Page 94 of Dressed to Kill
"You're the newest Laskin," I said. "Bar's on the floor. Stop talking."
"Right. Yes. Sorry." He shut his mouth, then opened it again. "It's an honor, though. Really."
Nikita gave me a look that saidGood luck with this one.
"The stones," Nikita said. "Tell me about the stones."
"Four hundred, give or take. Sewn into the product the way Niko called it." I nodded at my brother on the sill. "K flew in himself to collect. Burned a dozen men doing it, his and mine both. Nobody crosses an ocean and bleeds like that for stones he could have written off."
"No," Nikita agreed. "They weren't his."
"That's what I figured. He as good as said it before he died. He was holding them for somebody bigger." I shrugged. "Whoever that is, they're short four hundred stones now, and the man who was supposed to hand them over is in a field outside Winchester. That's not a loose end that stays quiet."
“Kostya swept the plane and the garage this morning,” Nikita said. “Whatever K brought into my city stays in my city. The inventory lands on your desk tomorrow.”
Nikita turned the pen over once on the blotter. He didn't like loose ends, and this was a bad one, the kind that came back wearing a different face a year down the road.
"Nikolai," he said.
Niko looked up from the windowsill like a cat who’d been sunning himself.
"You found them," Nikita said. "You knew the cut on sight. You knew what it meant before anyone in this room. That makes them yours." He set the pen down. "Find out who K was holding for. Quietly. You don't move on anyone, you don't spend a stone, you don't so much as breathe near it without coming to me first. You build me a name and a face, and a reason. Understood?"
For once, Niko didn't have anything charming to say. He looked at the cigarette in his hand, then at me, then back at Nikita, and something passed over him that I recognizedbecause I'd worn it myself — a man being handed back a piece of the thing he used to be.
"Understood," he said.
And just like that, my brother had a job, a real one, the first since he'd turned up on my doorstep with his accounts frozen and his tail between his legs. I didn't know whether to be glad for him or worried. With Niko, it was usually both.
"Niko. Take the kid," Nikita waved two fingers toward the door. "Get him fed. He looks like he hasn't eaten since the road, and he's mine to keep alive now, which means he's yours to feed until Aleksi says otherwise."
"I'm always the babysitter," Niko sighed, but he came off the windowsill and clapped EJ on the shoulder. "Come, mon gars. There is a man named Gregori downstairs who has been waiting in a hallway for an hour, and I have promised him my company. You'll like him. He's very large and says almost nothing, which, between us, is the best kind of man."
EJ went pink and got up too fast. He thanked Nikita again on the way out, then thanked me, then thanked Yuri, who hadn't done anything but ask him a question, and then the door shut behind the two of them.
Which left me, my boss, and my uncle, and the one piece of business I'd actually come here to do.
Nikita knew it too. He got up without a word, went to the cabinet on the side wall, and took out the good vodka with the Cyrillic label.
He poured two and carried one to me, then a third, smaller, and set it on the arm of Yuri's chair without being asked. Yuri inclined his head a fraction.
I drank mine because it gave my hands something to do.
"Say it, Aleksi," Nikita said, settling back behind the desk. "You've been carrying it since you walked in. It's making the room feel heavy."
"It's about Fin."
"I know it's about Fin." He almost smiled. "It's been about Fin since the morning you sat in my law office and defended your father to me like a boy. I told you then. I know a selfish bastard in love when I see one."
I turned the empty glass in my hand. Across the room Yuri had gone still and attentive in his quiet way, and I knew whatever I said next I was saying in front of the one man whose opinion I'd never been able to throw off.
"He's not an asset anymore," I said. "I want him off the books. Not a prisoner, not a worker, not a thing the organization gets to pull when it's convenient. He walks free. He's mine, and I want it sanctioned, so no one ever again gets to do to him what Pavel did."
Nikita didn't answer right away. He turned his own glass on the blotter, and I made myself sit in it, waiting, because I'd learned a long time ago that pushing Nikita got you the opposite of what you wanted.
"You think I'd take him from you," he said finally. "After all this."
"I think the organization owns what it owns. I've seen what happens to men who forget that."
