...spoilers?
*all hail kohsuke.*
[this is where the disclaimer goes.]
the metaphorical kind
When Alex finally musters the courage to ask who Veronica is, Worick is as quick with an answer as Nicolas is to skirt his glance in a perfect arc around her form. His gaze lands somewhere amidst the ceiling plaster.
"A stray cat." A rakish grin that not even almost reaches Worick's good eye slicks up out of what she now recognizes as empty habit. "Nicky never could let 'em be."
Unbidden, she recalls the afternoon Nicolas had swooped in dramatically to save her at the precise instant a man she'd impulsively introduced to the business end of a pipe meant to take his painful revenge. In the aftermath, while she'd been clawing her way out from under the crushing weight of guilt and anxious adrenaline and lingering, mortal terror, he'd suddenly and silently materialized beside her, near scaring her out of her skin. Stooped toward her, he'd presented a short stack of blood-spackled bills -and there, half-spilling out of his shirt, batting happily at his tags, was the well-to-do cat she'd spent the whole day hunting down.*
But there's no mistaking Worick's meaning here, or the significance of his expression, like he's seeing her for herself yet also seeing some other, completely different 'stray,' standing in this exact position, whom Nicolas had saved and unwittingly acquired and been ultimately unable to keep the city from swallowing anyway.
Alex opens her mouth to express frustration at all the cryptic comparisons of herself with someone who is hardly more than a tragic notion and pale fingers against Nicolas's jaw -but that, apparently, is the end of the matter, because Worick shakes a cigarette out of the pack on his desk and heads off for an appointment she's positive he just invented, while the broodier half of Benriya fixes her with an increasingly familiar, hard, inscrutable expression.
"Should I not talk about her?" She asks point-blank, trying and failing to sign the words as she speaks them. He responds by sweeping through a set of letters she actually knows, the very first she'd truly committed to memory: 'A-L-E-X.' Which is irritatingly Not an answer, and further, a response she has no idea how the hell to interpret.
Before she has the chance to accuse him of being deliberately evasive, he gingerly vaults out the open window without a backward glance and disappears into an alley.
Definitely not for the first time, she wonders what the hell she's doing, clinging so tenaciously to a pair whose lives are so steeped in traumatic secrets and literal deadly intrigue. What could they possibly gain from keeping her around? What could she possibly gain from staying?
*references events from chapter 18.
[next: he imagines by permutations of color the texture of her voice.]