The bed dipped behind her. Two thumps sounded, one, then the next. Boots, she thought. He’d taken off his boots. The mattress shifted again, and she could feel him stretch out beside her, the sheets pulling tight under her, all down the length of her body.
He’d lied down.
He was staying.
Her throat tight, she rolled back over, onto her other side, and saw him on his back next to her, head propped up beneath two pillows, turned toward her, hair fanning across the white pillowcase like spilled ink.
He held a pack of Marlboros. “Can I smoke?”
“No.”
He stared at her.
“Yes. But.” She rolled over to her nightstand, dug around in the top drawer, and rolled back bearing a crystal ashtray that she lay on the sheets between them. “Only if you share.”
He shook out two, lit them both on his lower lip, and then passed one over.
“Ta.” The first drag scratched a long-suppressed itch at the back of her mind, and smoothed the nerves that had flared at the notion that he didn’t want her back. He was still here, lying on her bed – albeit fully clothed. Maybe he had some self-control – obviously – but he wasn’t indifferent.
She turned her head to exhale the smoke up to the ceiling. “I’ve wanted one of these all week,” she said on a sigh. “Most models smoke, you know. Helps keep them thin.”
He regarded her lazily, gaze taking a stroll down her sheet-covered body in a way that left her face heated. He’d seen her now, physically at least; no sense pretending he didn’t know exactly what she looked like under her clothes. And in the throes no less. “You don’t.”
“I did, for a while. Mum slapped a packet out of my hand, once, when I was seventeen. It wasn’t seemly, she said. And I suppose she’s right. Stains your teeth, ruins your skin. Foul breath, all of that. No one wants a pretty girl to come into the room reeking. No sense aging myself out of the business too quickly, eh?”
He hummed a noncommittal noise. “You’re skinny enough.”
Her heart gave a betraying bump, so she took another drag and gave him a low-lidded, wry look, one she’d calculated over the years. It worked on all men. “Thank you,” she drawled.
Of course, neither the look nor the tone worked on him. He looked up the ceiling, hooked an arm behind his head, and worked on his own cigarette, unbothered. “Do you want to know what I found?”
Ah. A return to business. She regretted it more than a little. At least, for the moment, the post-coital haze and the cigarette were keeping the fear at bay. The sight of the gun at his hip where his shirt had ridden up didn’t hurt either. She said, “Of course.”
He exhaled smoke through his nose, and it roiled and curled in a sinister way above his face, made him look like a dragon. “You were right about the ring: it’s Alicia Newsome’s. The finger belonged to her maid. Polish girl. Antonina Ostrowski, here on a work visa, reported missing by her family a year ago when she failed to check in with them, accused of stealing the ring by Newsome.” He spoke softly, a voice just for her, so no one else in the flat could overhear; it made the news worse, somehow. A nasty secret just for her. “The lab said that she was killed, put on ice, then thawed before the finger was removed. She wasn’t being held captive: she’s been dead a while.”
Raven tapped ash into the tray and swallowed. Her throat didn’t hurt because of the rare cigarette, she knew. “Okay.”
“The next one’s trickier. The ear came from a man in Moscow. Gedeon Rosovsky. The Butcher.”
Her spine tightened, as though the whole thing were a puppet chord someone had yanked hard. She glanced at him sharply. “You mentioned him before. In the kitchen the night the ear arrived. You thought he might be behind this.”
“I didn’t say I thought he’d done it, just that this was the sort of thing hewoulddo. And he didn’t do this, because he’s dead.” His head rolled towards her, pillow rustling, his gaze eerily serious now, and no longer blank and withdrawn. “I killed him years ago in Moscow.”
Another yank down her spine; this one left her scalp prickling. “Jesus.”
“They told me they were going to drop him in the river. But clearly they didn’t. The ear was the same as the finger: he’d been on ice, then thawed, then cut up.”
The last haze of pleasure evaporated. She took a long drag off her smoke and wished for a drink to go along with it. “This is the Russians, then.”
“We don’t know that.”
She gave him a narrow look. “Who else would ship a dead Russian’s ear by post? A dead Russian you killed, no less. Christ.” An ugly thought occurred. “Are they after you and trying to go through me?”
“No.” He sounded sure, and she wished she could feel that way. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but if they wanted me dead, they could snatch me off the street. It’d be too much hassle fucking with you just to kill me.”
“Unless it’s not about you personally. They might be after the club.”
He made a face, the sudden creasing and pulling of it comical and mobile. “Maybe. I think there’s easier ways of targeting the club.”
