Page 8 of Ruthless Sin
She moved closer.
Cristo.
Heat drops straight into my gut, my fingers tightening against the pages until the paper wrinkles.
I want to put my hands on her so badly my palms itch with it, want to rip the door off its hinges and see if her eyes are still as wild as the night I took her.
My jaw goes tight. Every muscle I have locks down at once.
I stay still with my back pressed into the wall, and she doesn’t move away from the wood.
My voice goes rough on the first word of the next line and I have to start it again from the top.
She did not attack me when we broke into that black-site basement, even though the med tech who tried to check her vitals took a wooden chair straight to the teeth.
But the second I stepped into her line of sight, her feral glare dropped, and she let me carry her out without a fight.
Her slender arms wrapped tight around my neck, her wet face pressed directly into my shoulder, clinging to my shirt as if I were the only solid object left in hell.
I don’t know why she trusted my touch.
I am not going to ask her. Asking won’t get her to tell me because she won’t even open the fucking lock.
Giada checks the medical chart. The chart doesn’t tell us anything we couldn’t see with our eyes.
She has not given us her last name, and she has not given us a single syllable.
I carried her out of the Benedetti basement when the others had to be guided, and she walked into this house, locked herself away, and has not said one word.
At dinner I watched Marco’s bloody shirt and Cassia laughing into her water glass and slid the salt across the mahogany before Marco reached for it.
Nonna asked if I was hungry, and I told her no.
Giada asked if I was sleeping, and I lied and said yes.
Renzo said he’d been hearing that same script since Moscow, and I just looked at him and told him Moscow was three years ago, and I’m over it.
The smile held. The smile always holds.
I do not have to perform for a closed door.
I read another line of Akhmatova, my voice dropping an octave, dragging through the oak until my hands go stiff around the spine.
On the other side of the wood is a woman I dragged out of a cage, and the thought of leaving her alone makes my knuckles itch.
I don’t know what the hell else to do.
I finish the poem, close the book, and wait.
She gives me nothing more than that single floor-creak from earlier, but tonight, that tiny shift of her weight against the door is more than I have gotten since she arrived.
I stand up, my lower back aching and my knees stiff from the concrete-hard floor.
The book goes under my arm, and I walk back down the corridor to my room.
I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the empty wall.
Stop.
