Page 55 of Ruthless Sin
The place on my palm where his skin was is still warm.
I set the sweater on the dresser. Sofia’s note goes on top, folded four times, three words in pencil. The empty thermos at my feet.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
The bread is still in my pocket. I’ll eat it later.
The muscle of his forearm is still in my palm, the warmth of his skin already fading, and I miss it already. I close my hand around nothing and open it again.
The words are already in my mouth before I decide to say them.
“Spasibo.”
Quiet.
For the bread. For Sofia’s note and Oksana calling memilayaand Cassia and the violin I haven’t earned yet.
For Nico.
12
NICO
Marco meets me at the side entrance, the ink on his knuckles fresh enough to catch the dock light when he turns.
“Six hours,” he says, low. “Not one fucking word. No water. Just sits there.”
“He speaking?”
“Native. Refuses English.”
“Good.”
I go past him onto the floor.
Concrete under everything. One bulb over the table at the far end, the drain set into the floor between the table and the door, the river smell coming through the wall behind the chair. Marco built it right. Restraints that hold without making a show of it. The table at the height of a working man’s hands. A single bottle of water on the side counter where a man in the chair can see it and want it.
I hang my jacket on the hook by the door, walk to the table, and sit.
Korvan watches me come. Beard grown in, stocky, the build a barbershop chair learns the shape of. He is upright in the restraints because he has decided to be. The bulb is in his eyesand he does not squint. He has done this before. From my side of the table, and from his. That tells me how long this is going to take.
I open the folder.
“Pavel Ivanovich Korvan.” I keep my voice where his own mother would have kept it. Low. Unhurried. “Saint Petersburg, June of ‘eighty-nine. Came up through the Velikov network out of the Marigny shop. Three years on the chair. Fourteen of our soldiers under your razor. Four of theirs. The left chair is yours. The right belongs to your cousin Yuri. You take your coffee at Burgundy and Esplanade. Black. Two sugars.”
He does not move.
I turn a page I do not need to turn.
“Your sister Anya keeps the books for a dental office at Magazine and Felicity. Your mother is on the third floor at fourteen-eleven Tchoupitoulas, in the building with the wisteria that’s eating the gallery rail. Your daughter is in the second grade at the school on Webster. Left-handed. Her teacher sends notes home about it.”
I close the folder. I lay my hand flat on the cover.
“I don’t raise hands on women. Not yours. Not anyone’s. That is not the offer I’m making.”
His weight comes forward against the restraints. He reacts to his daughter. That’s the door.
“You speak it like a Moscow man.” Low. “Where did you learn it.”
