Behind you, on the workbench, someone had been watching you long enough for a cigarette to burn down to the filter.
"Could cut the ropes,"
Cezary Wolny said.
"No."
He shrugged, put the cigarette out against the bench top, and came over. Long black hair falling across the front of a face with no business in a warehouse: dark smudged eyeliner, three earrings in one ear, a jaw he tilted at an angle and held there. Tattoos climbed both forearms and disappeared under a black harness strap, and the blood drying on his bare chest was not his.
He looked at you the way he had been looking at you, without pretending about it, then dragged a stool across the concrete with one boot and sat down on it backwards, arms folded along the top, close enough that his knee was beside yours.
"Four strangers and one chair,"
he said.
"You are wondering how long before we stop being polite."
"Cezary."
Otho's voice came from behind you, flat as a wall.
"Sit down."
"I am sitting."
He tipped his head at you and dropped his voice, and the whole room could still hear him.
"That one is not going to hurt you. That one is the problem. I am the one who talks, and what I am going to do is talk you into a straight answer, and then talk Otho into cutting that rope. So. Two days ago you buried a stone that says Beloved Father and the papers called him something else. Say the something else out loud for me."