CHAPTER 27
Amara
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A velvet box sits on Mateo's desk in the study with a single black falcon feather inside it and a card in Lev's beautiful hand — I know precisely what you treasure now, nephew — and the first snow of the year comes on the eleventh of December the way bad news does, quietly, while everyone is looking at something else.
I've spent the morning at the dress form in the conservatory, basting the bodice of my own gown to the lining, the ivory silk cool and heavy across my lap, the nap catching the gray light off the glass like skin.
Mateo has moved the whole household behind one wall — Inés in the infirmary now, two days out of surgery and pink again, scolding the nurse Dr. Reyes installed; Pavel on the forecourt; the gate doubled.
He'd set that little box down so gently this morning that I understood, the way you understand a seam is going to tear before it tears, that the war had already started.
He'd said, He's going to come for you. Let him.
He's about to learn what you are. I didn't know, at the time, what I was either. I would learn it before dark.
By trade and by temperament, I am a woman who goes and gets her own things.
So when Nadia mentions that the courier with my buckram and my boning was turned back at the gate for lack of a name on the list, I pick up my shears and my coat and go down the gravel myself, because a gown does not build itself and I have stopped, somewhere in this house, believing that being kept safe and being kept small are the same gesture.
The snow has just begun. Fat slow flakes come down out of a sky the color of unbleached muslin, settling on the carved bird over the gate and going gray there, and the forecourt is very quiet, the foghorn out on the Sound marking its slow turn through the hush, and the gate man is not our gate man.
That is the first wrong stitch. I read it the way I read a garment somebody else cut: a stranger's hand, a tension pulled wrong all down the seam. Our gate men are two, and young, and bored, and one of them whistles flat through his teeth all day until Gael threatens to fire him into the Sound.
This man is alone, and forty, and still, and a scar drags the left corner of his lip crooked into something that wants to be a smile and fails, and he turns a heavy ring on his finger when he sees me coming, and I have spent my life learning men by their tells the way I learn cloth by its grain, and I know, three steps too late and not late enough, exactly who he is.
"Miss Costa," Roman says, warm as anything. Warm the way Lev was warm, that family warmth that comes right before the cut. "Or is it Sokolov now. Such a soft little argument, the name. Your husband can't decide either."
"The courier," I say, keeping my face the blank one I wear over a misjudged seam, while my pulse drops clean through into my stomach.
I press the shears flat against my thigh inside the fold of my coat, the steel cold through wool, and I make my voice the one I use on brides who want a neckline their mothers won't allow.
Level. Bored. Mine. "There was a courier. Where's Pavel."
"Pavel's at the house. " He comes off the gatehouse wall, unhurried, the snow landing on his shoulders and refusing to melt, and behind him I see it now, the sedan that isn't ours pulled close past the open gate, the back door open like a mouth.
Warmth, and then the knife. He smiles the warm smile all the way and it goes nowhere near the rest of his face.
"Your uncle sends his regards. He'd like a word.
Just a word, Miss Costa. He's family. You don't say no to family. "
The cove, I think, very clear, very cold, in Gael's voice, in the rain on the wet black stone of a night a month gone — the skiff, the dark water, don't look back.
The sea stair is forty yards left of me, down the cliff path, behind the winter garden wall.
Forty yards of open gravel with a man between me and the house and a car door open at my back.
The house is past reaching. The path, maybe.
"He's not family," I say. "He's the thing that killed mine.
" And I take the half-step back I need, toward the garden wall and the stair beyond it, and Roman's warm face does what Lev's used to do when the courtesy ran out, the smile holding exactly where it is while everything under it goes flat and patient, and he reaches for my arm.
I carry no weapon. I carry shears, and pins, and forty years of my mother's steel thimble cold at my throat, and hands that have driven a needle through eight layers of coutil since I was a girl at her knee and wear a thin silver scar from the one time the needle won.
When his hand closes on my coat sleeve I hold dead steady and silent.
I bring the shears up out of the fold of my coat and I drive them down into the back of the hand on my arm — the way you punch a needle through buckram, all the weight behind the point, one clean stitch driven home — and the honest snick of the blades opening as they bite is the cleanest sound in the world against all that warm lying, and Roman makes a noise that is finally, at last, the truth.
