CHAPTER 34 #2
"My mother is alive enough to litigate brine," I say, and my voice does something then that I didn't plan, goes thick and snags on the word alive, because there was a winter not so long ago when I knelt in a courthouse corridor holding my father's coat with his body already cooling, the coat too heavy and warm and smelling of him and nobody to hand it to, nobody, just me, left holding it.
That is the whole shape of what I believed about love before these three terrible men: that it hands you a coat and then it leaves, and you are the one left standing there with your arms full of the weight of someone who's gone, used up and set down and alone.
My mother is alive and arguing about brine. My arms are not empty and they are not full of grief; they are simply mine, and not one part of me is standing in that corridor anymore.
Mateo sees it move across my face — he sees everything, the wall is all eyes — and he doesn't say a clumsy thing, doesn't try to fix it, just turns and puts his big body between me and the wind, the burn-scarred forearm coming up along my back, the smooth pale skin of it under his sleeve where he carried his mother out of the fire twelve years ago and lost her anyway, the arm that learned grief young and learned to hold me late.
He lets me stand inside the windbreak of him and look at my window burning gold.
"I should be afraid of how much I want this," I say. It's the kind of thing I only say to him. Gael I tease and Emil I argue and Mateo I tell the truth, because he is built out of truth and weight and silence and there's no point lying to a man who carries the dead.
"Yes," he says. He lets the fear stand where I set it.
That's the gift of him; he leaves the true thing standing whole.
"I'm afraid of it every hour. " A long pause, the wind off the frozen Sound moving once through the bare branches over us, the cold breath of the indifferent world.
"I find I'd rather be afraid and have it than be safe and have buried it.
I was safe for thirty-five years, moya. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. "
We close the atelier at noon and drive north to the house.
The gate of Sokol House comes up out of the bare frozen trees the way it always does, the high stone wall, the black iron, and the stone falcon crowning the arch — Sokol, the bird that hunts alone and mates for life, wings half-spread over the gravel forecourt, wet-dark with old rain, watching the road.
Two soldiers on the gate. Pavel's young face at one of them, grinning, lifting a hand.
The same bird is inked over Gael's heart in the seat beside me, his bad leg up and his head tipped back, and pressed into the signet that used to turn on Lev Sokolov's cold finger and is locked now in the wall safe behind the portrait in Mateo's study, the authority of blood returned to the line that earned it.
One creature, carried three ways, and one meaning under all of it: it mates for life.
I used to think that was a pretty line for a brutal house. I don't think it's pretty anymore. I think it's the truest thing on the gate.
The house has gone mad with cooking. You smell it from the forecourt — Nadia's bread, the goose, black tea, something with bay and clove — and inside, the great hall with its black-and-white marble and its split staircase and its row of dead Sokolovs has been hung, on Nadia's orders, with so much greenery and so many candles that the dead men look, for once, less like a warning and more like guests. Yuri's portrait is the newest.
I stop under it, the way I always do. Emil's father.
Mateo's. The honest one Lev poisoned with digoxin over six slow weeks and staged as a stroke, the murder his sons proved with a pharmacy trail and a ledger and buried him under.
Your father kept honest books, Emil told me once, of mine.
So did his. Two honest men, killed by the same hand, and their children stitched together over both their graves.
My mother is in the kitchen.
She's sitting in the warm with a cup of tea, color in her cheeks, her hands — her gentle proud hands — wrapped around the cup, and she breathes easy, no gray in her face, no pause every third word for air the way there was for months while her heart failed and the Sokolov money that started as a ransom paid for the surgery that started as leverage.
Leverage. It's just my mother's life now.
That's what they did, all three of them, without ever quite saying it: they took every cold transactional thing this marriage was built on and they let it turn warm in their hands and become only love, just love, no ledger left in it.
The surgery is just my mother's heart. The marriage is just my life.
The bargain is gone. What's underneath it was always the realer thing.
"There she is," Inés says, and her voice is strong. "There's my girl. Nadia, this is the one who put the name back on the door. Tell her she's not allowed to cry in your kitchen, she'll salt the goose."
"No crying in my kitchen," Nadia says, not turning from the stove, sixty-some years of bratva household in two words.
"I never cry," I say, crying a little, and go and put my arms around my mother, careful of her, feeling her heart go under my hands, steady and strong and hers, the heart I thought I would lose, beating against me in the warm bright kitchen while outside the cold sea keeps its lonely time and cannot get in.
It's late, and the house is quiet, and we are all of us finally in the big bed in the master wing — my territory, the four-poster, the deep chaise where Emil reads, the workroom beyond the door where my machine and my dress forms wait, where a new bolt of ivory silk leans against the wall with the first chalk lines of a gown already on it, because the city's brides don't stop getting married just because the year turned, and I have a window with my own name over it and gowns to build.
Gael is on his back with his bad side guarded and me tucked under his arm, my cheek on the falcon over his heart, his scarred hand moving slow in my hair.
Emil lies along my other side, glasses off and folded on the nightstand atop a book he won't finish tonight, the ledger nowhere in the room, his cool precise fingers tracing idle equations on the give of my hip and the soft rise of my belly, mapping me the way he maps the only thing he's never been able to model.
Mateo is at the foot, his back to the post, the watch open on the nightstand — open the way a door stands open when something on the far side is worth letting in, the old warning in it long since gone soft into welcome — and his big hand wrapped warm around my ankle like he needs to be holding some part of me to sleep.