Page 30 of Ruthless Sin
I want him to know I’m still here. I want him to know I felt his eyes on my back for the entire walk.
I turn the knob and step inside.
Behind the closed door of my room, I pull the bread from my pocket and eat half of the loaf slowly, forcing myself to taste the chicory on my tongue.
I sit in the armchair under the tea-colored window and open the pale blue Tsvetaeva volume Cassia left on the shelf.
“Mne nravitsya, chto vy bol’ny ne mnoy.”I like that you are sick, but not for me.
I read it again. I am already sick for him and have been since the hallway this morning.
I read the Cyrillic text, then the English translation on the facing page, then the Russian lines again until the words blur. The cloth binding is warm where my palms have been resting against the spine.
It has been five years since my hands held poetry.
Sestra moya, ya zhiva. Ya zhdu. My sister, I am alive. I am waiting.
I turn the page to the next poem.
The old voice in my head has gone quiet.
6
NICO
The back room is colder than the rest of the house. Marco runs it that way.
Three monitors glow on the desk. Marco’s comms feed on the left, Izzy’s pattern board on the right and the third pulled toward my chair.
I sit.
“Morning,” Marco says, not looking up.
“Morning.”
“Coffee’s Nonna’s. Don’t ask.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Izzy is at her laptop across from me, her hair pulled back and her sleeves shoved past her elbows.
“I have him,” she says.
I look at her screen.
A face, beard grown in, the same shoulders we have been watching at the port. She has him beside three other photographs from different cities and decades, all of them the same man.
“Konstantin Lebedev,” she says. “Velikov network. Port logistics. Two years in New York before they pulled him east. Awinter in Chicago. Three Bratva payrolls in the last decade. He doesn’t ask twice.”
“How long until he asks past the port.”
“He already has. He just hasn’t asked the right person yet.”
Marco looks up. “Define right person.”
“Someone with a face memory who’s been to the basement. Someone who had access to her in the year before we pulled her out. Three men in this city fit. I have eyes on two of them.”
“And the third,” I say.