He lets go. Of course he lets go, because you let go of the thing with the steel in it.
I go left, into the snow, toward the wall and the path and the cove, and I get six strides, eight, my whole body one bright animal scream of run, my pulse slamming in my throat, before the snow eats the sound of my own breath and hands me back another sound underneath it.
A whistle.
Low, and tuneless, and rising, coming fast along the cliff path from the direction of the stable, and I learned that whistle on a wet sea stair a lifetime ago and I know exactly and only one thing it means.
Gael whistles before he does violence. It is the last sound the world gives certain men.
And no sound in my whole life has ever gladdened me the way a man telling me he is about to hurt someone gladdens me now.
What happens then I mostly hear. I've turned, breath sawing, my back to the cold garden wall, the shears still bright in my fist, Roman between me and the gate with his ruined hand to his chest and a pistol coming up in the other — and then Gael comes off the top of the garden wall like something that hunts, auburn and fast and stripped down to pure purpose, his grin gone and the jokester burned clean out of him, just the blade his brothers point, Pavel a beat behind him with a gun up and level.
The pistol goes off once into the snow. The switchblade does its quiet work across the gun hand.
Roman, two-handed ruined now, makes the only sane choice a cornered man makes against the Sokolov blade and falls back bleeding into the open car door, gone out the gate into the snow with the tires throwing gravel — alive, wounded, fled, saved for whatever Greywater has left to give.
And then it is very quiet. Snow on the forecourt. My own ragged breath. The gate standing open on an empty road going white.
Gael turns around.
I've watched all three of these men be afraid for me.
Mateo goes still, the wall getting taller.
Emil goes precise, indexing the exits. Gael's fear comes up through his face like blood through a bandage, fast, helpless, the armor gone before he can get it back on, and he crosses the gravel to me in four strides with his hands already out and shaking, his eyes going down my whole body once, fast, the medic's sweep, where, where, show me where, before they snap back to my face, and his voice when it arrives is wrecked.
"Where are you hit. Malyshka. Where. " His hands are on me, my shoulders, my arms, my throat, my face, checking, and they tremble so hard I feel it through my coat. "Tell me where."
"I'm not. I'm not hit. " My own voice comes out thin and not mine.
"Gael, I'm not hit, it's his, that's his blood, I — the shears —" I look down at them in my fist, bright, the snow falling on them, and I start to shake, the whole of it arriving at once now that it's over, the adrenaline going out of me like a tide and leaving nothing under me. "I stabbed him with my fabric shears."
A sound comes out of Gael that is half a laugh and half something that has no name, and he takes the shears out of my hand very gently, the way you take something sharp from a child, and presses them closed, and the snick of them shutting is the second honest sound in an afternoon of lies.
Pavel says something about the gate and the house and Mateo, and Gael says, low, without turning, "Tell them she's safe.
Tell them I have her. Nobody comes up to my rooms tonight," in a voice Pavel doesn't argue with, and then his arm is around me and he is walking me — half-carrying me, my legs are not entirely participating — off the white forecourt and up the outside stair to his rooms over the old stable, where the record player sits silent and the weights are stacked and the knives are on the wall, and he kicks the door shut on the snow and the cold and the open gate, and we are alone.
He doesn't put me down. He stands in the cluttered middle of his room with his arms around me and his face in my hair and he shakes. The blade. The one they point. Shaking.
"I heard the shot," he says into my hair, and his voice breaks clean down the middle on the word.
"I was at the boathouse and I heard one shot and I didn't know — I ran and I didn't know if you were — malyshka, I have done the math my brothers do, I have run the version where I get to you and you're already — " He can't finish it.
He pulls back and holds my face in both hands, his thumbs moving over my cheekbones like he's reading me in the dark, like he needs to feel me to believe the seeing.
"Don't. Don't ever. You went toward the wall.
You ran for the cove. You remembered. Good girl, you remembered the cove, but Christ, trouble, a pair of scissors, you went at Roman with a pair of —"