Page 33 of The Mad Don
I push the door open, and the room is shadowed. There is a four-poster bed against the far wall, and a figure in it, propped against pillows, one hand stretched toward a glass of water on the bedside table which has slid too far for it to reach.
It’s a woman. She looks young, maybe my age, maybe younger. She is so thin that the bones of her wrist look like they are about to come through the skin. Her face is the color of paper. Her hair has been brushed by someone who cared, but the woman herself looks like she has not stood up in days.
She turns her face toward me when I step in. Her eyes are large in her thin face. They are dark brown with a gold tint in the iris.
I know those eyes.
From where?
I stop in the middle of the room.
“The water,” she says. “Please. I can’t reach.”
I go to the bedside. I pick up the glass, and I hold it for her, my hand under hers because her hand alone is not steady enough.She drinks in small sips. Some of the water runs down her chin, and she does not seem to notice. She finishes and sinks back against the pillows.
“Thank you.”
I set the glass down, but I don’t move from the bedside.
“Who are you?” I ask.
She smiles weakly. “Lucia.”
The name means nothing to me. I look at her. I look at the thin wrists and the pale skin and the careful way she is holding the side of her body as if something underneath the blanket hurts.
And my heart skips as I think of Christov.
The thought arrives out of nowhere. The image of him I do not have because I have not seen him since he was ten, but an image my mind constructs anyway, of a thin boy in a dim room in a house somewhere far from anything he knows, waiting for someone to bring him water. The grainy photograph in Kirill’s file. The line of a jaw I half-recognize.
I steady myself and snap out of it.
“Are you a prisoner here?” I ask. My voice is more careful than I mean it to be.
Lucia’s eyes widen slightly. Then she laughs. It is a small, thin laugh that turns into a cough, and she presses her hand to her chest until it stops.
“No,” she says. “No. I’m — I’m sick. I’ve been sick for a long time.”
I look around the dim room. The drawn curtains. The closed window. The cup of water is just out of reach.
“This room is making it worse,” I say. “You should have light and some air.”
She shakes her head. “He says the light hurts my eyes during the bad days. He’s — He wants me comfortable.”
He? Giovanni?
“Who looks after you?”
She opens her mouth to respond, but a voice from the corridor cuts across the room.
“Who is in there?”
It is loud and sharp. A man’s voice I do not know. I tense up, and Lucia’s whole face changes.
It happens in less than a second. The weak smile is gone. Her eyes have gone wide and dark, and the present is leaving them, the way I once watched my brother’s eyes leave during a fever. She is looking past me, but it’s almost like she is not in this room anymore.
“Giovanni,” she whispers.
I freeze, and she grabs my wrist. Her grip is shocking, much stronger than her body should allow, the wiry grip of someone whose body has learned to summon strength for one purpose only.
