Page 14 of Ruthless Sin
I haven’t heard a woman laugh inside a man’s hand since I was sixteen years old.
Renzo’s dark eyes cut toward my doorway as they clear the threshold. He doesn’t look at my face. He looks at the angle of the open gap, checking the line of sight.
He keeps walking.
The girl doesn’t look, because she’s been trained to give me space. Isabella. Izzy, when Renzo’s voice goes soft. The one who went back into the smoke and the fire to drag Sofia out of the Benedetti black-site.
They live like this inside these walls. I haven’t been inside a house that felt like a family since before I was taken.
I pull the door shut, slide down the wood, and sit with my spine pinned to the panels.
Nico. The household calls him that. Nonna Rosa calls him Niccolò when she wants him to drop the performance and listen.
I don’t say his name. Not out loud. Not even inside the privacy of my own skull where no one can track the language.
He reads Akhmatova in low, unhurried Russian through my door frame, and his family talks about him in the hall like he’s a weapon that won’t turn off.
He didn’t sleep. He never does. Not before.
Before what?
The only men I have ever known who spoke Russian were the men who used the language to strip my skin off. They always smiled first. They always moved into my space with their hands open, pretending to want a deal before the violence started.
He hasn’t done a single one of those things.
He dragged me out of that basement in the rain. I don’t remember most of it — gray light and screaming — but I remember the weight of his hand on my shoulder blades, the glare of a New Orleans streetlight, and the rough register of his voice sayingtishe. Quiet now. Easy.
I didn’t claw at him. I didn’t fight his grip.
I don’t know why.
He works a room without trying. He pours other people’s drinks to control the pace of the table. He speaks six languages and his mouth moves into a soft smile a half-second before his eyes follow it.
My stomach drops and pulls at the same time, a hot-cold wrench below my navel that I have not felt in years and do not have permission for.
Every man in my past who moved like that was a monster. Nico moves like that down to the tailoring.
My old way of reading men doesn’t work on him.
The first night, he set a glass of water on my basement floor. Turned his back. Walked out. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t ask for anything.
Weeks of him glued to the plaster outside. Weeks of Russian poetry bleeding through the oak. Weeks and he hasn’t once tried the brass handle.
Blyad’. Fuck.
I don’t have a strategy for safe.
The corridor outside is silent now. The household has gone quiet.
I just open the door.
The grand stairs are wide, dark antebellum wood, engineered so cleanly the treads don’t give a creak under my weight. My left hand slides along the mahogany bannister, keeping my boots close to the wall where the joist holds the structure firm.
I move without sound. Five years of practice doesn’t go away because the floor is expensive.
I reach the bottom hall and follow the scent of chicory. Maria and Nonna Rosa are in the kitchen, voices low.
I don’t cross their line of sight.
