"You see this," Nikolai appealed to me. "In Paris, they would weep."
I didn't understand a word she gave him back. Neither of them gave an inch. I ate every bite of the Russian egg under the Frenchman's wounded eye and didn't take a side, because aman who wants to keep eating in this kitchen learns fast whose kitchen it is.
And somewhere in all that quiet mending, I started to think about the work again.
Not the way I'd thought about it in the dark those first nights, like a thing already buried. I started to think about it the way you think about a person you've not seen in a while. I started to want my hands back on a piece of leather. And under that, lower, stranger, harder to look at straight, I started to think about living again. Not surviving. Not getting through the day so there'd be another one. Living. Wanting things on the far side of tomorrow.
That was the morning it caught up with me.
I woke before he did, which never happened.
The room was still dark behind the blinds I'd told him to leave shut. He was on his back with one arm flung up over his head and the other lying open between us, palm to the ceiling, like even asleep he was offering me something he didn't have words for. He snored. Not loudly. The snore was a low, working sound, the engine of a big man ticking over. I lay there in the dark and listened to it, eyes closed, like it was music.
My left hand lay on the blanket where I'd put it. I made myself look at it. The bandage had shrunk to a neat wrap over the knuckle, gone grey at the edge where it caught on the sheets. Underneath it, the stump throbbed its low grumble. Warrick had taken the finger clean at the first joint. I'd give the bastard that. Clean as anything, while Aleksi begged.
Don't think about that part. Not this morning. I dug for the kit on the nightstand without sitting up, pricked the side of a finger that I still had, and read the number off the meter in the dark. Low side of fine. I dosed and capped the pen. That part of me, at least, still did what it was told.
Aleksi's breathing changed. The snore stopped. The arm over his head came down, and he went still.
"Stop watching me sleep, ye creep," I said to the ceiling.
"I'm not awake."
"Yer the worst liar I've ever met, for a man who lies for a living."
He turned onto his side toward me. The mattress dipped, and I rolled half inch into the warm trough of him before I caught it. Up close his face was soft with sleep, lines gone slack, grey coming in heavy at the temples. Forty years old, and he looked every bit of it in the morning. I liked him better for it. The polished version downstairs, the suit and the cologne, that was the wall. This was the man.
He looked at me for a long time. Then his eyes went down to my hand on the blanket, the bandage.
"Dinnae," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
"Ye said it with yer whole face." I tucked the hand under the blanket, out of his sight and mine. "I cannae stand it. The way ye look at it. Like a man looking at a bill he cannae pay."
"Fin."
"I mean it. Look at me like that and I'll go back to the ceiling." I snapped at him. I hadn't meant to, but it was beginning to wear on me. "Ye've not touched me. No' once since the shop. Ye lie down beside me every night and ye sleep on top of the covers like a Victorian aunt."
"You're still mending."
"I lost a finger, I didnae lose the rest of me." There it was, out in the room where I couldn't take it back. My face went hot. "Forget it."
He was quiet. I stared at the strip of grey light where the blind didn't quite meet the frame, and I waited for him to tell me I needed to rest more, that I needed to heal more. That I wasn't good enough now that I wasn't a whole man. He'd never say it directly. Aleksi was a lot of things, but cruel wasn't one of them.No, he'd do it kind like he'd been doing it, letting me die by degrees.
His hand came under the blanket and found mine. He drew it out into the open and turned it over carefully.
"Don't," I said. "Don't make it a—"
He lifted my hand and placed a gentle kiss on the bandage.
The throb under it answered him. He held my eyes the whole time, so I'd have nowhere to hide from it.
"It's mine," he said against the bandage. "Same as the rest of you. You think a piece of you coming off changes the count? I'll take what's left. I'd take you with no hands at all."
"That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me."
"It's the truest." He turned my hand and kissed the heel of the palm, the inside of the wrist, the pulse there, working back toward me. "Now stop telling me how to feel about my own property."