CHAPTER 32
Mateo
◆
A man should not be this happy the day he goes to kill his uncle.
I think it plain, standing at the study window with Yuri's watch open in my palm: the snow that fell on our vows is gone by morning, scraped off the black water by a wind out of the north, and the cold comes down the Sound while I hold the one thought steady and let it sit on me like the weight it is.
Behind me the house is quiet in the way a house is quiet when the people in it are still asleep and worth waking for.
Amara is upstairs in our bed, her hair across the pillow, the ring I put on her hand catching what little light there is.
Yesterday I married her in the chapel where I'd married her once already as a contract, and this time there was no contract, only the gown she sewed with her own hands and the small dented thimble at her throat and the word I gave her, grave, the way I give it.
Yours too. The wall has a door. She put it there.
I close the watch. The click of it is a small thing. It has been the only language I trust for thirty-five years.
I have buried everyone I was ever set to protect.
My mother, twelve years in the ground, and the burn she gave me carrying her out still smooth and pale along my forearm where it will stay until they bury me too.
My father, eight months gone, the stroke that was not a stroke, the poison Emil can now name to the microgram.
I carry a ledger in my chest where their weights are kept, and the rule of it is that I don't lay them down.
That is what a Pakhan is. A man who carries.
But the math, as Emil would say, has changed.
Two days ago the elders sat in the old chamber across the city and listened to my brother lay the proof on the table, page by page, in his flat exact voice — the forged berth assignment that turned Tomas Costa's clean line into a "seizure," the pharmacy trail that turned my father's heart into a clock Lev wound down.
Pyotr stood. The old guard stood with him.
By our own law, Pyotr said, you are no Sokolov; you are the thing that killed one. And Lev smiled his warm smile, the one he wears before the knife, and walked out unhurried into the snow.
Which is how we knew it wasn't over.
"He's gone to Greywater. " Emil's voice, behind me.
I haven't heard the door. He never makes a sound he doesn't intend to.
He comes to stand at my shoulder, glasses on, the black ledger under his arm like a hymnal.
"Roman pulled four men off the south rotation in the night.
Two cars crossed to the far side of the Sound at oh-four-hundred.
He's not running. Running would be smart.
" He says the word smart the way another man says coward. "He's setting a table."
"For us."
"For you. " Emil takes the glasses off and breathes on a lens and polishes it on his cuff, which means he is about to tell me something he'd rather not.
"He's stripped. The Council won't move with him.
His money's frozen — I froze it at midnight, it was a long night.
He has Roman, he has six bought men, he has a house full of glass on a cliff, and he has the one card he has always had with you.
" He puts the glasses back on and watches me through them, ice-pale and certain.
"Sentiment. He'll go for the women. He's already had a man on the safe-flat. "
The cold in me, the old useful cold, comes up like water finding its level. "Inés."
"And Amara, if he can. He doesn't want to win anymore, Mateo.
He can't. He wants to burn the empire to the foundation so that whoever stands in the ash is standing in his.
He wants you to lose her in front of everyone, so the last thing the family remembers is that the soft Pakhan got the woman killed.
" Emil's jaw works once. He is the coldest man I know and right now he isn't cold.
"I have modeled it eleven ways. In every version where we wait, we lose someone. So we don't wait. We go to him."
I look back out at the water. Somewhere across it, on the far cliff, Greywater sits in its modern glass like a thing made of knives, and my uncle is setting his table.
"Get Gael," I say.
We take the women out first. Strategy has nothing to do with it. Getting them clear is the one thing I have ever been good at.
The cove sea-stair drops from the grounds down the cliff face to a private cut in the rock where the boathouse leans over black water and the skiff rides on a creaking rope.
Gael showed it to Amara weeks ago — bad goes down, Pavel takes you out and you never glance back at the shore — and now I stand at the top of the wet stone in the hard morning light and watch my brother hand my wife's mother down it one step at a time, Inés in a good coat with her color still thin from the surgery, her hand white on the iron rail.
