Page 72 of Dressed to Kill
Boss:Thursday. 21:00. Your op. Don't fuck it up, Aleksi.
“What is it?” Fin hooked his chin on my shoulder.
“Nikita. He’s giving me the op to run.” I breathed out a sigh of relief. “He’s trusting me again.”
“Aye then,” Fin said and kissed my cheek. “Good for you.”
But there was something cold about the way he said it that I didn’t like, and even as we lay there after, trying to fall asleep at dawn, I couldn’t shake it from my brain.
Thursday gave us four days to get ready. It also gave the Italians four days. Bianchi's had been dark since the day we walked out of it, and a man like K counted his Thursdays. If word reached him that his tailor had stopped answering the phone, that timetable was worth nothing. I pushed the thought down and pulled Fin closer. Four days. We'd be ready in two.
The tailor had pinsin his mouth and resentment in his eyes, and I'd earned the both of them fair and square.
"That seam's no' sitting right at the shoulder," I told him, twisting my neck to see it in the three-way mirror. "Ye've eased it wrong. Pull it out and try again."
He took the pins out of his mouth one by one with the slow patience of a man who'd been hating me for forty minutes. "Sir, the shoulder is correct to the measurements—"
"Aye, the measurements are grand. The ease is wrong. Look at it, man. It's pulling across the back when I move my arm." I rolled my shoulder to show him, and the wool went taut in exactly the place it shouldn't. "There. See it now?"
His expression soured, but he said, “I see it.”
Aleksi sat on the leather banquette behind me with one ankle on the opposite knee and his arms crossed. He had a smug expression on his face, too.
"Take it off," the tailor said wearily. "I will redo the shoulder."
"That's the spirit." I shrugged out of the jacket and handed it back. "Ye'll thank me when ye see it sit proper."
He took the jacket and disappeared into the back.
I turned to the mirror in my shirtsleeves and waistcoat and had a proper look at myself for the first time. The houndstooth had been my idea. Aleksi had wanted charcoal. Charcoal would've buried me. The houndstooth made the copper in my hair look like a choice instead of an accident, and the cut of the waistcoat sat me up taller than I'd stood in months. The maimed hand hung at my side, and I didn't tuck it away.
In the mirror, behind me, Aleksi watched me look at myself.
"Enjoying the show, are ye? " I asked, smoothing my hands over the fabric.
"You’re running that poor man ragged."
"I’m only tryin’ to get yer money’s worth. Yer payin’ for the damn thing. Besides. The service ‘round here’s terrible. What’s that yer drinkin’? Smells like rubbing alcohol, it does."
"That’s because it’s vodka."
“Vodka,” I scoffed. “At a fitting? Ye bloody morose Russians. Where I come from, you have wine at a fitting and a proper Irish whiskey at the pub after.”
I turned. He looked me up and down the way he did when he was working out whether to eat me or kill me, and at this point I knew it was usually the first and I was usually grateful for it.
"It suits you," he said.
"Aye?" I turned a slow circle for him, hands out. "Ye like what ye see?"
"I always like what I see when I’m looking at you."
"Smooth bastard." But I felt the heat climb my neck anyway. I'd been a man who got told he was handsome by other men before, in pubs in Edinburgh and once in a hostel in Berlin, and it had never gone in like this. "Ye keep that up, I'll start believing ye."
"You should."
I didn't have anything for that, so I turned back to the mirror to give myself something to do.
The tailor came back through the curtain with the jacket draped over his arm and a face that said he'd taken the seam apart in the back and discovered, to his disgust, that I'd been right. He didn't say so. He held the jacket open, and I shrugged into it, and he set to work pinning the shoulder again, faster this time, the pride pricked out of him.
