Page 194 of Ruthless Sin
I finish. I lower the bow.
Nico is on the threshold without his shoes. His shoes are beside the door. He is in his socks on the half-finished floor of Casa Lucia. His eyes are dark and his breath moves wrong, shallow, like he has been holding still for too long.
My throat goes tight. The heat of him reaches me from across the half-lit room and my breathing goes uneven. I played for him and he knows it and I am not sorry.
He crosses the room. He stops in front of me. Close enough that I could touch his jaw. I do not.
“Eto bylo dlya tebya.” That was for you.
His breath catches, rough in the quiet.
“Spasibo, Mila.”
I want him to touch me. The wanting is loud in my body, louder than the music was.
His hand lifts toward my face and stops, just short, his fingers near my cheek but not landing, and the want of it pulls low in my belly, sharp.
He drops his hand. He takes mine instead.
We walk out of Casa Lucia together, past the scaffolding and the half-rebuilt door. We drive home.
In our bedroom, the lockets stay at my throat. Both of them. The wooden cross goes on the nightstand where I have been setting it at night since the river.
Yelena. Mama. Papa. Nico’s parents. All of our dead, in two lockets and a wooden cross on a nightstand.
I am the one who is still here. I press the lockets flat against my skin until my heartbeat is under them.
I am going to live for both of us. For all of you.
39
NICO
The dining room is set before the household has come down.
The chandeliers. The long oak table Papa kept. Mama’s chair at his right, Cassia’s chair now. Papa’s chair at the head, Dante’s chair now. The chair beside mine has been Mila’s since the night I crossed to the kitchen to bring her a hot plate when she wouldn’t come down. It has been her chair since.
Nonna is at the sideboard.
She is wearing the apron with the embroidered Santoro crest at the hem. I have not seen that apron in three years. It was Mama’s. She lifts the pan onto the sideboard with both hands. I do not say anything. She wipes her face on the back of her wrist once, just the once, and turns back to the stove.
The eggplant dish. Mama made it at Easter. Nonna has not made it since Mama died.
Don’t.
I look away. I pour a glass of water and set it at Mila’s place.
The household comes down in waves.
Dante and Cassia first. Dante in a black shirt rolled to the elbows, Cassia in soft silk the color of late summer leaves withher hair up. He reaches without looking and tucks a strand behind her ear.
She puts her hand briefly to her belly. The baby has been kicking through dinner all week. His hand finds her lower back as she sits.
I want that. Exactly that.
Renzo and Izzy next. Renzo in charcoal, his hand at the back of her neck. Izzy in a soft dress with Mama’s old ring re-set on her left hand.
She glances at the sideboard when she walks in and she knows, too — the apron, the dish — and her eyes come to mine for half a second before she sits. I pour her water. She lets me.
