Page 21 of Ruthless Sin
“So I’ve heard.”
“Good. There’s a green sweater resting on the chair in her room. She wears it every time she tries to leave the threshold. Leave it right where her hands can find it before you knock on the frame.”
“Cassia—”
“I’m telling you a thing she won’t tell you, Nico.” She sets the folder down on the back-room table with a soft thud.
“And bring food in the SUV. Bread, fruit, whatever Nonna will hand you from the pantry. Don’t offer it to her. Just set it on the console between the front seats and forget it’s there.”
“Why.”
“She’ll know what to do with it,” Cassia says simply. Then she turns on her heel and walks out.
The back room moves on around me, the comms humming.
I stand in the middle of the room.
She’s being looked for.
I walk back toward my own wing slow, my boots making no sound against the corridor.
I pass Nonna Rosa at the bottom of the back stairs, a wicker basket of laundry balanced against her hip. She doesn’t say a word to me. She just looks at my face. I keep walking.
She has known the truth since I flew home from Moscow with blood under my nails. She has never said it out loud.
I stop at the sharp corner right before Mila’s hallway. The Akhmatova volume is still in my suit jacket pocket, right where I closed it last night.
I do not walk to her oak door this morning.
I turn. I go straight to my own room.
I sit on the edge of the mattress. The watch is still on my wrist. I don’t take it off.
The silver cufflinks come off, into the porcelain dish on the dresser. Mama’s. I don’t look at them.
I open the Akhmatova. The poem is about a woman whose lover comes to her threshold at night and refuses to knock.
I slam it shut.
Tuesday morning Maria walks them down to the SUV and I drive them out and bring them home.
I will be in a car with her, no door, no oak.
Cristo.
Just her and me in the leather seats, someone hunting her through the ports, and her pulse running fast against my wrist at the dinner table is the wrong thing to be carrying right now and I cannot put it down.
4
NICO
I am refilling Marco’s wine when she walks in.
Cassia’s hand stops mid-reach for the salt. Renzo’s hand comes off the back of Izzy’s neck and comes down knuckle-first on the mahogany table. Gia sets her fork down without realizing, the metal clicking against the china.
I look up.
Mila is in the doorway.
