Page 122 of Ruthless Scar
Minutes pass. Three. Four. Mila shifts her stance, redistributing her weight toward the wall rather than the door.Not a retreat. Something looser in her shoulders. Sofia moves first. Not toward Mila. Just deeper into the space, away from the library Isabella disappeared into, settling onto the floor with her back against the wainscoting. She pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around her shins and makes herself small.
A minute later, Mila sits too. Against the opposite wall, thirty feet away, mirroring the posture without looking at Sofia. Knees drawn up. Arms wrapped.
Two girls making themselves small in the same corridor, each one choosing to stay.Fuck.
Then, from the first-floor corridor, a voice. Nico’s. Not loud. Not projected. The low, measured cadence of a man reading something aloud. In Russian.
The syllables drift through the corridor with a patience I’ve never heard from my brother, deliberate and careful, like each word is a bridge he’s building plank by plank. I move to the railing’s edge and look down. He’s sitting on the floor outside Mila’s room with the book open on his knees. A slim volume, worn at the spine, pages soft from being turned often.
He’s reading from it. Not performing. Not using the charm that brokers deals and disarms enemies. This is Nico stripped of all of that, practicing a language he has no business knowing, stumbling over a word and then correcting himself and continuing.
A poem. The rhythm is unmistakable even in a language I don’t speak. Something lyrical and old and sad.
Mila is listening. She hasn’t turned toward him. Her posture hasn’t changed. But her head has tilted, just a degree, the way a person tilts toward music. She stops scanning. Fixed on nothing. Just listening.
Nico reaches the end of whatever he’s reading. He pauses. Turns a page. Starts another.
He’s learning her language. And she’s letting him.
Footsteps behind me. I know them before I turn. Isabella’s walk. Slower than it used to be. Not limping. Just careful, the way someone moves when they’re still cataloguing what hurts. She stops beside me at the railing and looks down at the scene below. At her sister and Mila. At Nico reading Russian poetry to a girl who won’t speak.
For a while, neither of us say anything.
“We’re collecting broken things,” she says. Low. Not sad.
“Not broken.” The word comes out before the rest follows. She looks at me. Waits. My teeth grind.Dio.Nothing.
“Yeah,” she says. “I know what you mean.”
She leans her elbows on the railing. “Nico’s been reading to her. In Russian.”
“I noticed.”
“Gia couldn’t get an answer out of him either.” She glances at me. “Family trait.”
“You’re all terrible communicators. It’s a miracle anything gets done around here.”
“We get things done.”
“By shooting at them.” She looks at me. Her eyes go light. “I’m teasing.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Your face doesn’t change.”
“It changed.”
“Where?”
“You missed it.”
My hand finds Isabella’s lower back. I don’t think about it. My palm settles against the warmth of her and rests there. Not pulling her toward me. Not claiming. Just touching because the distance between us is a problem my body solves without consulting my brain.
She leans into it.
From the kitchen below, Rosa’s voice rises above the radio, carrying through the house the way it’s been carrying for decades. “Those girls need feedin’, cher.” Her accent wraps around the words like something warm and worn. “Can’t heal on an empty stomach. Mais, I need to double my biscuit recipe.”
“Triple it, Nonna,” Marco calls from somewhere. “Nico ate the last batch.”
