A good file doesn’t tell you what to think. It lays out what’s there and lets you do the thinking. Pavel’s told me what to think. He’d built three cases and stacked the whole deck on one of them, and the longer I looked at the deck, the more I thought about the hands that had shuffled it.
I’d known Pavel twenty years. He was the one who taught me how to read a file like this in the first place. Which meant he knew exactly how I’d read this one.
It wasn’t a name. A feeling and a page count don’t make a name, and you don’t put a forty-year man in the ground over the way he formats a report. But the thought sat down in my chest and got comfortable, and I already knew it wasn’t going to leave.
I finished the glass. Down the hall, Fin’s door was still shut.
The phone buzzed on the desk.
Gregori.
You want gyros for lunch tomorrow?
I set the phone down. It buzzed again.
Gregori
Also, that Italian place you like is opening a new location. Greek Village.
God dammit. The Italians had opened up shop in Greek Village. The Greeks and the vory had a line that had held since before my time, and the Italians had to come along and fuck with everything. If we didn't sit down, somebody somewhere was going to shoot the wrong fucking person and then it'd be Nikita and Nigel sitting down to stop a war. Better for us to nip this in the bud.
I texted Gregori back.
Gyros sound good. Where and when?
Then I closed the folder. I picked up the bottle and walked it back to the kitchen and put it where I'd left it earlier in the night, because the apartment had to look like a normal apartment in five hours when Irina came in for the morning. Irina knew everything about me she needed to know and not a thing more, and I was going to keep it that way for as long as I could.
On the way to the bathroom, I passed his door. No light underneath. The undershirt was still on me and his cum was still on the undershirt, dried stiff over my ribs. I peeled it off in the hall. The smell of him came up off it, and my body answered before I could stop it. Hard again. Fast. The fourth time tonight, like a teenager who'd never been touched. I put the undershirt in the laundry like a normal person.
I went to take a cold shower at half-past three because it was the only thing I had left that might work.
The water punched me in the chest. I stood in it and let it. After a few minutes my dick went down and the want went with it, beaten back the only way I had left to beat it. The headache helped.
Fuck. I had until Friday morning to give Nikita his name. If I was late, he was going to give Fin to Pavel and then...
Then he'd go to Yuri's boys and come back a jar of ash.
I stood under the cold and thought about giving him to Nikita early. I could. Nobody would ask. Nobody would even care.
No, that wasn't true. I'd care. Not because the Scottish bastard meant anything to me. I'd just miss having someone around to yell at.
The suits hung in their row. Charcoal, navy, charcoal, black, navy, charcoal. I'd used the same tailor for fifteen years.
Yer suit doesnae fit.
I stopped with my hand on the navy. I'd heard his voice as clear as if he'd been standing right beside me. What was it about him? My hand stayed where it was.
Pop had met a French woman in a Paris bar, and he went back to her every three months for the rest of his life. While he was gone, my mother sat at her sewing machine, letting out his pants, waiting for him to come home. I thought about Fin's delicate fingers threading a needle.
I yanked the navy suit off the rod and started pulling it on. My suits had been fine for fifteen years and some redheaded brat in handcuffs wasn't going to change that.
But as soon as I had it on, I knew it was wrong.
The shoulders sat the way they always sat. The chest pulled the way it always pulled. The collar pressed against my throat. None of it had changed. It was the same suit I'd been wearing since I was twenty-five.
Except now I knew.
I picked up my phone and texted Gregori.
