Page 183 of Ruthless Sin
Renzo at the front. Then four men. The medic stays on the boat with me. One guard at the bow.
They go through the cane and the cane closes behind them and they are gone.
I have the earpiece in.
I wait.
The cross in my closed left fist.
The earpiece is silent.
I look at the river. The light has started at the edge of the trees, gray-pink, the water going from black to that flat dark gray it goes at the moment before the day decides. It is the same sky Nico was watching when I woke and found him awake. The same dark lifting. He was brushing my hair off my face and his eyes were somewhere far away and I watched him do it from across the pillow: this is what safe feels like. Not the absence of danger. This. A man who watches you sleep and does not want anything from you except that you keep breathing.
The earpiece crackles.
Marco. Quiet.
“Brick is empty. Perimeter holds. Moving to the main house.”
My pulse is in my throat, high and fast. Not only fear. Fury underneath it, old and clean, my jaw going tight with it, the kind that has been sitting in my chest since I was twelve years old and learned that the man who smiled at Mama across the dinner table had different eyes when no one important was watching.
The cross in my fist.
I press harder.
Three minutes.
I have not been within reach of him in years.
I am going to be soon.
Yelena knew this moment was possible. She planned for it from Moscow. She gathered intel for years, traced the financial threads, mapped the routines, documented the lieutenants. She gave everything she had to the man she trusted, and the man she trusted found me, and now I am standing on a boat in the Mississippi at dawn with her cross in my hand and her work in my head and her name in my chest.
For you, sestra.Sister. For you and for Papa and for Mama and for every girl in every basement who does not have someone standing on a river at dawn.
The earpiece crackles.
Marco.
“Front door breached. Two down. Three minutes to dining room.”
Three minutes.
I breathe.
The light is coming up at the edge of the trees and somewhere past the cane field and the oak alley there is a house, and in that house there is a dining room, and Nico is moving toward it right now, taped ribs and healing eyebrow and all of it, moving toward the man who killed Yelena while I stand here with her cross in my hand.
Come back. Come back. Come back.
I did not say it at the door this morning. I did not say it at the boat. I am saying it now, too late for him to hear it.
Come back and I will say it in English and in Russian and in every language Papa gave me. I will say it until he believes me. I will say it until I stop being afraid of what it costs to mean it.
The earpiece crackles.
Marco. Voice flat and steady.
“House clear. He’s alive. Bring her up.”
