Page 7 of Ruthless Sin
I stay still enough that she won’t see the shadows change, and close enough to hear her move if she does.
She hasn’t moved yet.
I read the Cyrillic characters, letting my voice drop into a low murmur that scrapes straight through the wood.
“Ya ne proshu tvoey lyubvi.” I don’t ask for your love.
The door stays locked.
It always does.
For weeks she has been living in this house and I have spent my midnights glued to this patch of floor, reading to a solid block of oak while she refuses to give me a single fucking word.
My hand finds the same split leather spine, my weight settling into the same patch of floor, my spine against the plaster.
I turn the page, the paper whispering in the quiet hall.
The cicadas are screaming out in the oaks, the jasmine turning heavy enough to choke, and my shirt sticks to my back while I force myself to stay perfectly still.
I keep reading to her.
Speaking Russian pulls at something behind my sternum that I can’t close back up.
I learned this language for one woman, and now the cadence of it tastes like the room she died in.
Don’t.
My hand goes flat against the wall behind me, my palm pressed to the plaster. I press harder, forcing my knuckles to feel the rigid wood frame underneath.
Plaster, plaster, plaster.
Not concrete.
This is not concrete.
My wrists are zip-tied to the chair. Concrete at my back. Concrete under my boots. One bulb on a wire above me, swinging in a draft I can’t find.
Yelena six feet across from me, the blood at her temple still wet. Her chin is up. She isn’t looking at Alexei. She is looking at me. She is humming through the knife at her throat and her eyes are?—
Stop.
I pull my hand off the wall, shoving my fingers hard into the denim of my thigh until the tremor stops. I count thirty breaths through my teeth before I trust the plaster again.
Then I do.
The hallway is dead quiet.
There’s just the ragged drag of my own lungs and the jasmine drifting in through the glass like it has nowhere else to be.
I don’t know if she is listening to the poetry.
Don’t know if she is even awake in the dark.
Then I catch a sound from the other side of the oak panel.
The floorboard creaks, a weight shift that tells me she’s moved from the edge of the mattress to the floor, her bare feet sliding over the wood until she’s standing directly against the other side of the door.
She is on the other side of the wood.
