Page 182 of Ruthless Sin
We walk down to the back room.
The river is waiting.
34
MILA
The boat is moving against the current.
The Mississippi at this hour is flat and slow and the boat is pushing upstream and the water is letting it. Black hull, dark waterline, low profile. Marco’s. Six men at the bow in tactical gear. Renzo at the front of them.
I am at the rail.
Dark layers. My own boots. The chain at my throat under the dark shirt. The folding knife in the side pocket of my pants.
The wooden cross is in my closed left fist.
I have not opened my hand since Nico put it there at dawn. The wood has gone warm from my skin. The bevel. The cross-piece. The impression of it pressed into my palm now, part of the lines there.
Carry it. Bring it home.
I press my fingers in harder.
He said it in English. He wanted me to hear it in the language I am still learning to trust. I understood that without him saying it, the same way I understand most things about him now, in the body, before thought, the way I used to understand music before I understood that I was playing it.
I understood it and I did not say anything back and I have been carrying that too, since dawn, alongside the cross.
He saidI love youin the dark before we dressed.
He said it three times.I love you. Do you hear me? I love you. I have loved you since the first minute.
My mouth did not open.
I wanted it to. The words were there, not in Russian, in English, the language of the household and the kitchen and the back room, the language I have been learning to live in. Three words. Simple. The kind of words I have known the shape of since I was a child, in Papa’s house, before Alexei took the house and everything in it.
Ya lyublyu tebya.Papa said it to Yelena and me every Sunday morning. Every Sunday for ten years until there were no more Sundays. He said it like it was ordinary, like it cost nothing, like breathing.
I forgot that it could be simple.
I have not said those words to a living person since I was ten years old. My body did not know how to form them. Not because I didn’t feel them. Because the last time I felt them for someone, I brought him tea and sat beside him while he died and did not know it was a death at all until it was over, and the words went into the ground with him.
Nico’s arms were around me and his face was in my hair and the words sat in my chest like a closed fist and I pressed my forehead harder into his neck and I held on instead.
I am going to say it when he comes back.
When. Not if.
Renzo crosses to me at the rail. Vest, comms set in his ear, sleeves rolled. His jaw set, his hands still, watching the tree line.
“Stay at the rail until Marco sends for you. You stay in the boat until I come for you myself.”
“I know what I have to do.”
He looks at me for a beat. Nods. Turns back to his men.
The boat anchors in a small cove near the riverbank.
The team moves over the side and into the cane. Spanish moss heavier here than at the compound. The cane is half-fallow. Alexei has not been farming, only maintaining the appearance of a plantation. The air smells like silt and cane gone past its harvest. The sun is not yet at the horizon.
