Page 13 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

Four hours ago I’d have hugged him. The Rebecchi is the reason people are crossing the bridge to come here at all.

“This is the anchor of the show,” I say. “It doesn’t leave until twenty-ninth. After that, I’d love to discuss a fair price and collection.”

Annoyance flickers across his face and gets tidied away. He looks down the length of my gallery, his lip curling with what looks like pity.

“You own the building?” he asks.

“I do.”

“Hm.” He takes a card out of his coat and sets it on the desk beside my label cards, in almost exactly the place where Natan’s sat this morning. “You’ll want to be careful about the company you keep in a place like this.”

“Thank you so much for coming,” I say, warmly, brightly, with my whole face. “There’s wine on the table if you’d like a glass before you go.”

He nods. Though he doesn’t look happy about having to wait another couple of weeks. I watch as he leaves, my eyes landing on the little lot at the end of the street has a gap in it where his car was parked all for most of the day.

I press my thumb against the back of my phone case, where a plain white card is wedged behind it, and I stand in the middle of the best day of my life wanting to go to him.

Sammie and Delilah arrive either side of me as the last customers leave.

“Jasper is taking Eduard and Lilah home, so we can stay with you and celebrate,” Sammie says, linking her arm with mine.

“And I can drink her share of the alcohol,” Delilah adds as the last guest leaves.

Today has been a roaring success in every way I could imagine.

So why do I feel so rotten?

Natan

The padlock on the wicket gate has three years of weather on it and no scratches around the keyhole, which tells me nobody has put a key in it since the day the sale went through. I stand with my palm flat against the roller door of Jannick Johansson’s warehouse while the light goes orange over the second yard, and I try to think of one honest reason a man pays tax on eleven thousand square feet and never opens it.

The office window at the side has a sill of even dust, undisturbed from one end of the frame to the other. Behind the glass there’s a swept concrete floor, an office chair lying on its side where somebody left it, and a calendar still showing July from three years ago.

Mechislav’s headlights swing across the brick behind me and cut out.

“You got me down here for a door,” he says, coming around the front of his car with his hands in his pockets. The left side of his jaw has come up in a color I’d call impressive.

“Jannick Johansson.”

“The one in the Jaguar.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and does a quick search. “He bought this at auction and paid over the odds for it. Eduard had someone look at him three years back, decided he was a rich idiot with a warehouse, and we all went back to work. Why.”

“He wants the painting. The one she loves…” The one I can’t imagine not being in that gallery, on that wall, for the rest of time.

Mechislav waits. He’s good at that.

“I don’t want men like him anywhere near her,” I finally confess.

He stops looking at me and starts looking at the warehouse, then he says, “We are men like him.”

Jasper picks up on the second ring with a sound behind him like a bag of bolts going over.

“You do paper trails,” I say.

“I do a number of things.” He sounds bored.

“You do paper trails the best.”

There’s a pause where he decides whether to enjoy this. “Say the word.”