He moved, and I flinched. Six months of warehouse training overrode the mouth, and I jerked back with the jacket pressed to my chest like a shield. He stopped. The rage broke. For half a second he was just a man looking at someone half his size who'd flinched from him.
Then the ice came back, harder than before.
"I'm no going to tell anyone," I said. I dropped the brat and let my voice go steady, the way my da talked to skittish clients. "Whatever just happened stays in this room. Yer men dinnae need to know. This is yers and I'll leave it alone."
He stared at me, chest heaving, hands shaking.
"Gregori," he called.
The door opened. Gregori's eyes went from Aleksi to me and back. He knew something had happened. He was too smart to ask.
"Cuff him. To the bed. He doesn't leave the room tonight."
"Boss?"
"Did I stutter?"
Gregori took my arm. I let him. I held the jacket to my chest, and Aleksi turned his back on both of us.
"The jacket stays with him," Aleksi said to the window. "And bring him his insulin."
Gregori walked me down the hall, cuffed my wrist to the bed frame, and set the insulin kit on the nightstand.
"What did you do?" he said, low enough that Aleksi wouldn't hear.
I could've ended Aleksi right there. One sentence.Your boss got hard when I put my hands on him.Gregori would've done the math. Men like him always did, and information like that was worth more than anything in my pockets.
But I'd told Aleksi it stayed in the room, and God help me, I'd meant it.
"My job."
Gregori gave me a long look, then left.
I sat on the too-hard mattress with a dead man's jacket in my lap. The apartment went quiet. Then footsteps started down the hall, heavy, pacing, back and forth.
I leaned back and closed my eyes with the cuff cold on my wrist. No pillow yet, but someone had left water and an apple on the nightstand, and the ice cream would be in the freezer by morning. That was the kind of man he was. He raged and shoved and cuffed you to furniture, then made sure you had your insulin and your tools and your ice cream.
Planning was the smart play. I'd stayed alive for six months by being smart.
But I was thinking about his pulse under my fingertip, how fast it had been at his throat. His Adam's apple against my knuckles when he swallowed. The heat of his waist where the shirt had rucked up. And the half-second crack in his face when I'd flinched, the one that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with a man seeing himself through someone else's eyes.
That last one wasn't strategic. That one was just him.
I pressed my face into the jacket. It smelled like cigarettes and garlic and old leather and somebody else's da, and for a second I let myself think about the shop on Victoria Street, the sound of a sewing machine, the smell of hide and wax and my da's voice saying, “Start with what ye can see, lad.”
Then I put it down and started planning for tomorrow.
She died mid-stitch.
The needle was down through the leather on a stroke she hadn't finished. Her foot had slid off the pedal, and the machine had stopped with the thread caught, a single stitch held open in the grain of a belt the color of dried blood. She was slumped forward on the work. Back of the head, one round, the way the rest of them had been done. Clean job. Somebody had walked the line and put them down one at a time.
"Aleksi."
She was wearing a cardigan the color of oatmeal. There was a piece of masking tape on the machine with a name written on it in pen. Dragana. A cup of tea on the bench beside her had gone cold and skinned over. A pair of reading glasses sat folded next to it.
"Aleksi."
I'd seen a setup like this before.
