And the bullet hole was still there.
I'd backed it from the inside so the leather around it would stop tearing itself apart, but the hole stayed, and the dark stain set into the grain around it stayed. I'd told him as much the first night, drunk and cuffed and reading the thing in his lap.
Aleksi didn't move.
He sat up in the wrecked bed and he looked at his father's jacket, whole again in the hands of the man he'd just put a ring on, and something went through his face that I'd only seen once before—on the floor of his entryway, the night Dragana died, the night he told me about his mother and the sewing machine. The thing under all the cold had shown his face, the boy who came home at three o'clock and found his mum dead.
"Fin," he said, and his voice had gone thick.
He reached for it and stopped with his hand an inch off the leather. His fingers hovered over the bullet hole, and then he touched the collar instead, and ran his thumb along the seam where I'd feathered the new oil into the old.
"You finished it," he said.
"Aye."
"You weren't—" He stopped. Swallowed. "You could've dragged it out. Kept it half-done. Long as it wasn't finished, I had a reason to—"
"I ken." I'd known it for weeks. I'd known it was the leash that both of us were pretending not to hold. "I didnae need the leash, Aleksi. I'm no going anywhere. So I finished it."
He looked up at me then, his eyes wet, and the great daft murdering bastard didn't even try to hide it from me.
We'd have stayed there in the wreck of the bed all morning if his phone hadn't gone off on the nightstand.
He didn't move for it, which for Aleksi meant something. It went off again. On the third buzz, I reached over him, because one of us had to be a functioning adult, and it clearly wasn't going to be the man holding his dead father's jacket like it might fly off.
"It's Niko," I said, reading. "Where are you?" Another one came in while I held it. "Your brother is driving me crazy."
Aleksi took the phone from me and thumbed back a reply one-handed without sitting up properly, and I read it over his shoulder.
He's your half-brother too, idiot.
"Where're we meant to be, then?" I asked, handing the phone back. "Since ye've apparently got my whole day booked and didnae think to mention any of it."
"It's Pop's birthday." He said it to the ceiling. "Niko wanted to go out to the grave. Bring a bottle. Show EJ."
He finally sat up the rest of the way, scrubbed both hands over his face, and looked at the jacket where I'd laid it across the foot of the bed. "Get dressed. It's two hours to Athens County, and Niko'll have the boy fed to the dogs by the time we get there."
So that was the day. A wedding I hadn't been asked about, a ring on the hand they'd maimed, a dead man's jacket made whole, and now a two-hour drive to drink vodka over a grave with the wreckage of the family that man had left scattered across two countries.
I got dressed.
I didn't ask whether he was bringing the jacket. I just watched him lift it off the foot of the bed, careful as anything, and lay it over his arm.
Irina was in the kitchen when we came out. She always was, before any of us were properly awake, and she'd have heard the bed go and drawn her own conclusions and said nothing about them, which was more grace than Niko had ever managed.
She took one look at the pair of us, dressed and bound for the door at an hour that meant we'd be gone past lunch, and set down her spoon. By the time we had our coats on, she'd wrapped a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese, and a stack of the cold cuts Aleksi liked. She pressed the lot into my arms in a cloth bag and said something low and Russian and not gentle, pointing the spoon at me, then at Aleksi, then at the door.
"She says eat in the car," Aleksi translated. "And that I drive too fast. And—" His ears went red. "The rest doesn't translate."
I didn't need it to. She'd put a plate in front of me the first morning I was in this flat, a half-dead stranger her boss had dragged home in cuffs, and she'd been putting food in my hands ever since. A ring that morning changed none of it. She pinched my cheek on the way past, hard, same as that first day, and went back to her stove.
The cemetery was asmall one off a county road in the hills, the kind of place with more trees than headstones and no sound but wind in them. Gregori took us up the gravel track, and there was the other car already parked crooked across two spaces, and Niko leaning against it looking like a man who'd survived a disaster.
"Never again," he said as soon as Aleksi and I got out. "Never again do I get in a car with that—that—" He gestured at EJ, who was coming round the bonnet looking pleased with himself. "He drives like the road owes him money. Ninety on the county route, Aleksi. Ninety. Around hairpin curves! Like he does it every Tuesday!"
"I dodothat every Tuesday," EJ grumbled. “Except I’m usually on a bike.”
“A bike?” Gregori’s eyebrows shot up. “Sweet. What do you ride?”