Page 29 of Ruthless Sin
Not performing happy. Actually happy. Like she built this place because she wanted to, not because someone told her to.
I haven’t seen that on a woman’s face in a long time.
Sofia tugs hard at my sweater sleeve, and I follow her down the quiet corridor.
The therapist meets us at the door of the group room, her voice practiced and soft. You can leave the room whenever you need to. You don’t have to speak.
I sit in the plastic chair beside Sofia. There are other women in the circle, their shoulders hunched in the same shape mineheld in Bucharest. I listen to the noise of their sentences. I keep my lips locked.
When the session ends, Sofia and I walk back down the brick hallway. Giada is waiting outside the examination door, her scrubs sterile. Today is vitals.
“Mila. The chair, please.”
I step inside the small room, Sofia keeping vigil in the open doorway.
“Cold tip on your arm,” Giada narrates, her voice landing before her hands do. “Then the cuff. Then I’m going to look at your eyes.”
She names every movement before she delivers it. My muscles stay loose. I don’t flinch from her hands.
“That’s it. Your vitals are good. I’ll see you next week.” She studies my face a beat longer than the chart requires, her dark eyes on my face, her mouth opening once before it closes again. Her pen stays flat on the clipboard, and she lets the silence sit between us before she signs the bottom of the page.
In the corridor, Cassia passes us with a folder tucked under one arm, gives me the same half-step pause she uses in the compound hallway, and keeps walking.
Through a half-open office door, I catch Izzy sitting at a laptop. Her coffee mug rises a fraction of an inch in a silent toast before her fingers go right back to the keys.
The music room sits on our left as we walk back toward the main lobby. On other days I walked straight past. Today, I let my neck turn the full way.
An old violin rests on a wooden stand in the corner. Russian-made, the dark wood worn smooth.
My father bought me one just like it when my hands were small.
That girl is gone. You don’t get her back.
Papa is dead. Mama and Yelena are in Moscow.
I keep my boots moving, Sofia matching my pace. I don’t look back at the stand, but the image is already burned behind my eyelids.
I know the wood is there.
The drive back to the compound is silent. The sun has slipped past its high point, casting long, dark shadows across Magazine Street.
Nico doesn’t ask for a report. Not me, not Sofia.
I let my eyes track the line of his hand on the gearshift, the hard line of his thigh, the dark skin at his throat where the linen opens.
He hasn’t looked at me once on the drive home.
That is worse than being looked at.
My thighs are pressed together and have been since Magazine Street. The ache from the hallway this morning never fully went away. It sat there through the session, the vitals check, the whole drive back, patient and low and getting louder the longer he doesn’t look at me.
He knows I’m watching him.
His hand on the gearshift is too deliberate. A vein at his temple moves once. He’s holding himself the same way he held himself at the dinner table — like he decided not to move and is paying for it.
Good, I think. And I don’t take it back.
The SUV stops at the front porch. I open the door and get out, my boots hitting the stone. I walk toward the entrance without looking back at the glass, but I pause for one long beat with my hand resting on the brass knob.
