Page 6 of Ruthless Sin
Not to Dante. Not to Giada. Not to anyone who would look at me the way I can’t afford to be looked at right now.
If I say her name in that house, I don’t survive the year. And if I don’t survive the year, I can’t keep the one promise I have left.
So I walk.
Frankfurt. New Orleans. A doctor who doesn’t ask questions. I’ll find Dante in his study and tell him the deal fell through — Russian partner, cold feet, not worth the trip. I’ll walk into that house clean.
Somewhere out there is a girl who doesn’t know her sister is dead.
She doesn’t know yet.
She doesn’t know I’m coming.
I swear it over Yelena’s blood and I walk out into the rain.
1
NICO
Mama’s solid silver cufflinks catch the low light before I drop them into the porcelain dish on my dresser, the silver hitting the porcelain with a click.
Papa pressed the metal into my palm the morning after we buried her, his eyes flat, the muscle in his jaw working once before he turned his back on me without a word.
I strip them off the same way every night and don’t look at them.
The watch stays on my wrist because I need the weight.
Dante looked at me twice across the dining room table tonight, once over the wine and once when Nonna brought the second course, and neither time did he blink.
Gia tracked me longer than that, her fork pausing twice over her plate and her eyes never leaving my face when I reached for the salt. My jaw locks.
But it was Renzo who let the word Moscow slip out loud during the second course, dropping it onto the linen tablecloth like it was any other city.
I just smiled at him until the plates were cleared.
The house is quiet now, but the New Orleans humidity sits on my skin, making my shirt stick to the raw skin of my back.
Maria took Mila a plate hours ago, and carried it back down to the kitchen untouched, same as last Sunday, and the Sunday before that.
The chair is set anyway. Silver fork, crystal glass, Nonna’s napkin folded into its sharp unforgiving lines.
We set it in the dark. We always set it.
I grab the leather-bound volume of Akhmatova poetry from my nightstand, the spine already cracked at the same three pages, my thumb finding them without looking.
I walk back to the central wing.
The hallway is a long stretch of silence, the doors closed against the dark while the scent of night-blooming jasmine drifts through the open window at the end of the corridor. It sits thick on top of the Louisiana heat, sweet and toxic.
Sofia’s door is second from the right, dark and silent under the frame. Izzy has been living inside her shadow since we raided the Benedetti basement, and she’s only downstairs tonight because Renzo practically forced her to take a breath.
Sofia is finally asleep.
Mila’s door is third from the left, closed like a vault.
I stop directly outside the dark oak paneling, my pulse kicking up hard against my ribs.
I slide down the wall until I’m sitting flat on the floor, my back pressed against the plaster and my knees bent, the book resting open in my lap.
