Page 179 of Ruthless Sin
“Christ, you feel—you feel like?—”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He presses his forehead to mine instead. The same press from earlier tonight, from the door in the dark. His eyes are closed and he is shaking slightly and his ribs are pulling with every breath and I run my hands down his back over the three scars and I hold him there.
“I’ve got you,” I say. English. All I have right now.
He comes inside me with my name in his mouth. Soft. A different pitch than I have heard before.
“Milochka.”
I do not flinch. I let him say it. I hold him tighter.
He drops his weight onto me, careful with his ribs, forehead in the crook of my neck. His breath against my throat, uneven, slowing. He shakes for three breaths. Then he settles.
I run my left hand down his back. The three scars under my palm, the skin smooth over them now, old damage. He breathes against my throat and I breathe against his hair and the room is quiet and the chain is warm between us and Yelena’s canvas faces out across the room.
I know she is there. I let her be there.
She trusted him with the most important thing she had. She was right.
He lifts off me slowly, careful, and lies beside me, pulling me into his side. My head on his chest. His arm around my shoulders. His hand warm on my stomach. The tape at his ribs under my cheek, the slight roughness of it, and beneath that his heartbeat, steady and slowing.
I won’t bury you again.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.
33
NICO
She is asleep.
I have been awake watching her do it.
Her face is turned toward mine on the pillow, her hair loose around her shoulders, her mouth soft the way it only goes when she is all the way under.
The chain at her throat catches the low light from the curtain edge. Her hand is open on the sheet between us, palm up, fingers slightly curled. She breathes slowly and evenly and deep, the sleep of someone who has not slept like this in years, and I did that. We did that.
She is young.
Beautiful and here. In the dark, that is the whole of everything. She has been through things that should have broken her into pieces so small you couldn’t put them back together, and instead she is here, in my bed, sleeping with her hand open between us like she is not afraid of what reaches for it in the night.
She trusted you.That’s what she said with her hands on my face.
She bet her life on you. She bet mine.
I look at her face.
I think about Papa.
Papa hollowed out for eleven years after Mama died. I was nine when it happened. I watched Papa become a ghost at his own table, in his own house, in his own skin.
The man who had run an empire with one hand went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with silence and everything to do with absence. He was there. He was never there. And I took the lesson the way a nine-year-old takes a lesson, without language for it, in the body, before thought: love makes you weak. Need makes you useless. Don’t ever let anyone matter that much.
I have been running on that lesson for years.
I look at Mila’s face in the dark and I understand Papa for the first time.
