Page 191 of Ruthless Sin
I come inside her with her name in my mouth.
“Milochka.”
I say it quietly.
She turns her face into my neck. Her arms come around me and hold.
We lie there. I curl around her from behind. My hand low on her stomach. My mouth at the back of her neck. The smell of her hair. Sweat and soap and us. The chain at her throat under my chin.
The painting space door is open across the room. Yelena is on the canvas in the lamplight. I have not turned her to the wall in days. The canvas stays out. I look at her face in the paint andthe grief of her is there and it is bearable now and I let it be. She is going to be in this room with us for the rest of my life. That is right. The way it should be.
“I’m going to love you for the rest of my life.” A breath. “You know that, right?”
She is quiet for a moment. Long enough that I think she has gone under. Then:
“I love you.”
Her voice steady and low and certain the way it goes when she has decided something.
My chest does the thing it does when something costs me and I was not braced for the cost. My arms pull her closer before I have told them to. My face goes into the back of her neck and I stay there for a long breath and I do not speak because I do not trust my voice right now.
She lets me stay there. Her hand finds my arm where it crosses her stomach and holds.
“Okay?” she asks quietly.
“Khorosho.”
She tightens her hand on my arm. I feel her smile against the pillow.
A beat of quiet. The lamp on the desk still on at low. The canvas of Yelena across the room. The chain at her throat warm under my chin.
“Khorosho,” she says back. Soft. Testing the word in her mouth.
She sleeps.
I watch her face for a long time. The chain at her throat. The mark above her eyebrow. The small sound she makes when she breathes.
Keep being a man she chose.
I close my eyes.
I sleep. For the first time in years, the dark behind my eyes stays quiet.
38
MILA
I am going to play for them today. I decided before breakfast, before I could talk myself out of it, and I have been talking myself out of it ever since. I am doing it anyway.
The garden in the late afternoon is the garden Lucia planted. Jasmine at the corner of the iron bench. Bougainvillea climbing the back wall. Nonna’s herb bed by the kitchen door. A dead woman’s garden, tended and loved and still blooming. The right place to play my mother’s song.
I walk in wearing the soft dress Cassia put in my closet days ago. The chain at my throat under the high collar. The wooden cross in my right pocket. The violin Nico brought me in my left hand. The bow in my right. My heart is loud. Not fear. Not only fear.
The household assembles without being called. Nobody told them. Nobody had to. My chest aches at that.
Cassia waits at the edge of the garden by the kitchen door. The dress no longer hides the swell of her belly. Her hand has been on it all afternoon. Dante has not left her side.
Sofia sits on the iron bench at the corner. Isabella’s arm around her shoulders. Sofia’s notebook is on the bench beside her, closed. She has not written in it today.
