Page 77 of Ruthless Sin
One step back. The same step she gave me.
My hands are shaking and my breath comes wrong and I stand here and I let her see exactly what she just did to me because she earned the right to know.
She looks at me.
Her mouth is swollen. Her breathing is uneven. A flush has climbed her throat, heat high on her cheekbones. Her hand goes briefly to her lips, the tips of her fingers touching the place my mouth just was.
No words.
There are none I’m allowed to say yet.
Cassia walks past the open library door.
Phone to her ear, folder under her arm, the intake board for tomorrow.
She sees us.
Her step doesn’t change. Her head doesn’t turn. Phone, quiet: “Yes. Thursday is fine. I’ll be there.”
She is past.
The household knows without being told. It has always known, and it was always going to know. Everyone has been watching me since I carried her out of a Benedetti basement and it has been patient with me. The way it is patient with everything I don’t say out loud.
Neither of us speaks.
Mila turns.
She walks toward the door of the library.
At the threshold she stops.
Her back stays to me. The chain at her throat catches the last of the evening light. Her left hand rises and her fingers brush the wood of the doorframe.
She walks out.
And then, into the hallway, without turning her head, without knowing she is doing it.
She hums.
I go still.
Three bars. Four. The intervals are Russian. The third bar bends into the fourth. The same bend it had in the safehouse in Moscow when the wine was bad and the bulb was yellow and the woman across the table from me had decided to be drunk for the first and last time in my presence.
The woman across the table from me who was days from being dead.
The melody surfaces all the way.
Tonkaya Ryabina.
The slender rowan tree.
I have heard this melody once in my life.
Mila’s footsteps go quiet at the end of the hallway.
The house is silent.
I stand in the library doorway with my hand on the frame and the melody in my ear and the taste of her mouth still on mine and I think.
