Page 16 of Ruthless Sin
The volume is there. Cloth-bound. Pale, faded blue. Tsvetaeva. Russian characters on the left, English translation on the right. The top edges of the pages are still uncut, raw and untouched.
I take it down with both hands, my fingers wrapping around the cloth. The spine is warm from where the afternoon sun has been striking the wood, the same warmth I find on my door after midnight before I pull my hand away.
I carry it back up the stairs to my room, holding it carefully against my chest, my movements identical to the way I handle the cup of morning coffee, like something precious that will break if I stop paying attention.
I place the volume on the single wooden chair. I don’t open the cover.
Put it back. Nothing here is free. You pay for it in skin, like always.
I just sit on the floor in front of it, staring at the blue cloth.
Cassia knows I understand her.
She’s known the whole time. She didn’t weaponize the information with her husband or her brothers. She simply told me she knew, using two quiet sentences in the only shared language we have left.
I won’t make conversation. I’m reading. It has been waiting on that shelf for someone.
The silence is still mine. She didn’t rip it away from me to prove her own power. She gave me the book and didn’t ask for anything back.
My throat tightens, a hot, sudden burn flaring behind my eyes. I press my palms hard against my face, breathing the scent of old paper into my skin until the shaking stops.
It has been five years since anyone handed me a gift I didn’t have to pay for with my own skin.
“Spasibo.” Thank you.
I whisper the word to the empty plaster walls. She won’t hear the sound. I say it anyway.
That night, his boots don’t come to my door. I don’t turn on the light.
I lie down on top of the covers in my layers, my right hand locked around the casing of the blade in my pocket, my left lifting the chain at my throat.
I am Lyudmila Dmitrievna Zakharova. I am my father’s daughter.
Nico doesn’t have a goddamn clue what he’s doing with me yet.
Neither do I.
But I am going to be the one who figures it out first.
3
NICO
Dante pours me a glass of whiskey before I have even managed to shut the oak door behind me.
“Sit.”
I sit on the leather chair across from him.
The gold signet ring is catching the morning light on his right hand where it always does. Papa’s ring. Two generations of Santoro Dons on the same finger, worn down smooth by decades of decisions. He hasn’t touched the gold yet this morning.
He is going to.
The whiskey is entirely too early and we both know it.
He slides the glass across the dark mahogany desk, the base whispering against the wood.
“Drink that,” he says, “and tell me what you think.”
