He walked out. I followed because he hadn't told me not to. The jacket was on the dining table, spread flat, the bullet hole visible from across the room. Gun gone. Vodka gone. Outside the kitchen, the apartment was a different world. White walls, expensive furniture, nothing scuffed or used. Irina's kitchen had life. The rest was a showroom.
I sat down and pulled the jacket toward me. Aleksi leaned against the doorframe, arms folded.
"Come here," I said. "I'll talk ye through what I'm seeing."
He crossed the room and stood close enough that I could smell his cologne: warm leather and smoke, too much of it. My da wore Brut for forty years and my gran used to say she could find him in a blackout. Some men wore scent like a signature. Some wore it like a wall.
I turned the jacket over and ran my finger along the inner seam. He leaned in. His sleeve pulled tight at the elbow, the same way a glove pulls when the pattern's wrong for the handinside it. His tailor was guessing. I could read the guesswork in every seam.
I kept that to myself. For now.
"Yer da's tailor knew him," I said. "These measurements are perfect. Sleeve, shoulder, rise in the back. Ye dinnae get this from a fitting room. Ye get this from years of making for the same body. Somebody built this jacket for one man only, and he wore it until the day it stopped him."
He pulled back.
"The debrief," he said, all business. "Start talking."
I gave him a taste. Enough to trust me, not enough to replace me. My da's rule for first fittings. Keystone Logistics, registered in Delaware. Shipping was on Tuesdays and Fridays, rotated between three docks on the east side. The inspection man came every two weeks, short, Italian, fake Rolex I'd clocked from across the room because the weight was wrong and the crystal was mineral, not sapphire. Black SUV, Pennsylvania plates. Workers called him Mr. K.
Aleksi made a call and relayed everything in rapid Russian before hanging up.
"What else?" he said.
"That's enough for today."
"That's not how this works."
"Aye, it is. I give ye everything at once and I'm useless by dinner. Piece by piece and ye've got a reason to keep feeding me."
His jaw tightened. Then he went to the kitchen to make coffee, and the conversation was done.
I sat with the jacket in my lap. The Italians would've backhanded me for asking for water. This one hadn't said no to a single thing.
The afternoon filled in. Gregori brought the shoes, the right brand, right size. Then clothes, everything I'd specified, and a razor and shaving cream.
I showered for the first time in a week. Aleksi unlocked the cuff long enough for me to wash. I stood under the spray and gripped the tile and pressed my forehead to the wall and shook. I was not going to cry in a Russian gangster's shower.
I shaved and put on clean clothes. The shirt was cotton, dark grey, soft against skin that had been in the same polyester for months. My da would've said I looked like death warmed up and made me a cup of tea. That was what he did. He fixed things.
When I came out, Aleksi was at the dining table on his phone. He looked up.
The phone stopped moving in his hand. He didn't scan me this time. He just looked, and the look had weight to it, a slow, heavy drag from my wet hair to my bare feet that I could feel on my skin like a fingertip tracing a line down my sternum. He caught on the open collar of the shirt, on the strip of collarbone showing where I hadn't buttoned the top, and stayed there. Two seconds. Three. Long enough that the back of my neck went hot and something pulled tight low in my stomach that had nothing to do with strategy.
Then he picked up his coffee, and his face was like stone.
"Better?" he said. His voice was strained.
"Aye. Almost human." I sat down across from him. "While we're waiting for materials, there's something I've been meaning to say."
"What?"
"Yer suit doesnae fit."
He put the phone down.
"The gloves were wrong, and I told ye. The suit is wrong and I'm telling ye. Shoulders are fine. Everything else is off. Chest too tight, collar sitting wrong, trousers breaking too high."
"My tailor has been doing my suits for fifteen years."
