Page 15 of Dressed to Kill
"Boss."
"Don't."
"You all right?"
"I said don't."
He lit a cigarette and didn't press. The parking lot was quiet. The cold cut through the wool of my coat. My breath came out white, and I pulled my own cigarette from the pack, and Gregori lit it for me because my hands were not going to manage the lighter.
He didn't comment. He just lit it and stepped back.
I stood in the parking lot of a converted warehouse on the east side of Columbus and smoked two cigarettes in a row while my men loaded bodies into vans, and somewhere in my apartment a Scottish kid was sitting with my father's jacket in his lap.
"Go home," Gregori said. "We've got it. I'll call when the cleanup's done."
"The intel."
"Pavel's on it. You'll have something by morning."
I got into the car. Gregori closed the door for me. That was how bad I looked. Gregori, who'd seen me eat a man's gun and smile about it, closed the car door for me like I was somebody's grandmother.
The drive back wasforty minutes, and I don't remember any of it. I came back into my body in the elevator on the wayup to the apartment. My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs and kept my eyes on the floor numbers, and thought about nothing, or tried to.
I got the door open. The apartment was dark except for the lamp in the living room, the one Gregori had left on before the call came in. I stood in the entryway, pulled off my gloves, and set them on the console table. The sight of my own hands coming out of the leather was the thing that did it.
My chest went tight. Not the tight I knew. A different kind, the kind where the air was in the room but wasn't in my lungs, and my heart was slamming in my throat like I'd been running. I hadn't been running. I'd been sitting in a car.
I pressed my palm flat against the wall. The wall was cool. The wall was fine. The wall was still there.
She was going to make cheeseburgers.
The thought came from nowhere and landed whole. She was going to make cheeseburgers and sweet potato fries, the ones she cut by hand because the frozen ones weren't as good, and she'd told me that morning before I got on the bus and kissed the top of my head and told me to be good. I'd come home from prep school at three. She was at the machine in the sewing room. Her head was down. I'd thought she was concentrating.
My legs went out from under me. I hit the floor. My coat rucked up around my hips and I couldn't breathe. The floor was not the floor. I was eight years old in a house in Bexley and my mother was slumped at her machine and there was a pair of my father's trousers under the needle, the waistband half-taken-in because he'd come back from Paris the last time a size bigger than he'd left.
"Aleksi. Hey. Look at me, aye?"
Someone was crouched in front of me with his hands on my face, warm palms bracketing my jaw, his knees pressed against mine. It wasn't her. I knew the voice. I couldn't place it until Ilooked up and Fin was there, close enough that I could see him clearly, holding my face steady so I couldn't look anywhere else.
"Good lad. Eyes on me. Ye breathe with me now. In. One, two. Out. One, two, three, four."
I did what he said because I couldn't do anything else. His mouth shaped the numbers, and I followed them until my lungs remembered the pattern, and his palms stayed where they were, steady pressure on either side of my jaw, an anchor I could feel when the rest of me was somewhere I didn't want to be.
"That's it. Keep going. Yer doing fine."
I kept going. The tightness eased by slow degrees, and the floor came back under me, and eventually my hands were my own again.
Fin kept his hands on my face until my breathing evened. Then he moved one palm and slid two fingers to the side of my throat and held them there, pulse-counting, the way Collins would have. When he found what he was looking for, he took that hand away too. The other one stayed on my jaw a second longer than it needed to. Then it was gone, and I immediately missed it.
He sat back on his heels and stayed on the floor with me, a foot of space between us.
"Right. I'm getting ye water." He got up and came back with a glass, pressed it into my hand, and sat down again. "Small sips."
I drank. The glass rattled against my teeth the first time. The second time it didn't.
"How long?" I said.
"Five minutes. Maybe six."
