Thief (Boston Underworld #5)(22)
“Indeed, it’s a nice place you have here out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.”
“Just how I prefer it.”
He pauses to look up at me. “And a pretty little peach secreted away down the hall.”
“You saw the girl?”
“I presume it must be her, this girl with no name. She was apologetic when she bumped into us in the hallway. Tall like a willow and soft like the sea. Her pretty amber eyes will long haunt me.”
“You should have been a poet,” I deflect.
Christophe sniffles and murmurs something in response, but I don’t hear it. It never occurred to me that Tanaka’s appointment with the therapist would be ending around the time of their arrival. I had grown accustomed to her being locked in her room, but now that she’s permitted to roam the house under the doctor’s supervision, Sergei has seen her, and it’s a development I dread. He will have questions. He will have many questions.
“All done.” Christophe snaps off his gloves and glances back at me curiously. “She’s beautiful.”
“The piece?”
“The girl. But the piece is remarkable too. If I were able to compare the original, you might give me a run for my money.”
“With certainty, I would.”
He smiles and snatches the bottle from my hands, helping himself to a drink while we examine the dancing girls in the picture. “Degas said that art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
“And what do you see?” I ask.
“It’s a beautiful, bloody sport. Unappreciated. They make something impossible appear effortless.”
I nod in agreement. “It wasn’t until recently that I came to understand the gruesome labor of a dancer.”
Christophe whistles and shakes his head. “You were holding back on this piece. This is the problem with reproductions. You are forced to color in the lines. But that one—” He points to a stray canvas in the back of the room. “That one is a force of nature.”
In my rush to prepare the piece for him, I forgot about my other works lying out. Most notably, the one he is currently gravitating toward. It feels intimate, and I want to stop him. But it would only serve to fuel his curiosity.
“She’s a beauty,” he repeats. “You have captured every emotion on her face. The toil, the agony, the pain. Fall from Grace. It’s an apt title. Color me captivated.”
There is no denying the muse for my piece. The night Nakya fell from grace, I was as shocked as the rest of the audience. While most of the onlookers politely chose to look away from her shame and focus on the show, I was not one of them. Her struggle to get back up again held me hostage, and at that moment, the heartbroken beauty enchanted me.
“It’s a pity,” Christophe muses. “The greatest love stories always end in tragedy.”
A throat clears from the doorway, and I turn to find Sergei waiting there, half blitzed already. The rims of his eyes are red and glassy, and the broken capillaries around his nose seem more obvious than usual.
“Are you finished?” he asks brusquely.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Christophe answers. “Though I could stay here and thumb through the inner workings of your mind all day, I have a real job waiting for me in the city.”
I shake his hand and offer him a smile. “We can’t all live a life of luxury, running Russian bakeries.”
He removes a card from his wallet. “Well, if you ever get tired of peddling pastries, I think you’d do well selling your own pieces.”
My eyes move to Sergei, who seems amused by the idea. To him, my pieces have never amounted to more than chicken scratch on paper. It was Viktor who decided that I should attend college to nurture my skills. Now common practice in the modern Vory world, a well-educated Vor is a valuable asset.
Christophe gathers his bag and offers me one last goodbye before Sergei tells him a car is waiting downstairs. With his departure, I am left with only the company of my father. His eyes move around the room, cataloging my things into order of nonsense. I know what comes next, but I only wish I had more alcohol in my system.
“What is with the girl?” he asks.
As avtoritet, it is now my right to tell him that it’s none of his concern. But as my father, I am still inclined to show him respect. When it comes to Tanaka, I am not worried that he will connect the dots. Even if he were to discover the name of her father, it would make little difference to him. As far as he believes, my mother has been dead to me since he told me she ran off with an Italian man. He would have no reason to suspect I’d been searching my whole life for answers.
I edge toward the door of the vault, and Sergei follows suit. “The girl is just collateral.”
“Pretty little thing.” He scratches at his chin. “She has a tight ass. I wouldn’t mind borrowing her—”
My fist collides with his jaw so fast that I have little time to understand what has come over me. Sergei reels back in astonishment, his teeth bloody and his eyes furious. I offer an apology in Russian while I try to come to terms with my actions. It would be in my best interest to smooth it over, but all I can think of is that I’ve just given him cause to poke his nose where it doesn’t belong.
“She is mine,” I declare. And this was not the thing I should have said because now he’s laughing.