CHAPTER 22 #3
I find her in the corner room she's claimed and made into an atelier, because of course I do, because that's where she lives even when she's sleeping somewhere else in the house.
Lamp on. Machine quiet. The gown on the form — her own gown, the one she's building stitch by stitch like she's building a spine out of cloth, ivory silk-velvet that catches the lamplight along the nap like skin, like the inside of a thing, the kind of fabric that holds a mark and keeps it.
She's pinning a seam, pins between her lips, the thimble bright at her throat. She doesn't startle when I come in. She's learned my weight on the floor.
"You're back," she says around the pins, and takes them out, and reads me the way she reads everything, top to bottom, the weave and the tension and where I'm fraying. Her face changes. "You've got that thing under your face. What happened."
I've got the scrap in my fist before I lose my nerve.
It's only an offcut, a long ribbon of the deepest blue velvet I saw at the downtown atelier weeks back, on the floor, on its way to a bin, and I picked it up and pocketed it and never knew why until right now.
It's nothing. It's a thing somebody threw away.
I've been carrying it around against my heart with the murder.
"Saw this," I say. The blade who talks constantly, who never met a silence he didn't fill, and now I can barely get three words out in a row.
"On the floor. At your place. Down the bin.
Thought — " I shrug, jagged, hating how naked it is.
"Thought it was the color of something. Your eyes go that, at the edges.
In the dark. Thought you'd want it before it got thrown out.
That's all. It's garbage. It's nothing."
She doesn't take it like it's nothing.
She sets her pins down on the table, careful, all of them, like she needs both hands. Then she takes the scrap from me and she runs it through her fingers, slow, that craftsman's touch she gives the things she loves, and she looks at it and she looks at me, and she knows. I watch her know.
I watch her see the whole stupid shape of it — the blade who does the killing and the fetching, the one who counted himself out, walking around for three weeks with a scrap of trash over his heart because it was the color of her in the dark.
"You saved garbage off a floor," she says, low, "because it looked like me."
"When you put it like that it sounds insane."
"It sounds like the kindest thing anyone's done for me in a year. " Her voice has gone rough at the bottom. "Gael."
"Don't," I say, because if she's kind to me right now, on top of Inés, on top of that hand-print still warm on the ink, on top of the list with her name on it, I'm going to come apart in her workroom like a badly-set seam, and I've got a courier to manage and a war to be ready for.
"Don't make it a whole thing, trouble. It's a scrap of cloth. "
She loops the ribbon once around her own wrist, slow, and ties it, deliberate, and looks at me with it on her like a mark she's choosing to wear, and doesn't make it a whole thing out loud. She just lets me see her wear it. Which is worse. Which is everything.
And that — her, choosing to keep the garbage I saved because it was the color of her — that's when Inés's words come back and lodge.
Don't be a receipt, boy. Be the one who tears it up.
I've spent my whole life being the thing that gets spent.
The hand in front of the knife. The one nobody picks because you don't pick the blade, you just reach for it when you bleed and put it back in the drawer when you stop.
I laid myself down in that drawer years ago.
I decided, somewhere with Lev's lessons still ringing, that I'd love the way falcons hunt — alone, cold, asking for nothing, owed nothing, holding no slip on anybody and letting nobody hold one on me.
But she tied my garbage to her wrist.
And for the first time, standing in the lamplight with a murdered man's medicine over my heart and a sick old woman's mercy still warm in my chest, I let myself wonder — really wonder, out loud in the privacy of my own skull — whether being chosen is a thing I'm allowed to want — to want it plain and out loud, past all the earning and the tab-settling and the blade-in-the-ribs penance, want it like a man who's done being a receipt.
Inés had said it like she could see straight through the ink to the kid underneath, the one who catches knives so nobody ever has to love him.
I drive nothing tonight. I stay. But later, in my own rooms over the stable with the record turning down to the run-out groove, I take that scrap-twin of the ribbon — I kept a length of it, I cut it before I gave her the rest, I never told her — and I turn it over and over in my tattooed hands in the dark, and I wonder it again, the reckless thought, the one I was never built to hold.
Don't be a receipt, boy.
Whatever she chooses, I'm hers. That part's already done, signed, no clause to strike. But for the first time in thirty years, turning her color over and over against the ink above my heart, I let myself wonder if being chosen back is a thing a blade like me is allowed to want out loud.