"I can be," he says. "When it matters."
I don't say yes.
I don't say no.
I say I'll think about it, and he nods like he expected that answer, and then he sits on his usual stool and drinks his usual coffee and eats the last slice of apple pie—the edge piece, the one I saved for him without thinking. He stays until almost three, and we talk about nothing. The weather. The city. The way the light looks when it hits the buildings in the morning.
He doesn't touch me again. But I feel his eyes on me the whole time, and I feel the weight of his offer pressing against my chest like something I can't put down.
When he leaves, he presses another stack of hundreds into my palm.
"For Dmitri," he says. "For the stitches."
"Tell him to be more careful."
"I will."
He walks to the door. Pauses. Looks back at me over his shoulder, the way he always does, and I see something in his grey eyes that I haven't seen before.
Something that looks like hope.
"Goodnight, Monika."
The door chimes. The wind blows. And I'm left alone with the smell of coffee and blood and the ghost of his hand in mine.
The apartment is dark when I get home.
I don't turn on the lights. I don't need them. I've walked these rooms a thousand times, in the dark, in the light, in the grey hours between sleep and waking. I know where the floor creaks. I know where the radiator hisses. I know the shape of the silence that lives in the walls.
I sit on the edge of my bed and take off my shoes. One at a time. Slowly. The way you do things when you're trying not to think about anything else.
Aleksander Mire.
I say the name out loud, in the dark. "Aleksander Mire."
It sounds like something. Like a promise. Like a warning. Like the beginning of a story I'm not sure I want to be in.
He wants me to work for him. To live in his mansion. To stitch his people back together when they break.
He wants me to be safe.
And I keep thinking about the way he looked at my hands. The way he held them. The way he saidsaving liveslike he meant something more than the words could hold.
My mother taught me to lean in.
She didn't teach me how to know when leaning in was the wrong thing to do.
I lie down on the bed and close my eyes, and I see his face. Grey eyes. Silver at the temples. A smile that looks like a crack in a stone wall.
I dream about the barn. About my mother. About a calf named Mercy, and the way it felt to pull her into the world.
I dream about hands. My hands. His hands. The space between them, closing like a wound that's finally learning how to heal.
In the morning, I call the number on the card.
6
Gabriel's Gaze
