Nikolai’s pocket watch clicked as the hour struck two in the morning. He ought to have gone to bed long ago, but here he still was, standing in front of a tri-fold mirror in his bedroom as a measuring tape and several pins flew around him, designing a new frock coat. For a once pudgy orphan from the Kazakh steppe, Nikolai had grown up to be rather striking. His eyes were dark and fierce, his face and body all sharp planes, and yet there was an impossible fluidity to the way he moved—in fact, even in the way he stood—that was both incongruous with his trenchant edges and an inseparable part of
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