Thirteen Stitches

Chapter Nine: Left Handed

By morning, every outlet in Calder Bay ran the same headline.

HARROWGATE MAN AT CENTER OF GALA SHOOTING.

Ezra saw it on the television above the nurses' station and on the phone of the trooper outside Abel's door. They had used a photo of him on the ballroom floor, kneeling in the red emergency light with his hands buried in a dying man's chest. Out of context, it looked like something much worse.

Augustin Draycott had survived six hours of surgery. He lay three floors above Abel, alive and sedated, and he couldn't speak a word.

At noon, Isolde called, her voice clipped and exhausted.

"Rupert walked into the elder council this morning with a stack of newspapers. A Varne head who protects a man at the center of a shooting has lost her judgment, he says." She paused. "They moved the vote to Friday."

Ezra did the math. "Three days."

"Three days."

That night he let himself into the shop on Mercy Street for the first time since the raid. The place was still wrecked, linings piled in drifts and mannequins on their backs, so he left the overhead lights off and lit the old brass lamp on the cutting table instead. Abel's chair still stood by the window, his reading glasses folded on the sill where he'd left them, and Ezra didn't let himself look at them for long.

He had soaked the gray coat twice in cold salt water that afternoon, and most of the blood had lifted. The wool would survive, but the lining wouldn't. He unpicked it stitch by stitch and began cutting a new one from a bolt of gray silk the raiders had missed.

Isolde arrived just after ten in a dark sweater that made her look younger and very tired. She pulled a stool to the end of the table and watched him work. The shop was silent except for the lamp's soft hiss and the whisper of thread through silk.

"I've never seen hands that steady," she said eventually. "Not on surgeons. Not on judges."

"Abel says steady hands come from forgetting who's watching."

A few minutes passed. Then she spoke again, more quietly.

"If you could call the Varne favor again, what would you ask for?"

Ezra kept sewing. He drew the thread through and set the next stitch before he answered.

"Who you were before they made you a Varne."

The silence stretched. He didn't look up, and she didn't answer, but she didn't leave either. She stayed on the stool with her arms folded against the cold, watching the needle, and after a while the quiet between them stopped feeling like a question.

When the new lining was half finished, he brought the old one into the lamplight. The square hole where the thirteenth panel had been looked ugly against the silk.

"Look at this," he said, running a finger along the edge. "A thief would have slashed it out. Whoever did this cut along the seam allowance exactly where my grandfather placed it, five-eighths of an inch all the way around. They knew where his stitches were before they ever turned back the lining." He touched a corner. "And these notches. Abel taught us to angle them toward the cutting hand." He showed her a corner of his new lining, the tiny cuts angled right. "These go the other way. Whoever cut this was left-handed."

"How many people did your grandfather train?"

"In sixty years, a handful. Most are dead or long gone." His voice flattened. "Exactly two are still alive. Me and Danny."

"And Danny is..."

"Left-handed."

Isolde had the address within ten minutes. Two days ago, Danny had signed a lease on an eighteenth-floor apartment in a harbor tower, with a year's rent paid in advance by a holding company owned by Draycott Bank.

Danny opened the door in a silk robe with a whiskey in his hand. He saw Ezra and went white. He tried to shut the door, but Ezra caught it with one hand and walked in.

The apartment was all glass and white leather, with harbor lights shimmering across the ceiling. Ezra stood in the middle of it and looked around at the life his brother had sold him for. Years ago they had shared a room above the shop so small their beds touched, and Danny used to whisper in the dark about the day they would both own shops of their own. Now Danny cracked almost immediately.

"I didn't hurt him." The words tumbled out. "I swear to God, Ezra. They paid me to say what I said, and I said it. I lied in that statement, I know I did. But I never touched the shop, and I never touched the coat. I wasn't anywhere near that corridor last night."

Ezra watched him. He watched the way the robe hung from Danny's shoulders, the shift of his weight, the tremor in the hand holding the glass. All his life he had read people by how they wore their clothes. A lying man held his elbows close. A frightened one buttoned himself up to the throat.

He looked at Danny for a long time, and for the first time in his life, he couldn't tell. It was like going deaf in a room where he had always heard perfectly.

"You were there last night," Ezra said quietly. "At Lucian's elbow."

"So were six hundred people."

"Only one of them was left-handed and trained by Abel."

Something in Danny's face changed. The fear didn't vanish, but it set hard, like glue drying, into something Ezra didn't recognize.

"You still think you're the only one, don't you?" Danny put down his glass. "Abel adopted me when I was fourteen. Legally, with papers and a judge. You never noticed, because you never had to wonder whether you belonged." His voice went soft. "They showed me the exact wording of that pledge. The bearer is a Lockwood by blood or by house."

Ezra felt the floor tilt beneath him. He remembered Odile in that windowless room, saying the bearer of the Lockwood name, and he realized she had never once said blood.

"You think you're the only heir?" Danny said. "If you die, Ezra, the debts don't burn. They pass to me."

He smiled thinly, and it was the coldest thing Ezra had ever seen on his brother's face.

"How many families do you think have figured that out?"