Page 193 of Ruthless Sin
Sofia lifts the locket and holds it out to me.
I set the violin in its case at my feet. The bow on top. I sit beside her. She lays the locket in my left palm.
The gold is warm from Sofia’s hand. I would know this locket blind.
I open it.
Inside, the photograph my father had made the autumn I was small. Four faces in Mama’s kitchen, morning light on the table. Papa. Mama. Yelena. Me in Yelena’s lap. The photograph is smaller than my thumbnail and I remember everything it is too small to show. The eggs on the table. Papa’s black coffee. Yelena’s chin resting on my hair.
My hands shake. I let them shake. My whole family in my palm, alive, before any of it. Grief and gladness arrive together and I cannot tell where one stops.
I close the locket and my fist around it. I lift my hand to my throat, open the clasp, slide it on, close the clasp. It settles in the hollow of my throat where it has always belonged.
Nico crosses the garden. He stops in front of me at the bench. Sofia and Isabella to my left. Cassia and Dante to my right.
He pulls a small velvet bag from his inside jacket pocket. I know the bag. It held the wooden cross at the river. Cufflinks before that, when I asked him about it once and he did not answer.
He opens the bag and hands me what is inside.
A second locket. Lighter in my palm. The gold a different gold. The same shape, but the engraving on the front is a small line of leaves, not the family crest, and the clasp sits at the side, not the top.
“It’s different on purpose,” he says.
I look up at him. His jaw is tight. His voice is low and even. His shoulders are not.
I open it.
Yelena. A small print from his painting, the canvas in the alcove off his bedroom, made to fit inside. Her face fills it. She is singing.
I look at her face for one breath. Two. He gave me my sister back singing. My chest hurts. The good hurt. I want to keep it.
“She belongs beside them,” Nico says. “Not instead of them.”
“Spasibo.” Thank you. My voice is not steady. I do not need it to be. “Ty vernul yeyo mne.” You gave her back to me.
He nods once. That is all. It is enough.
I open the chain, slide the new locket on beside the old one, close it again. Both lockets settle together at my throat.
The garden empties slowly. Cassia and Dante into the house. Sofia and Isabella follow, Isabella’s arm at Sofia’s elbow. Renzo and Izzy past the gate. Marco after them. Giada into the kitchen with Nonna. Maria has been in and out the whole time.
Nico stays.
I sit on the bench with my violin in its case at my feet. Neither of us speaks.
His hand finds my shoulder. Light. It has rested there this way since the boutique. Heat comes through the fabric where his palm rests and my pulse picks up. Not fear. Want. After everything, my body has decided he is safe to want.
The garden goes quiet around us.
The early evening at Casa Lucia. The clinic is still climbing out of its rebuild. Scaffolding on the back wall, the reception desk gone, Lucia’s photograph in a temporary spot at the side wall. The music room is half-finished. Wallpaper down, windows open, piano covered in a sheet.
He drove me here without asking why. He opened the door at sunset and walked me to the music room and stopped. He has not stepped in.
I take my violin out of the case. I close my eyes. I open them.
I play Bach. The Chaconne. The piece my father made me practice for years. The piece I have not played in years. The Bach we played in Moscow was heavier, slower, the long notes held longer. My father said Bach in Moscow was Bach in church. He preferred church.
The garden was Mama’s song, for all of them. This is Papa’s, for one man.
