Page 74 of Ruthless Sin
Five years of keeping every want nailed shut, and this one gets loose before I can stop it.
I want it. I want it so badly my hands go tight on the violin and I am terrified of how badly I want it because wanting things has never been safe and this table is the most dangerous want I have ever had and Dante is looking at me like the answer is already yes.
I look at him.
I nod once.
Nico’s arm is beside mine. He hasn’t reached for his glass. His breath is even beside me and the warmth of himcomes through the space between us and I let myself feel it, just for this moment, just while the room is still moving and nobody is watching and the violin is in my lap and the dress is against my ribs and I am at this table.
My chair. My place. I have not had either of those words since I was fifteen years old. I don’t say that out loud. I put myhands in my lap and feel the violin against my thigh and let it be true.
It’s late.
The dress is on the chair. The violin is propped against the wall by the door. I carried it up with me. Cassia hasn’t asked for it back.
The cream tissue paper from Marguerite is folded on the dresser beside the paperback. The two folded notes are under the paperback.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
My hands are in my lap. I turn them over, palms up, and look at them. The calluses on my left fingertips are gone, five years without strings does that, but my hands remember. They remembered tonight before I did. The bow found the string. The wrist loosened. The shoulder dropped.
I am still here.
That is what the performance told me. Not the table, not the toast, not Dante’s next year landing in my chest like a stone thrown into still water. Those are outside things. This is inside. My hands remembered. The music came back.
The person who stood in a concert hall at fourteen with her heart pounding and her bow hand steady. She is still in here, under everything that happened, under five years of silence and survival and not-playing.
She did not leave.
I didn’t know I needed to find that out tonight. I didn’t know how much I had been grieving her.
I pick up the violin from where it leans against the wall.
I hold it in my lap. The wood is warm. The new strings catch the light from the lamp.
I put my chin to the rest. I don’t play. I just hold it, the shape of it against my jaw, the weight of it in my left hand, my right hand loose at my side.
Spi. Sleep.
To the violin. To the girl I used to be.
Ya zdes’. I am here.
16
NICO
The coffee on my desk has been cold since Nonna made it.
The household is slow this morning, hungover and quiet in the way a house gets after a night that cost something good.
Through the study window before dawn I watched Dante walk Cassia through the garden, his hand at the small of her back and her hand on her belly, moving slow, the way people move when they are trying to make a moment last.
I sat at the desk and watched them and thought about a woman three doors down who left her door open last night and stayed on her side of it.
The door was open.
She didn’t come through.
