Page 61 of Dressed to Kill
"Then we have a problem bigger than one warehouse." A pause, and I heard him set something down on his desk. "If K was sewing stones into the product, he wasn't doing it himself. He had hands. Skilled ones. The kind that don't grow on trees in this city."
He meant Fin.
“He couldn’t have known,” I said. “If Fin knew, he would’ve told me.”
Nikita sighed. “I believe you. The boy’s an asset to the Italians, and assets don’t need details. He did the fine work for the Italians for six months. They had him making the pieces that had to pass while the women did all the rest. If anybody alive can pick one of these out of a crate by feel, it's him."
Nikita was quiet for a moment longer, and when he spoke again, there was something almost amused under the grim. "Talk to your Scottish boy, Aleksi. Find out if he can be our bloodhound." A beat. "And Aleksi. I appreciate you taking the time to call me."
He hung up before I could answer, leaving me standing in a cold warehouse holding a phone and a chest full of something I didn't have a word for. Niko was watching me.
"So," my brother pressed. “What’s the verdict?”
I tucked my phone away. “Looks like we’re going shopping.”
The wallet was doneby the time I heard the elevator.
I'd been at it three days when he wasn't looking, which wasn't easy in a flat where the man tracked me like a hound. It was bifold. Plain. Four card slots and a billfold, vegetable-tanned, the kind of piece my da gave apprentices to ruin before he'd let them near anything that mattered. The stitching down the spine was honest work and nothing more. A man who knew leather would clock the tension going soft at the back third where the left hand had given up its share, and he'd know exactly what had happened to the hand that made it.
Aleksi wouldn't. That was half the point. He'd carry the thing for years and never know it was the ugliest wallet I'd made since I was nine.
I slid it into the waistband at the small of my back and pulled my shirt down over it.
The key didn't fight him tonight. He came in clean, the way he hadn't the night he'd torn my shirt open, and I tracked him by sound. Coat off. Keys in the dish. The fridge, then nothing fromthe fridge, which meant he'd thought better of a drink. Then his weight in the doorway of the dining room, and the particular quiet of a man working out how to start.
I didn't look up from the clam. "Yer late."
"I was at a warehouse counting handbags."
"Sounds like a promotion."
"Don't." He came in and set something on the table beside my elbow. I turned my head. It was a bag, the kind of cheap knockoff I'd stitched a hundred of in a room full of women who were all dead now.
My hands went still.
"I need you to look at something," he said.
"Not yet," I said and stood.
He looked at me. "Not yet?"
"Ye walked in here with a face like a funeral and a bag full of bad news, and I've been waiting on ye all day." I came round the table slowly, wiping the wax off my fingers on a rag. "So whatever's in the bag can sit there another ten minutes. I made ye something."
He froze. "Fin, you shouldn't have."
"Aye. Don't get sentimental, it's shite." I tossed the rag onto the table. "It's on me somewhere. Ye've got to find it."
"Fin."
"Those are the terms." I spread my arms a little, the rag-clean hands hanging loose. "Ye want yer present, ye work for it. Same as everything else round here."
He didn't move for a second, and I watched him decide whether to be annoyed about it. Then his mouth quirked, and he crossed the floor.
"Where?" he asked, and I held back a little shudder as he put his hands on my hips.
"That'd be telling."
His hands came up to my shoulders. He patted down the seams of the shirt like he was frisking me, which the beautiful, daft man probably was. His hands slid down my arms.
