Page 49 of The Mad Don
“I see.”
“Prepare. We leave Friday.”
She nods, but she doesn’t go.
I wait.
“And my proposal,” she asks, “about your sister.”
Chapter Twelve
Yana
“Don’t push your luck.”
He says it without raising his voice.
He is leaning against the edge of the desk with his back to the light. His shirt is still open at the throat. The collar is pulled crooked. The cuff is dark with the blood from his hand. The cut has stopped bleeding, but he has not bandaged it.
I let my eyes move over him.
I do not mean to, but I look over at him anyway, and I get lost in it. The line of his shoulder. The tendon at the side of his neck. The snake at his collarbone, the head of it visible now that the shirt has shifted, the body disappearing down into the fabric I have not yet seen. My chest is warm, my pulse is in the side of my throat, I am still standing where I have stood for the last ten minutes, and I have not been able to make myself leave.
I look away, and I force myself to think about Lucia. She has been on my mind since our last encounter, and my gut hasn’t rested.
She was in bed and could not lift a glass of water without dropping it. She is the same woman standing up off that bed with a strength her body has no business holding, pushing me behind her, screaming at the door. I think about her again, three days ago, on her feet, shoving him off balance hard enough that he went down on his hip.
I have seen what dying looks like. Lucia is not far from it on a bad day. And yet on a bad day, she produces a kind of strength that does not match the body she is in.
That is not natural.
Sickness does not work that way. Bodies do not work that way. A woman who cannot reach for a glass should not be able to manhandle a Don to the floor. Something is wrong with her, yes. But underneath the wrong, there is something else wrong. Something on top of the illness. It’s something unnatural. I have no proof, just my gut.
He is watching me, and I look back at him.
He walks past me to the door. He closes it. He turns the key.
I hear it click.
“What are you doing?”
He does not answer me. He walks back to me, and as he walks, he unbuttons one button at the top of his shirt that was already open, and then the next, and then the one below it. His fingers are unhurried. By the time he reaches me, his shirt is open down to the middle of his chest.
The snake.
It comes down out of the collar of his shirt and curves across the muscle of his pectoral and disappears under the fabric on the other side. Its detail is fine. Its body has scales drawn in. The eye, just below his collarbone, is open and watching.
But beneath it are scars, dried-up old scars. I stare at it.
“What are you doing?”
His hand finds my wrist, and he pulls. I do not let myself be pulled, but he is stronger than he is fair, and he closes the half pace between us anyway, and I am suddenly very close to him.
I can feel his breath on my face.
I can feel my heart against my own ribs.
I am reminded again of what his fingers did inside me. I think of his mouth on my skin. I think of the gag of my own underwearpressed between my teeth and the helpless sound that came out of me anyway. I think of the smell of him because the smell of him is in the air right now, and my body is not asking my brain for permission to recognize it.
