Page 72 of Ruthless Sin
TheMélodiefromSouvenir d’un lieu cher. The piece Papa made me practice for two years before my hands were old enough to hold the bow weight.
The piece I played at my first recital while Mama sat in the third row and Yelena stood at the back of the hall and I could see her moving her mouth along with every note. The piece Mama used to ask for on winter evenings, when dinner was over and the house smelled like soup and Papa was on the phone in the next room.
The piece you haven’t earned the right to play again. The piece that belonged to the life Alexei took.
You don’t get to have it back just because you’re standing in a safe house with new strings.
The first notes come out wrong.
The pitch wavers in the second bar, a quarter step flat on the long note, the bow too heavy in my grip, five years out of the strings. My stomach drops. The mistake sits in the air.
I hold it.
I let it sit there.
I don’t flinch. I stopped flinching at my own mistakes the year I learned that flinching only tells the room where to look.
By the third bar my hands remember the rest.
The melody arrives. My right shoulder drops. My left wrist loosens. The sound comes up through the wood of the violin into my jaw and my chest and it is mine again, and the room goes quiet, and I don’t look down.
I look at the chandelier. I stop deciding where the bow goes.
Halfway through the piece the table comes back. I stopped looking at it and now it’s just there, the way things are when you stop fighting them.
Cassia’s hand finding Dante’s. Renzo still. Tears on Giada’s face that she doesn’t wipe. Marco not moving. Nonna in the doorway, still. Luca across the table with his glass untouched and his dark eyes on me and then — on Giada.
Nico doesn’t move.
His sleeve is at the edge of my vision, not moving, and then I look.
I shouldn’t look. I know I shouldn’t look.
His eyes are wide. And then, before he can stop it, before anything in him gets there in time, something soft at the corner of his mouth, gone almost before it arrives, and it is the most dangerous thing in this room because I know how to protect myself from men who want to take. I don’t know how to protect myself from a man who looks at me like that.
I look back at the chandelier.
The bow stays true.
The last long note holds.
Then it ends.
I lower the violin.
I bow. My chin drops to my chest, the bow at my side, the way Madame Petrova drilled into me at eight years old. You give them the bow. That is how you tell them it was worth it.
It was worth it.
I straighten.
Nico is out of his chair before I finish straightening. I don’t see him decide to move. I don’t think he decides. He is just there — four steps and his arms are around me from behind, the violin still in my hands, the bow still in my grip, and his mouth is in my hair and I stop breathing entirely. One second. Two. The whole table watching. His lips against the top of my head and his arms tight and he is shaking, barely, just enough that I feel it through my shoulders.
Then he lets go.
The cold where his arms were is immediate, the fabric settling back around me, and I stand with the violin in my hands while he walks to his chair and puts his hands flat on the table, and I watch him rebuild the wall from the outside and I am the only one in this room who knows it just came down.
The room explodes.
