged seizure that ruined my father is proven all the way to the source, every forged berth-assignment, every bought stamp, sitting in a small leather book in this room behind this door.
And every last piece of it is the furthest thing from why I'm standing here.
I should be here about it, and I'm not, and that's the seam I keep smoothing on my thigh, an invisible one, the lie-tell my mother would catch in a heartbeat.
There's a war coming — Roman caught a second car idling past the atelier gate at dusk, third night running, the same plates, Lev's plates, a watcher posted now to count who comes and goes — and my mother's heart is failing and I'm standing in a cold corridor at midnight in a robe because two nights ago Emil Sokolov backed me to the edge of his desk and then took his hands off me like I was the live wire and not him, and said, When I have you, I want every part of my mind on you and none of it on Lev.
He has indexed it. I know him well enough now to know that. Somewhere behind those ice-pale eyes there is a column that has been left open since that afternoon, an unbalanced number with my name on it, and the cold one would gnaw his own arm off before he let an open column stand.
Turns out I'm exactly the same, which is its own kind of news.
The foghorn goes out on the Sound, low and far, a sound the dark doesn't care whether I hear. I close my fingers around the cold dented steel under my collar, my mother's thimble, the little armor she wore on the finger that fed us, and I think, coward, and I knock.
"It's open."
It always is. That's the thing about the most guarded man in the house — he leaves his doors unlocked, because the lock is internal, the lock is the whole architecture of him, and a wooden one would only be redundant. I let myself in.
This is the first time I've crossed this particular threshold.
Nine weeks under this roof and I've been in every other room a dozen times over, and this one stayed sealed until now, and that lands on me the second I'm inside.
It's the most ordered space I've ever stood in.
A narrow good bed, made with a precision that looks like geometry.
A reading chair under a single bare lamp, the only light burning.
A wall of books shelved by some system I can't read on sight, which means it skips right past alphabetical into something that's purely his.
Bare walls, surfaces clear, every soft thing exiled — the room of a man who decided as a boy that to be predictable was to be safe and built his whole life out of straight lines so that nothing could ever surprise him into being hurt.
Emil is in the chair. He has a book open and the black ledger closed on the small table at his elbow, and when I come in he does the one thing in nine weeks I've never watched him do.
He sets the ledger down face-down.
The proof of everything. The literal weapon.
The thing that ruins Lev and avenges my father and his.
He turns it over so the cover hides the pages, and he sets it down, and he takes off his glasses and folds them — the small dry click of the steel hinge — and lays them on top of the closed book he was reading, a book he will not finish tonight, and he looks at me with his naked, unmodeled face.
"Amara. " Just that, and nothing after it. He skips the question of why I'm here, because he already knows why I'm here, and he's known it since the desk.
"You left a column open," I say.
His mouth tilts a fraction, the ghost of that bone-dry irony he wears like the glasses.
"I left several. You have a talent for it.
I had a closed system before you. It balanced.
It was very restful. " He stands the way he does everything, careful and deliberate, and even careful he's a tall lean line of a man crossing a small room toward me, ash-blond hair gone soft without its part, ice-blue eyes stripped of the steel rims he hides behind, the thin white scar through his left eyebrow that Lev gave him with a chair when he was nine and that I've trained myself to leave unasked, because the silence around it is its own gift between us.
"Now nothing balances. I have run the figures.
You are the error in all of them and I have stopped wanting to correct it. "
"That's the filthiest thing anyone's ever said to me," I tell him, "and Gael talks."
That gets the real thing — past the irony, down to the actual flicker underneath it, the warmth he rations like a man who grew up where warmth got taxed.
"Gael," he says, "uses a great many words to say less than I say in a glance.
It's a volume problem. I prefer precision.
" He stops an arm's length from me and keeps his hands to himself.
He's kept them to himself since the desk and he'll go on keeping them, I understand, until it's named, because for Emil the naming is the consent and the consent will never be a formality, it's the single part of him that has stayed warm the whole way through.
"Why are you here. Say the real thing. I dislike approximations. "
I read him the way I've always read cloth, weave and bias and where the tension lives and which seam gives if you pull it wrong.
And what I read, standing this close in the lamp-light, is a man holding himself so still it's costing him, holding the line he drew two nights ago, no part of my mind on Lev, and waiting to see if I came to settle the column or to balance it.
"I came to ruin you," I say.
His breath changes on those four words. The chest under the immaculate shirt — he's in shirtsleeves, no tie, which on Emil counts as nakedness — goes still, and then it catches.
"On purpose," I add, because I want him to have all of it, the whole true seam.
"I came the way I came to the library that night, except that night I didn't know what I was doing and tonight I do.
You let a word slip in the library. Kotyonok.
You told me to strike it from the record.
I told you I was keeping it. I've kept it nine weeks, Emil.
Tonight I want the rest of what that word costs you.
I want to take the model apart with my hands and watch you not be able to put it back together. "
For a moment he doesn't move at all. The lamp hums. Somewhere below us a window settles in its frame and goes quiet.
Then he reaches up, slow, and tucks a fallen piece of my hair behind my ear, and his ink-stained fingers come a fraction short of steady, and that small tremor in the steadiest man I know undoes me past anything Gael has ever growled or Mateo has ever commanded.
"Yes or no, kotyonok," he says. Owning it. Saying it on purpose, the slip made deliberate, the mortification spent into something else. "I need the word. I will not move until I have it."
"Yes," I say. "God. Yes."
He kisses me like he's solving me. That's the only way I can name it — there's intent in it, a mind working even now, mapping where I respond and filing it, his hand coming up to cradle my jaw the way you'd hold something you've calculated the value of to four decimal places.
And then I open my mouth under his and bite, soft, the way I did to learn if I could break the surface, and the calculation stutters.
I feel it. I feel the exact half-second where the model hiccups, and I chase it, and his other hand fists in the back of my robe and pulls me into the long line of him and the kiss stops being a solution and starts being a need.
"That," he says against my mouth, breath ragged for the first time since I walked in, "is going to be a problem. You keep doing that. You break it on purpose."
"Tell me what you're going to do," I say, because I know his idiom, because the narration is how he stays in control and I want to hear the control before I take it. "You always tell me first."
He pulls back just enough to look at me, and his pale eyes are not cold, they have not been cold for weeks, and he says, "I am going to take that robe off you and I am going to put my mouth on every part of you I have only been permitted to imagine, and I am going to make you come more times than is strictly efficient, and I have calculated three, and I intend to be wrong about the number in the direction of more.
And you are going to lie there and let me catalog you, because you are the one thing I have never been able to model, and tonight I would like to study you up close.
" He unties the robe with two precise movements and pushes it off my shoulders and it pools at my feet.
"I have wanted to do that since the conservatory.
I refused myself the authorization to want it.
I have stopped asking my own permission. "