He was smaller than I remembered. In the safe house he'd seemed bigger, sharper, full of that manic energy that came from running his mouth faster than his brain. Standing in my living room at two in the morning, he was just a skinny kid in dirty clothes, and I wanted to shove him against the wall so hard I had to wrap my fingers around the gun to keep them still.
"Do ye have any idea what time it is?" he said. His voice was rough from sleep.
I picked up the gun and pointed it at his face. "Sit down."
He looked at the gun, then at the bottle on the table, mostly empty. "Ye're pissed."
"I said sit down."
"Aye, I heard ye. I'm just making a note that the man pointing a loaded weapon at my head is fucking hammered. For the record."
Gregori put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him into the chair across from me. The kid went down hard, the cuffs rattling against the table's edge. He winced and his lips parted, and I stared at his mouth for a full second before I caught myself.
"Leave us," I told Gregori.
Gregori looked at me, then at the kid, then at the gun. "Boss?"
"I said leave."
He left. The door closed behind him. I could hear him in the hallway, not leaving, just standing there, because Gregori wasn't stupid even when I was.
The kid shifted in the chair. The cuffs clinked. I tracked the movement of his wrists: the bones, the tendons, the red marks where the steel bit in. His hands were resting on the table. Those fucking hands. Long fingers, blunt nails, calluses on the pads of his thumbs from years of pulling thread through leather. I knew that because he'd pressed those calluses into my palm and my body had lit up like a shorted wire and I was losing my mind.
I leveled the gun at his chest. "You told me you were a craftsman. Three generations. Hand-cut, hand-stitched, every piece made to measure. That's what you said."
"Aye, that's what I said."
"Were you full of shit?"
"Could ye maybe ask me that without the gun?"
"No."
"Right. Grand. This is how we're doing this." He swallowed. I could see his pulse going in his throat, fast, and his hands were shaking in the cuffs. But he didn't look away. Same as the safe house. The kid could be terrified and still hold your eyes like he dared you to be the one who blinked. "I wasnae full of shite. Every word I said was true."
"Prove it." I set the gun on the table between us, barrel pointed at him. Then I picked up the jacket and dropped it in front of him. "Tell me what you see."
He didn't touch it right away. He looked at it the way he'd looked at my gloves in the safe house, reading before reaching. His eyes moved over the leather, the collar, the shoulders, the seams, and then they stopped on the bullet hole.
His face changed. The bratty energy, the smart mouth, the performance he'd been running since they dragged him through my door — all of it dropped away. He looked at the hole in the leather and then he looked up at me, and his eyes were different. Older.
"Can I touch it?" he said.
"That's what you're here for."
He reached out with both hands and lifted the jacket off the table. He held it the way you'd hold something alive. He turned it in his lap and ran his fingers over the leather, starting at the collar and working down, and I gripped the edge of the table because the last time those fingers had worked over something of mine I'd embarrassed myself in front of my own men.
He found the maker's mark on the inside of the collar. His thumb traced over it, and his eyebrows pulled together. "This is Russian."
"Yes."
"Old Russian. This tanning method is..." He brought the collar close to his face and inhaled. "Oak bark. Birch oil in the finish. Nobody does this anymore. The last workshop I know of that worked this way closed before I was born."
"I've been told."
He spread the jacket across his lap and ran both palms flat over the body, smoothing the leather the way you'd smooth a bedsheet, feeling the grain, the weight, the places where the hide had softened from decades of wear. His hands stopped over theleft side, just above the bullet hole, and his fingers pressed into the leather there.
"This was somebody's jacket," he said. "Somebody wore this every day for years. The leather's molded to them. Here, at the shoulders." He touched the shoulder seam. "And here, at the elbows." His fingers moved to the crook of the arm where the leather was worn thin and butter-soft. "Whoever owned this was broad. Bigger than you through the chest, maybe, but shorter in the arms. The sleeves were never altered, which means the maker got the measurement right the first time."