"Pavel takes the skiff across to the marina," Gael says, low, to me, not to her.
"Reyes is waiting with the doctor's car.
Inés never touches a road. Nobody who's watching a road sees a thing.
" He has his switchblade out, flipping it open, shut, open, the bone-handled blade worn pale where his thumb has lived on it since he was a boy.
His mouth stays shut and tuneless. When Gael whistles, someone is about to stop breathing; when he goes silent like this, he's already three moves into the killing and only his hands know it.
Amara comes down the stair behind her mother with the wind taking her hair and a steel calm on her face that I have learned to read like weather.
She is dressed for cold and for work — boots, a coat the deep red of dried blood, the same coat she wore the first day she walked into my study and turned out to be something other than the pawn I'd been promised.
My mother's small worn keepsake rides at the hollow of her throat on its chain.
In her pocket, I know without looking, her shears, because she told me last night, plainly, into the dark: I'm not staying behind a door while you go through one.
I didn't win that argument. I barely fought it.
The man I was a month ago would have locked her in the house.
The man she made would rather have her where he can see her than safe and out of sight and unconsulted, because she's right, and because stand beside me, God help us both is a thing I said to her once and meant.
"Inés is on the skiff," I tell her. "You're not."
"No," Amara agrees. She watches Pavel hand her mother into the little boat, watches Inés settle, watches her mother lift one frail hand.
"I'm where I can do something. I know that house.
I designed a gown for the woman who lived in it before Lev bought it out from under her estate — I've stood in those rooms with a tape measure.
You'll want the floor plan that isn't on Emil's drawings.
The service stair behind the kitchen glass doesn't show from the water.
" She smooths an invisible seam on her thigh, which is what she does when she's afraid and won't say it.
Then she stops, deliberately, and lets her hand fall, which is what she does when she's decided the fear doesn't get to drive.
"I come as far as the cars. I stay with Emil.
I am not a hostage you have to spend the day protecting.
I'm a person who knows the building. Use me. "
Across the cut, the skiff's motor catches, low, and Pavel angles out toward the open Sound with Inés small in the stern.
The water takes the engine-sound and flattens it to nothing against the grey.
Inés doesn't look back at the cliff. Her daughter watches her go and doesn't cry, and I understand, again, that I married a harder thing than any of us, harder than the blade beside me, harder than the strategist on the stair above.
"Use her," Gael says to me, and flips the switchblade shut, and grins.
The widest grin he owns. I have learned what that means too.
It means the hurt has gone all the way down.
"She's better in a tight room than half the soldiers.
Velvet, you stay on my left and behind Emil and if I say down you become the floor, you understand me? "
"Green," Amara says, which is their word, and Gael laughs once, short, and the morning swallows it.
Greywater has no gate. Lev never wanted one; he wanted you to see exactly how unguarded he was, because a man who needs no walls is a man who has spent his whole life on the inside of them, never once shoved out into the cold like the rest of us.
The house sits at the end of a long pale drive, all glass and pale stone, and the cliff behind it falls a hundred feet to the rocks.
Cordite and salt. That is what the day smells like before it smells like anything else — Pyotr's old men went in ahead of us through the trees, quiet, and there is already work done. Two of Roman's bought men lie on the gravel, gone still. The morning has a taste to it now, copper under the salt.
Emil takes Amara to the line of cars at the head of the drive and puts her behind the armored sedan with Pavel's spare sidearm in his hand, which he doesn't give her, because she's never fired one and this is not the day to learn; instead he gives her the thing she asked for.
He lays his tablet on the hood and lets her draw on his clean architectural plans the rooms the plans get wrong — the service stair, the glass doors, the blind hall behind the kitchen where a man could come at you unseen.
Her finger moves over the screen sure and quick, the silvered needle-scar on it pale.
Emil watches her hand and watches the house and says, very low, "When this is done I am going to need a very long time to recover from how much I require you to live," and Amara says, "Then keep me modeled, kotyonok," and he makes a sound that is almost a laugh and almost a wound, and we go up the drive.