Page 75 of Ruthless Sin
I sit with that.
Cassia stops at my study door on her way to the kitchen.
Silk robe. The bump full under it. Folder under her arm, printout in her left hand, the intake board for Casa Lucia already running because Cassia has never in her life waited for the day to start.
“He’s not here.”
“Who.”
“Andrei Volin. Reception. I removed him on Friday. Quietly. The new man started this morning. Marco vetted him. The clinic doesn’t feel the change.”
“And the Naples thread.”
“Izzy is on it. The sister is alive. The family that took her has been paid by us through a shell that doesn’t have our name on it. She’ll be on a flight to New Orleans this week. Andrei won’t know we paid. He’ll know his sister has been moved because of him.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“You didn’t need to be asked. You needed it done. I did it.”
“Cassia.”
“Nico.”
Her mouth curves. Her eyes don’t.
“Drink the coffee.”
She turns. Calls back over her shoulder.
“And Nico. Whatever you’re sitting there carrying, it has a face today or it doesn’t. Either way you’re going to have to look at it.”
She’s past before I can answer.
I stay at the desk.
She can’t know. She’s talking about the clinic, the surveillance, the operational picture. That’s all she meant.
I sit with the coffee going cold in front of me and the library door open across the antechamber and a woman on the other side of it and I think about what it means that I wanted her to come.
The library door has been open all my life.
Cassia’s library on one side of the antechamber. My study on the other. The doors between them open since I was a boy doing homework at this desk while Papa worked in the study beyondand Mama read in the chair by the window and the household moved around all of them like water around stone.
Mila is in the chair by the window.
The Tsvetaeva-in-translation Cassia left her is open on her lap. Her left hand is on the page. Her right is on the arm of the chair. Her hair is down. She is wearing the sweater that is not hers and the chain at her throat catches the morning light when she shifts.
She hasn’t looked up.
I don’t move.
I sit at my desk across the antechamber and I watch her read and I think about how I have been watching her read and watching her eat and watching her exist in this house for weeks.
I’m going to lose her.
Not today. Not yet. But I am carrying something that is going to cost me her. I sit here and watch her read and I do not let myself name it.
