Free The Winter Thief by Jenny White Page A

vineyards on the Aegean coast and sold his wine by the barrel. He knew Rhea was—had been—her father’s favorite, but he was unlikely to give the youngest of his six children a valuable ruby ornament. It was the sort of thing you gave a wife. He thought about his own father, who had never given his mother a kind word, much less a gift.
    Vahid ran his fingers over the tines. He should have been the one to give Rhea this gift. Instead, just like his father, he had demanded everything but given her nothing. She would have married him if he had given her jewels like this. Women always responded when you gave them what they wanted. But he had never been able to understand what it was that Rhea wanted.
    “I respect you, sir,” she had said in a voice so warm that he was convinced she liked him. They met every Saturday afternoon in the private room of a café overlooking the Golden Horn. There she let him touch her golden hair, the shafts of it flexible between his fingers. He held her dimpled hand with its translucent pink nails. Once she let him guide her trembling head onto his shoulder. Her hair smelled of lemons.
    But she refused his offer of marriage, saying her father wouldn’t allow it. He then talked to her father, a man who could have used a powerful son-in-law. Her father put him off, once saying she was too young, another time that he did not yet have the money for a dowry. Vahid understood that Rhea’s father was afraid to refuse him, and he took comfort in that small hope. Lately he had put pressure on her father to hasten his decision. One of the father’s warehouses had burned, ruining a season’s production. Vahid wondered if Rhea had guessed the origin of the fire. Could that have been the reason she had refused to see him the past two weeks? He pressed his thumb against the tine of the hairpin with such force that it buckled. He could master men, he thought, but whenever he reached for love, it was wrested from his grasp.
    He opened a drawer and took out a small, sharp, and pointed knife, a bottle, and a latched box. He rolled up his sleeve, revealing a swarthy arm seeded with scars like grains of rice. He pressed the tip of the knife to the skin just below the crook of his elbow and for a few moments let the sting penetrate like a balm. His heart beat faster. Lowering the blade, he increased the pressure ever so gently, until he broke into a sweat, his eyesight blurred, and a cascade of pleasurable feeling washed over him. He removed the knife. He was breathing rapidly and his heart pounded. Carefully averting his eyes from the line of blood, he took a piece of cotton from the box, poured on alcohol solution, and tied it to his arm with a cotton strip. He rolled up his sleeve, flexing his arm to feel the sting. He put on his jacket, slipped Rhea’s hairpin in his pocket, and left without a word to his assistant.

12
     
    D ESPITE THE EARLY HOUR , Kamil rode first to Feride’s house. He had to know whether Huseyin had come home. Deep shadows beneath Feride’s eyes revealed that she hadn’t slept. She was dressed in the same gown she had worn at dinner the night before. Elif sat beside her on the sofa and held her hand. Kamil thought Elif must have stayed the night. He imagined the steep streets of Galata, where she lived, had been made impassable by the storm.
    Two anxious servant girls waited just inside the door. Glasses of tea and a plate of breakfast chörek rested untouched on the table beside the sofa. A fire roared in the grate.
    “Kamil!” Feride jumped to her feet. “What are you doing here so early?” She turned to one of the servants. “Tea, and bring some breakfast.”
    “I can’t stay long, Ferosh.” Kamil could see the tension around her eyes. The furrow that had appeared between her eyebrows after their father’s death had deepened. “Is Huseyin here?”
    “Has something happened?” Her voice was steady, but he could hear her anguish moving like water beneath a thin sheet of