Page 15 of Ruthless Sin
Instead, I turn the corner that opens into the massive room I’ve only seen through a cracked doorway on my first afternoon.
Books line every wall, climbing all the way to the high ceiling. There are leather chairs that smell of old tobacco, and tall windows the color of weak tea where the drapes have been pulled half-shut against the morning sun.
Cassia is sitting at the mahogany desk.
She hasn’t seen me yet.
My fingers lock around the wood molding of the doorframe. Every muscle in my legs screams to pull back.
Go. Now. Move.
I am one split-second away from vanishing back up the stairs.
She looks up.
She doesn’t offer a fake smile. She doesn’t drop her pen.
“You can stay,” she says, her English flat and quiet. It’s a dry statement of fact, not a polite offer. “I won’t make conversation. I’m reading.”
My eyes stay on her face a beat too long, looking for the catch.
Her pen pauses on the page and she does not look up, the line of her shoulders shifting once before they go still again.
She’s already gone back to her accounting ledger before I’ve finished deciding whether to breathe. She doesn’t perform a welcome at me.
Other women in the houses I was kept in performed welcome. Italian women in expensive dresses, silver trays, smiling with too many teeth while they waited for me to do something with my mouth that my throat couldn’t manage.
Cassia just reads.
I cross the Persian rug, my boots silent. There is a small armchair tucked under the tea-colored window, and I drop into it, keeping my spine straight, my hands folded in my lap, and my ankles crossed.
My father’s posture, the princess lines.
I haven’t been able to unlearn the stance, even in the basements.
Cassia turns a page.
The window light moves across the dark floorboards by slow inches. Once, she makes a small, satisfied sound in her throat, there and gone.
She never looks at my corner.
The light shifts another foot.
She closes the ledger with a soft thud, stands up, and gathers her fountain pen and her empty porcelain cup. She walks toward the exit without angling her gaze toward my chair.
She stops right at the threshold, her back half-turned.
“I’ll be in here tomorrow afternoon,” she says, her voice the same as before. “If you want quiet again.”
A beat of silence stretches between us.
“There’s a book on the third shelf from the bottom. Russian, with the English on the facing page. It has been there a long time. It was my mother-in-law’s. I never met her. I have not opened it. It is not mine to give, but it has been waiting on that shelf for someone.”
Her linen skirt rustles as she walks out into the hall.
I don’t move for a long time, watching the dust move through the tea-colored light.
When my knees finally loosen, I stand and cross the room to the third shelf from the bottom.
