Built From Sin

Chapter 1: The man she chose

Stephanie Colony had learned a long time ago that love did not always arrive in something clean.

Sometimes, it came wearing a black coat in the middle of a Moscow winter, with snow on its shoulders and danger in its eyes. Sometimes, it had a voice that was too calm for the situations it found itself in. Sometimes, it walked into your life at completely the wrong moment, and you let it stay because nothing else had ever felt so certain.

That was Thomas Colony.

She met him on a Friday evening in late November. The kind of cold that Moscow experienced in November was not the kind you got used to. It pressed through every layer you wore and settled in your bones like it planned to stay forever. Stephanie had just finished a twelve hour shift at the private clinic on Tverskaya Street where she worked as a medical assistant, and she was tired in the way that went beyond sleep. She stopped at the small convenience store two blocks from her apartment to buy bread and soup and maybe something sweet if anything on the shelf looked worth it.

He was already inside when she got there. Standing near the back, tall, broad shouldered, with dark hair that was damp from the snow outside. He had a cut running along his jaw, fresh enough that it was still bleeding slowly through a piece of tissue he was holding against it. He was staring at the shelf over the counter supplies like he was trying to solve a problem.

She walked past him to get to the bread. Then she stopped.

"That tissue is not going to do much," she said.

He looked at her. His eyes were a shade of brown that was almost black. "Excuse me?"

"The cut. The tissue is too thin, and you're pressing wrong. You're spreading it instead of closing it." She set her basket down and reached past him to take a small pack of wound closure strips from the shelf. "You need these."

He looked at the pack, then at her. "Are you a doctor?"

"Medical assistant. Close enough for a cut like that." She tore the pack open before he could protest and held out her hand. "Let me see."

He hesitated for just a second. Then he moved the tissue away. The cut was about three centimeters, clean edged, the kind that came from something sharp rather than something rough. She did not ask how he got it. She positioned two closure strips and pressed them into place with the kind of efficiency that came from doing things like this too many times.

"Done," she said. "Keep it dry for at least two days."

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a fold of cash. "How much?"

"I'm not a clinic," she said. "It's just strips."

"Still." He held the money out.

She shook her head and picked up her basket. He watched her move to the bread section with the kind of attention that was not quite staring but was close to it.

"Thomas," he said from where he was standing.

She looked back at him. "What?"

"My name. Thomas Colony."

She held his gaze for a moment. "Stephanie."

He nodded slowly. "Thank you, Stephanie."

She told herself that was the end of it. She paid for her things and walked out into the Moscow cold, and did not look back. She made her soup, ate it at her small kitchen table, watched twenty minutes of television, and went to bed.

He was outside the clinic the next morning.

He was leaning against the wall across the street with two cups of coffee from the place on the corner, and when she came out he crossed over and held one out to her like it was a completely normal thing to do.

"How did you know where I worked?" she asked.

"You said Tverskaya Street clinic. There is only one."

She looked at the coffee. She looked at him. The closure strips were still in place, which meant he had kept the wound dry, which meant he listened, which meant something she did not examine too closely.

She took the coffee.

That one cup turned into a walk along the Moskva River that lasted two hours. He was careful about what he said and generous about asking questions, and he laughed at the right moments and went quiet at the right moments, too. By the time they parted ways at the entrance to her Metro station, she had agreed for the dinner on Saturday.

She did not tell her mother.

Her mother, Maria Jones, had very specific ideas about the kind of man Stephanie should be with. He should have a proper job with a title she could explain to people. He should wear a tie sometimes. He should have a savings account and a five year plan and parents who are still married. Maria had raised Stephanie alone after her father left when Stephanie was nine, and she had worked two jobs to do it, and she felt that this history gave her the right to have opinions about every significant decision her daughter made.

When Stephanie eventually brought Thomas home, three months into seeing him, Maria sat across the table from him with the smile she used when she was reserving judgment. She asked him polite questions about his work. He said he was in private trade and logistics. Maria nodded and said that sounded interesting and spent the rest of the meal watching him with eyes that Stephanie knew too well.

Later, in the kitchen, while Thomas was in the bathroom, Maria said quietly, "Where exactly is the money from, Stephanie?"

"I told you. Trade."

"Trade," Maria repeated, in the tone she used for words she did not believe. "He paid for this dinner in cash. He has a watch that costs more than my rent. He drives a car with no stickers on it. Men in private trade and logistics do not look like that."

"Like what?"

Maria looked at her daughter steadily. "Like they have done things."

Stephanie did not answer because the truth was she already knew. She had known for about six weeks by that point. She had found it out the way you find most things you are not supposed to know, which is by accident, by being in the wrong place and hearing the wrong conversation and having a brain that was too sharp to pretend it had not understood.

She had gone to his apartment to surprise him one evening. He had given her a key two weeks earlier. She let herself in and heard voices in the back room and stood in the hallway and listened to Thomas talking with two other men about a shipment coming from the south, about money owed, about what would happen to someone named Viktor if the money did not arrive by Thursday. The voices were flat and businesslike. There was no anger in them, which made it worse somehow. Anger you could reason with. That flat, certain tone was something else.

She stood in the hallway for a long time after the voices stopped. Then she heard Thomas laugh at something, a real laugh, the one she already knew the sound of, and the other men laughed too, and then she heard the back door close.

She went and sat on her sofa.

When he came out and saw her there he stopped walking. He looked at her face and understood immediately that the conversation she wanted to have was not a casual one.

He sat down across from her and said, "How much did you hear?"

"Enough," she said.

He was quiet for a moment. He did not lie to her. That was the thing she held onto later, when she was trying to understand why she stayed. He did not construct a story or look for a way to reframe what she heard. He said, "I move the product. I have done it since I was twenty-two. I am good at it, and I am careful, and I have never touched what I sell."

"Product," she said.

"Yes."

"You mean drugs."

"Yes."

She sat with that word between them for a long time. Outside the apartment window, Moscow carried on being Moscow, indifferent, enormous, and gray.

"Are you going to leave?" he asked.

She looked at him. He was asking it plainly, not pleading, not performing. He was asking like a man who already knew that some things could not be negotiated and was prepared to accept the answer either way. That honesty, strange as it was, wrapped around her like something solid.

"I don't know yet," she said.

But she stayed that night and the night after. And six months later, she said yes when he went down on one knee in a restaurant with a ring that was too expensive and eyes that were entirely serious.

She stayed because she had looked at Thomas Colony and saw something underneath everything else. Not the deals, not the danger, not the flat voice he used in back rooms with men who owed him money. Underneath all of that was someone building something. She could not always explain what he was building or whether it would ever be finished. But she recognized the effort of it and she loved him for it and she was not going to apologize for that.

Not to her mother. Not to anyone.