Page 135 of Ruthless Sin
I won’t be.
My family is dead. I’m in a house with the man who knew. I can’t breathe.
Mama is dead.
She didn’t get out.
Yelena died asking him to find me.
He stopped looking.
I bend forward over my knees. My breath stops and won’t come out. I press my forehead into my palms. My whole body shakes.
I try to cry. It comes in fragments. A sound. A breath. Then nothing. My body doesn’t remember how to do this. I haven’t cried in front of myself in years.
I haven’t slept or eaten. The room won’t stop moving.
The light at the window hasn’t started.
I get up.
I leave my room before the household is up. The hallway is dark. I’m in his shirt and my slip. Bare feet. I walk to the library.
He doesn’t go in the library. The library is Cassia’s.
I open the book on my lap. I open it to the page I was on before. I look at the words.
I can’t read.
I sit in the chair. My hands keep shaking on the spine.
I cry without sound. Tears land on the page. I don’t wipe them.
I’m cold. The shirt is thin. I don’t get a blanket.
I have been sitting in this chair for a long time.
My hands are in my lap. They won’t stop shaking. I stopped trying to make them an hour ago and now I just watch them and let them shake because fighting it takes something I don’t have left.
Mama is dead. Yelena is dead. She asked him to find me.
The tears come and stop and come again and I have no control over any of it, which is its own kind of horror because I have had control over this for five years. Five years of making myself a wall and the wall is gone and I don’t know what I am without it.
The book is open on my lap. The words mean nothing. There’s just the chair and the shaking hands and the light moving slow across the floor and the thing sitting in my chest that I cannot name and cannot put down.
Cassia comes in.
She’s in a dress, her hair up, the bump full under the fabric. She’s carrying a glass of water on a small enamel tray. Nothing else. She sets the tray on the side table without asking if I want it and closes the door behind her and looks at me.
“I know,” she says.
My throat closes so hard it hurts.
Because she does. It’s in her face — not performance, not pity, not the careful way people look at broken things. She is looking at me the way a woman looks at something she recognizes. She has been in this chair. Maybe not this one. But she knows this chair, and she is not flinching at what she sees in it.
She pulls the desk chair over and sits right next to me. Close enough that I could reach out and touch her if I wanted to. She doesn’t ask me anything. She doesn’t say a word.
She just stays.
