Page 95 of Crowned in Sin
"You want to know something?" he says, low, almost gentle now, a calm that means he's about to hurt someone. "I built all of it. Harry. Bianca. Seven years of keeping your mother sick just enough to keep you coming back. And the last few weeks, pointing you at your father's own files, letting you find just enough truth to blow your whole marriage up yourself." He leans in close enough that I can smell coffee on his breath. "Didn't even have to push you, Lyddie. Just had to open the door. You walked through it all on your own."
Something in my chest goes hollow and cold, and for a second my legs go weak under me.
He gets the cord tight, checks it once with a cop's hands, and turns me toward the door.
"Let's go home," he says.
The last thing I register, before the front door of the house that raised me swings shut behind us both, is the click of the latch.A gun at my back. And no one in the entire world who knows where I am.
35
NICO
The coffee wentcold two hours ago and I still haven't touched it.
I sit behind the desk with a stack of shipping manifests I haven't read a word of, and I tell myself the same thing I told myself at six this morning. She needs space. Give her the room. Don't make it worse.
It's a good lie. I've built worse ones out of less.
I can't stop seeing last night. Her voice breaking apart under me. The sound she made after, small and wrecked, coming through the bathroom door while I stood on the other side of it with my hand raised and never knocked. I told myself I was protecting her from more of me. The truth is simpler and uglier. I was a coward standing in a hallway, and I let her cry alone rather than look at what I'd done to her face.
I've killed men for less cowardice than that.
The manifests blur. I read the same line four times. Somewhere in the house a door closes and footsteps cross a floor above me.Every one of them isn't hers. I've been listening for her step since sunrise, the same old instinct that used to have me listening for gunfire. My whole body pointed at a door she isn't behind.
Give her the room, I tell myself again.
I don't move. That's the thing nobody tells you about guilt this heavy. It doesn't make you run. It keeps you standing exactly where you are and lets you believe that's respect.
Marco knocks at seven with a question about the Brooklyn shipment and I answer him without hearing a word he says. He leaves. I don't remember him leaving. I sit with my hands flat on the desk like I'm holding it down, like the whole house might tip if I let go. Somewhere under that stillness is a boy standing in a hallway with a knife in his hand, eleven years old, told to be still, told stillness was obedience and obedience was love. I learned the lesson too well. I've been practicing it on her all morning without even calling it by its name.
I pour the coffee out at some point and pour a fresh cup I also don't drink. Small rituals to convince myself I'm doing something other than waiting for a version of today where I didn't fail her last night.
The light on the far wall crawls from one bookshelf to the next. That's how I mark the morning going, not by a clock, by a rectangle of sun sliding slow across old spines. Ten. Eleven. Some hour past that. I text her once.Piccola. Nothing else. I don't know what else I'm allowed to say to her right now. No reply comes, and I tell myself that's space too. That's her taking what I promised to give her. I sit there and let the silence do the work guilt usually does.
Somewhere past noon a thought finally cuts through the paralysis.
I haven't seen her at all today.
Not once today. I haven't passed her in a hallway, heard her voice down the stairwell telling Giorgia she wants eggs, or caught the water running in her bathroom. Nothing. A whole morning of a house with my wife in it and I haven't laid eyes on her a single time.
I stand up so fast the chair skids back and cracks against the wall.
I go up the stairs two at a time, and I tell myself this is nothing. I'm only going to see her, that's all. I'm not going to say anything. I just need to see her face and know she's still in this house and still mine to fail correctly tomorrow.
Her door's open. The bed's made, too made, made like nobody slept in it and pretended otherwise. Her closet's got gaps in it I recognize before I understand them, a coat missing, the good boots gone, the small bag she keeps for overnight things not on its hook.
My stomach drops through the floor.
"Piccola?"
The word comes out wrong, too big for the empty room, and nothing answers it.
I check the bathroom, the sitting room down the hall with the window seat she likes, the kitchen, the garden, and the car she almost never drives, standing exactly where it always stands. Nothing. I take the stairs down two at a time and I'm shouting her name now, not asking. My chest is tight enough to hurt.
Giorgia's in the kitchen, drying a glass that's already dry.
"Where's Lydia."
