Page 59 of Ruthless Sin
I sit with the folder closed on my knee and the river soft through the wall, and I do not move.
Then bare feet from her wing, the rhythm I have learned without deciding to learn it. Light, even, a small hitch on the fourth stair where the board has gone soft.
I am out of the chair, my hand already reaching for the door, before I catch myself.
No.
I put my hand on the back of the chair and hold it. My knuckles go white. I stay.
Not toward my room. The other way. The back stairs, the hall, the kitchen.
She is in the kitchen long enough for the pipe to sound, water to run, water to stop. Then the bare feet again, back the way they came, up the stairs, the hitch on the fourth, the hall.
Her door closes.
I sit, and I listen for it to open a second time.
It doesn’t.
She went to the kitchen and she went back up and she chose the kitchen tonight. Not my door. The kitchen. I am going to sit here and let that be what it is, and I am going to keep my hands on this desk, and I am going to breathe through the fact that she was three rooms away and I have her name written in someone else’s file and there is blood on my hand that is not mine and I did not keep her safe enough and I am not done.
Volin.
Soon.
13
MILA
The room is dark and the day won’t settle.
I’m on my side, the chain moving with my breath, and I count what’s wrong the way I used to count exits. The man at the reception desk was gone. A woman in his place who looked at the list and said Sofia before she said my name. Two doors that never locked, locked. An unfamiliar vendor name on the stamp at the top of the list. Cassia’s voice through a door that should have been open, saying Thursday the way she says things that are already decided.
The counting doesn’t stop.
Don’t.
I’ve lived in places where a change meant being moved, and being moved never meant somewhere better. I know what it feels like when the ground shifts under you and you don’t get to choose what comes next.
I want to do this alone tonight, to count my breath down to something even and prove I can do it without him. Without anyone.
Don’t.
I press my back flat against the mattress and stay.
I close my eyes and don’t mean to sleep.
I sleep.
The dream doesn’t start like a dream.
It starts like a memory.
Concrete under my knees. The cold seeping through fabric. The smell of cigarette ash on a suit jacket. Turkish tobacco, the expensive kind Papa used to smoke before Alexei decided what Papa smoked.
A hand clamps the back of my neck, heavy and possessive.
My heart is pounding in my throat.
