Page 118 of Ruthless Sin
Cold floods my body.
“I carried the lie for three years.”
Three years.
He’s known about Yelena for three years.
“I told myself you were already dead,” he says. His voice is flat now. Dead. “That looking would only get more people killed. That Yelena died for nothing and the best thing I could do was let it go.”
Let it go.
Let me go.
“I stopped looking,” he says.
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
My hands go to the mattress. Grip it.
Not to stop from falling. To stop from doing something else.
He stopped looking.
Yelena died begging him to find me.
And he stopped looking.
“I pulled you out of the Benedetti basement,” he says. “And I didn’t recognize you.”
My hands are shaking now too.
“Then I heard you hum a song,” he says. “In the hallway. I froze. I knew that song.”
Tonkaya Ryabina.
The lullaby. Yelena’s lullaby.
“I asked Izzy for a photograph that night,” he says. “She sent it to me. I looked at it once. I didn’t need to look again. I recognized it the moment I saw you.”
He looks at me for the first time since he started talking.
His eyes are red.
“I should have told you that night.” His voice is raw. “The night I heard you hum.”
“Yes.”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. His hand presses harder against the back of his neck.
“I was —” He stops.
“You were what.”
The silence goes too long. His throat moves.
“You were what, Nico.”
“I couldn’t —”
