Page 6 of Dressed to Kill
My da would've called the glove work a fitting. You measured the client before you measured the hand. You figured out what they wanted, what they needed, what they didn't know they were missing. Then you made yourself the only person who could give it to them.
The information would last a day. The gloves might buy me a week. But if the boss liked being touched that much, if that blush meant what I thought it meant, then maybe I could make myself useful in ways that didn't have an expiration date.
I'd done worse things to stay alive.
I rolled onto my side and pressed my face into the pillow. Somewhere outside this room, in a city I didn't know, the men who'd killed my da were still breathing.
But so was I, and I'd just found the thread. All I had to do was pull it.
The bottle was halfempty when I pulled the jacket out of the closet.
I'd been sitting at the kitchen island for two hours, drinking, staring at my hands on the granite like they belonged to someone else. The apartment was quiet, all that expensive furniture sitting there doing nothing, and I was losing an argument with my own brain.
A kid touched my hand. That was it. A half-dead Scottish kid chained to a bed had turned my hand over, rubbed my palm, and my whole body had decided this was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to it. I'd sat there like a fucking idiot with my face on fire while a prisoner read my gloves like a bedtime story. Forty years old. Two prison stretches. Ran my own crew. And some redhead in handcuffs had turned me into a goddamn teenager by touching my palm.
That was not going to stand.
It was manipulation. That was what this was. The kid was a survivor; six months with the Italians, and he'd learned howto work people. He'd clocked my gloves because gloves were his thing, and he'd run his little performance to buy himself another day of breathing. Smart and calculated. The same thing I would've done in his position.
So why was I still thinking about it? Why was I sitting in my kitchen at midnight replaying a handshake like a goddamn schoolboy? This was embarrassing. This was the kind of thing I'd shoot somebody for if they told me about it.
I shoved back from the island and went to the bedroom closet. The jacket was in the back, wrapped in a dry cleaning bag I'd never taken to the dry cleaner. I pulled it out and sat on the edge of the bed, and held it in my lap.
My father's jacket. Dark brown leather, almost black in places where the oil from his skin had worked into the hide over the years. It smelled like him if I buried my face in it, which I hadn't done since the funeral. Cigarettes, garlic, and the cologne he wore too much of because he thought women liked it. They did. All of them. Every woman my father ever looked at fell in love with him, and he let them because that was who Sacha Laskin was. Too much of everything, always.
The bullet hole was on the left side, just below the ribs. Small entry, neat edges, the leather curled inward where the round punched through. The blood had dried dark and stiff around it, soaked into the grain so deep it was part of the hide now. My father had been sitting in his car, waiting, doing a favor for my cousin River, and a coward had shot him and dragged him out into the snow and driven off. Sacha Laskin, who'd survived two wars and a decade of vory politics and every stupid, dangerous thing he'd ever done for love, bled out in the street because he was sitting in the wrong seat on the wrong night. River’s people had put the shooter in the ground before the snow melted — that was River; you didn't have to ask — but burying him fixed nothing. The hole stayed.
I'd taken the jacket to four restorers. The best in Columbus, then Cleveland, then a guy in New York that Nikita's people found. They all said the same thing. The leather was old, the tanning method was Russian and obsolete, and any repair meant cutting out the damaged panel and replacing it with new hide. They could match the color. They could approximate the grain. But the repair would look like a repair, and the original panel would go in the trash.
The original panel had my father's blood on it.
So the jacket stayed in the closet and I stayed on the edge of my bed holding it, drunk and furious and apparently losing my mind over a twenty-two-year-old's fingers. This was a new low. I'd done a lot of stupid things in my life, but sitting on my bed at midnight getting worked up about a handshake was going straight to the top of the list.
The kid was full of shit. He had to be. He'd talked a good game about three generations and bespoke craftsmanship and his father's father's shop on whatever street in Edinburgh, but talk was cheap. I'd met a lot of good talkers. Most of them were dead now.
I looked down at the jacket. The bullet hole stared back at me.
If he were full of shit, I'd know. I'd put this jacket in front of him and I'd know in thirty seconds whether he could back up a single word that had come out of that smart fucking mouth.
I picked up my phone. Gregori answered on the second ring.
"Bring him to my apartment."
A long pause. "The Scotsman?"
"Did I stutter?"
"Boss, it's two in the morning."
"I don't care what time it is. Bring him. Cuffed. And bring the medical kit."
He hung up without arguing because that was what Gregori did. I set the phone down and looked at the jacket in my lap andthe vodka on the nightstand, and the gun on the dresser. This was a perfectly rational thing to do. Drag a prisoner out of a safe house at two in the morning to look at a jacket. Completely normal behavior for a man who was definitely not losing his grip.
I stood up and tucked the jacket under my arm, and brought it to the living room. I set it on the dining table and put the gun next to it, and sat down to wait.
Gregori knocked forty minutes later. I buzzed him up and opened the door, and he came through first, scanning the apartment the way we all scanned rooms, and then he stepped aside, and the kid came in behind him.
He looked like shit. They'd dragged him out of bed, and it showed. His red hair was matted on one side, sticking up on the other. His skin had that gray undertone from the warehouse, the color of someone running on fumes. He was wearing the same clothes from the safe house, wrinkled, slept in, the collar of his shirt pulled to one side so I could see the notch of his collarbone. The handcuffs were in front this time, and he held them up in front of his chest like he were praying.
