"He will."
"But if he doesn't, Niko." I wasn't letting him have the easy version. "You’re worried too. I can see it on you.”
He looked at me in the mirror rather than straight on. “Worry isn’t the right word. Aleksi has always been…” He sighed. “Cocky. And when someone moves the schedule forward rather than back, that always leaves less room to prepare and more room for things to go wrong. But you’re the one who knows this Mr. K better than me. How scary is he really?”
I sat down on the edge of the guest bed and thought about how to say it and found there wasn't a clever way, so I gave it to him straight.
"He left me chained to a radiator to die," I said. "Not out of cruelty. That's the thing you've got to understand about him. He'd no feeling in it at all. I'd stopped being useful and moving me was a bother, so he left me for the cold the way you'd leave a chair you didn't fancy carrying down the stairs." My thumb had found the gap where my finger used to be without me sending it there. "He had eleven women shot at their machines because it was faster than walking them out. He shot my da in a doorway and stepped over him and took my granddad's tools off the bench while my da was still warm on the floor."
Niko had gone very quiet.
"So no, he doesn't scare me the way you mean," I said. "He doesn't shout. He doesn't enjoy it. He's worse than that. He's a man who does his sums, and people are only ever a number in the wrong column, and he'll cross them out without a flicker and sleep like a bairn after." I looked up at him. "And Aleksi walked into that man's schedule a day early because he wanted to look good for Nikita. So, aye, Niko. I'm frightened. You should be too."
Niko was quiet for a long moment. He looked at his own face in the mirror like it belonged to somebody he used to know.
"What would you have me do, Fin?" he said. "This is his operation. Nikita made that clear. I’m not…" He stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath through his nose. “I’m not the man I used to be.”
"No," I said. "You're not. And whose fault is that?"
His eyes came to mine in the glass.
"You were the man over the whole of Paris," I said. "Aleksi told me. Pakhan, the lot. And now you're down the end of his hall waiting for some prick named Étienne to ring and tell you it's safe to come home. He's never going to ring, Niko, because the longer you sit here being no trouble to anybody, the longer he keeps your chair warm with his own arse in it." I stood up from the bed. "You want to know what you can do? You can stop waiting. That's the whole of it. You've spent however long it's been sitting on your hands letting other men decide your life for you, same as you're doing right this minute while your brother bleeds somewhere you've decided you can't find."
"You don't know that he's—"
"I don't know that he's not. And neither do you. And you'd rather sit here not knowing, admiring your pretty shoes, pick up a phone and be a problem for somebody." I let that land. "That's why you're on the sofa and not the throne, pet. Not theaccounts. Not Étienne. You. You act like yer ma raised you to be somebody’s bitch. Did she?"
Niko’s jaw muscles worked and his face hardened. Then he closed the shoebox and slid it into the bottom drawer of the vanity, and out of the top one he pulled a sleek black Glock. He racked the slide. “Nikolai Laskin is nobody's bitch.” Then he turned to me. “Go take your shot, Fin. We're going to go paint this town red.”
I waited in the living room. When he came out, he was in a suit and gloss, and I said nothing about either. Mr. K wasn't worthy of the red soles, anyway. I followed him out the front door, where Gregori had parked himself in the hall. He stood when he saw Nikolai was armed. "Mr. Laskin—"
"Bring the car around, Grigori." The Parisian had gone clean out of his voice. "We are going to find my brother."
Gregori frowned. "Aleksi told me to keep him here." He nodded to me. "His words. Keep the boy in the apartment."
Niko gave Gregori a bored look and then reached out to pick some lint off his lapel. “Gregori, darling. Your loyalty to my brother is impressive. I respect it. I do. But I’d hate to have to go to Nikita and tell him you refused a direct order from his third in command.”
Gregori’s face twisted. “Third in command?”
“That’s right. Or did you think I’d settle for something less? In Ohio? Inthiseconomy?”
Gregori looked at me as if he expected me to help him.
I shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I’m not a bloody Russian.”
Gregori held out for another second. Then his shoulders slumped, and he reached for his keys. “Fine. I’ll drive you, but if Aleksi feels like taking it out of someone’s ass, it’s going to be yours, Fin.”
“Aye, as it should be,” I agreed.
He wrinkled his nose. “Ew. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Too late, Gregori.”
He sighed, defeated. "And where exactly am I driving you?" Gregori said, thumbing the lift button. "You want to find him, fine. Columbus is a big fucking city, in case you boys didn't notice."
"You staged the crew tonight," Niko said. "You know where they went out from."
"I know where they staged. A depot off Joyce." Gregori's jaw worked. "And I know the job was out by Winchester, because I'm the one who books the cars and somebody had to know how far to fuel them. A private strip. That's all I've got. I wasn't told the rest."
