Page 175 of Ruthless Sin
I keep my fingers laced through his and he does not move. He does not speak. He does not take. The next thing is mine. He has always known that.
When I stand, his fingers do not tighten. I let my hand slide out of his. His palm stays on the arm of the chair, open, empty, and I look at it for one second before I look away.
His voice is quiet and even.
“Take whatever time you need. I’ll be here. Same door open.” A beat. “You don’t owe me anything, Mila. Not a word. Not a look. Not forgiveness. Nothing. I’ll be here anyway.”
I walk to the doorway. He has not stood. He is still in the chair with his palm open on the wood where my hand was.
I do not turn back.
I walk out through the corridor and up the stairs and into my room and close the door behind me and do not lock it. The lamp off. The window cracked the way I have left it every night since the first week.
My right hand is still warm where his fingers were laced through mine. I press my palm flat against my cheek and hold it there in the dark, and the warmth of it moves through me slowly, like the first note of a song you thought you had forgotten.
I close my eyes.
I sleep all the way through the night for the first time in days.
31
NICO
Maria delivers the message and goes down the back stairs.
The plan is final. The compound is in motion. My room is still.
The painting space door is open across the room. Yelena’s canvas faces out. The velvet bag with the wooden cross is on the nightstand. I do not look at either of them.
My ribs pull when I breathe too deep. Gia’s tape has loosened at the edges and I have not gone back to have it redone. My eyebrow has closed. My forearm works. I am going after Alexei carrying days of damage and I have had worse.
She has not come to my room since she found out. She has been in this house, in this hallway, at this table, three feet from me at meals, and I have not gone to hers, and the distance has been its own kind of damage, the kind Giada cannot tape.
Now she is coming to me.
I have been standing here for twenty minutes unable to move, which is not something that happens to me, which I am not going to look at directly.
Her steps in the gallery. My pulse goes wrong before the door opens and I am glad no one is in this room to see it.
She walks in. She does not close the door behind her.
Her hair is down around her shoulders and I want to put my hands in it, not gently, not carefully, just my fingers in her hair and her face tipped up to mine, and I am not going to do that. I gave up the right to touch her. I know exactly when I gave it up and I have been living in that moment ever since.
The chain at her throat catches the light. No knife in her pocket. She came to me without the knife and my chest closes around that.
I cross the room to her.
I stop close enough that I could reach out, close enough to see the pulse at her throat and the way her breath has gone careful and shallow, the way it does when she is holding herself very still on purpose.
My voice comes out low and controlled.
“Ya idu odin.”I am going alone. “Alexei Morozov has been breathing the same air as you for a long time and I have let that go on long enough. He touched what is mine. He took what is mine. As long as he is alive you will never be free. You will never be safe. You will never be able to stop looking over your shoulder and I cannot live with that.”
I look at her.
“I am going after him. And when I am done there will be nothing left of him to find you. And I am coming back to you.”
Her face shuts. Her body, already still, goes stiller. The chin up. The eyes flat. The hands at her sides not closing. Her jaw goes tight.
