Page 186 of Ruthless Sin
“She won’t be able to look at me,” he says, and there is something in his voice now that was not there before — the faintest edge of something that is not certainty. He is trying to convince himself as much as me. “She has never been able to. Even as a child she — “
He finds what he is looking for. The patience settling back into place, the calculation completing, the man deciding which knife to pick up next.
“You know what you did, don’t you.” Not a question. The voice of a man reading a room. “Yelena was safe. Years of safe. Unhappy, yes. Compromised, yes. But alive, and mine to manage, and not a problem I had to solve.” He lets that land. “Then you came. A man from New Orleans with a family name and a clean suit and a promise she wanted to believe. You put the idea in her head that she could leave. That someone from outside would come and take them all away and she would be free.” A pause. One word at a time. “She moved because of you. She died because you made her hope.”
My jaw is tight because he is not wrong and we both know it.
“You know our world, Nico. You have been in it since you were a child. You know what it costs to move against a Pakhan. You knew it in Moscow and you offered her the deal anyway because you wanted the intelligence and you were willing to spend her life to get it.” His voice drops quieter. “You didn’t save her. You used her. I just finished the job.”
That’s not?—
It is partly true and I know it is partly true and I have been living inside the partly-true version for years and I cannot fullyargue with it and he knows I cannot fully argue with it and that is exactly why he said it.
“And now.” He tilts his head toward the door. “You’ve done it again. Another Zakharov girl. Another promise of safety from a man who lives in violence and calls it protection.” The voice is almost gentle. Almost regretful. “She is going to die because of you. The same way her sister died because of you. You walk into women’s lives and you light them on fire and you call it love.”
The room goes white.
Not the walls. Behind my eyes. Everything I have been holding since the concrete room, everything I buried and carried and performed over for years, and it has been waiting for exactly this sentence, this man’s mouth on her name.
I am around the table before I have decided to move.
My fist connects with his face and the operator at the corner is still turning when I hit him again. The crack of it. His head snapping left. The chair scraping back. Blood at his mouth immediately, the split lip opening fast, and I hit him again before he can turn back, this one at his eye socket, and he goes the other way and the chair nearly goes over.
“Nico.”
Marco’s voice in the doorway. Flat. Not a warning. A fact.
I don’t stop.
My hand in the collar of the silk robe, his face level with mine, the blood from his mouth on my knuckles, and I am going to keep going until there is nothing left of this face, until the voice that has been living in the back of my throat for years goes quiet, until I have taken back every single thing this man took from Yelena and from Mila and from me in a concrete room in Moscow while I was held down and made to watch?—
Marco’s hand on my arm. Hard. Pulling.
“Nico.She’s here.”
Two words.
I stop.
My chest is heaving. My knuckles are split and wet. Alexei’s head hangs forward, blood dripping from his chin onto the silk robe, one eye already swelling shut. He is breathing. Alive. He has to stay alive for Mila.
Marco pulls me back another step. I let him.
I straighten. I roll my shoulder. I look at my hand, the blood there, his not mine, and I close my fist and open it and close it again and breathe until the white recedes and the room comes back and I am the Consigliere again, or near enough.
I turn my head toward the door.
The gravel outside. The oak alley. The cadence of boots I have memorized in the compound hallways, late at night, coming to find me.
Then her. The soap from the compound. The faint warmth of her reaching me before she crosses the threshold, the smell I have been falling asleep beside for weeks, and everything in me goes quiet the way it only goes quiet for her.
All of it, the blood on my hand, the white behind my eyes, Alexei’s voice and the years it has lived in me, goes still.
She is here.
36
MILA
