Page 57 of Dressed to Kill
I'd made a thousand of these. Ten thousand. The draw was nothing, the breath between the breaths. Your fingers do it while your head's elsewhere. My fingers went to do it, the ring finger gone, the whole grip rolling toward the gap. The thread slid where it shouldn't. The tension I'd held in that hand my whole life ran out through a hole. The stitch came up slack. Crooked. A child's seam.
I stared at it.
Then I pulled it out and did it again, slower this time, telling the hand what I wanted the way you'd talk a drunk down a stair. I sent the needle, caught it, drew. My own hand betrayed me, a stitch at a time. The waxed thread bit into the side of the wound where the gauze had ridden up. The pain went white and clean up the arm. The needle skipped the hole and went into the meat of my thumb instead.
I dropped the work, fighting tears.
I couldn't do it.
Fuck.
I crossed my arms over the table, put my head down, and for the first time since they'd taken my finger, I let myself cry over it.
I don't know how long I stayed like that. Long enough for the tears to dry tight on my face. Long enough for my arm to go dead under my head.
When I sat up, the offcut was still there in the clam. The seam was still crooked. The awl was where I'd dropped it, point-up, my granddad turning in his grave.
I wiped my face on my shoulder and looked at the mess of it. And somewhere under the wet and the snot and the self-pity, a meaner voice came up, the one that had got me through the van and the warehouse and six months of being a line in a ledger.
Ye miserable bastard. Ye've conquered worse than a finger.
Aye. I had. I'd lost my da. I'd sewn for a man who'd have put me in the ground the day I stopped being useful. I'd had a needle in my leg and a chair under me and a blade at my hand, and I was still here, still breathing.
And if those fuckers thought they could break me by taking my finger, they had another thing coming.
I picked the awl back up and set it point-down where it belonged. Then I pulled the slack stitch out for the second time and threaded the needle on the good hand, and this time when I went to draw, I didn't ask the left to do what it used to do. I let it do what it could.
I held the line differently and pinched the thread against the side of my hand where the finger wasn't, finding a new way to take the tension, clumsy as a bairn's first try.
The stitch came up wrong again. But less wrong.
I pulled it and did it again.
Less wrong.
I'd be slow for a long while. I'd be ugly at it longer. I might never be the best in any room again. But I could do it. I could fucking do it.
Let somebody else be the best. The best was nothing but trouble, anyway.
"No' done," I told the empty room. "No' fucking done."
I pulled the next stitch through, and it held.
There were one thousandfour hundred and twelve fake handbags in the warehouse on Cleveland Avenue, and Nikita wanted every one of them counted, photographed, and logged before they went into the holding truck to be sold. The plan was to slowly drip them into the market so they didn’t tank the price. It was basically free money for us, courtesy of Mr. K. All it cost was a few innocent lives.
The job would normally fall to some low-end foot soldier, the kind of guy who was still trying to earn his stripes in the organization. Instead, it fell to me and my good for nothing half-brother.
Apparently, Nikita knew how to hold a grudge.
I logged a red bag in the ledger, photographed it, and tossed it into the bin with all the other red ones.
“You know, Pop bought mum one just like this for their fifteenth anniversary,” Niko said on my left.
“Pop didn't buy fakes. Not for my mom, at least."
"Mm. No. You're right. Hers was a real Prada. He had taste." Niko turned a tan one over in his hands like he was appraising it instead of logging. He slipped the bag over his shoulder. “What do you think? Is pink my color?”
I snorted. “Pink is agirl’scolor.”
