Page 124 of Ruthless Sin

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Humming a song my sister sang to me when we were girls.

A sister who died asking a man to find me.

A man who stopped looking.

I hum.

And I break.

22

NICO

I haven’t left my bedroom since she walked out.

The shirt she threw on the bathroom floor is still there. Through the open door. White cotton. Soaked through in places. I haven’t moved or touched it.

The bed is unmade. The sheets still smell like her. Like us.

The smell of her hits me low, an ache that has nothing to do with grief and everything to do with wanting her back in this room, her weight against mine, her breath on my neck. My chest goes tight for a different reason than guilt.

I’m sitting on the floor.

Back against the wall opposite the bed. Knees drawn up. Hands hanging loose between them.

I’ve been here for hours.

The light through the curtain has moved from gold to white to the pale gray of afternoon.

I heard her in the hallway.

Humming.

Tonkaya Ryabina.

The lullaby.

Yelena’s lullaby.

The same song Yelena was humming when she died.

I heard Mila hum it as she walked away from me.

She doesn’t know what that song does to me.

I heard it three years ago in a concrete room while a woman bled out six feet away.

I’m the reason she needs it.

I double over and my hands go to my head and my chest is breaking open, and I cannot find the bottom of it.

I can’t breathe.

The sound that comes out of me is not a sound I’ve made since Moscow.

Raw. Broken.

I’m bent over my knees on the floor of my bedroom and I can’t stop shaking.

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