Chapter 1
NICO
Mama’s solid silver cufflinks catch the low light before I drop them into the porcelain dish on my dresser, the silver hitting the porcelain with a click.
Papa pressed the metal into my palm the morning after we buried her, his eyes flat, the muscle in his jaw working once before he turned his back on me without a word.
I strip them off the same way every night and don’t look at them.
The watch stays on my wrist because I need the weight.
Dante looked at me twice across the dining room table tonight, once over the wine and once when Nonna brought the second course, and neither time did he blink.
Gia tracked me longer than that, her fork pausing twice over her plate and her eyes never leaving my face when I reached for the salt. My jaw locks.
But it was Renzo who let the word Moscow slip out loud during the second course, dropping it onto the linen tablecloth like it was any other city.
I just smiled at him until the plates were cleared.
The house is quiet now, but the New Orleans humidity sits on my skin, making my shirt stick to the raw skin of my back.
Maria took Mila a plate hours ago, and carried it back down to the kitchen untouched, same as last Sunday, and the Sunday before that.
The chair is set anyway. Silver fork, crystal glass, Nonna’s napkin folded into its sharp unforgiving lines.
We set it in the dark. We always set it.
I grab the leather-bound volume of Akhmatova poetry from my nightstand, the spine already cracked at the same three pages, my thumb finding them without looking.
I walk back to the central wing.
The hallway is a long stretch of silence, the doors closed against the dark while the scent of night-blooming jasmine drifts through the open window at the end of the corridor. It sits thick on top of the Louisiana heat, sweet and toxic.
Sofia’s door is second from the right, dark and silent under the frame. Izzy has been living inside her shadow since we raided the Benedetti basement, and she’s only downstairs tonight because Renzo practically forced her to take a breath.
Sofia is finally asleep.
Mila’s door is third from the left, closed like a vault.
I stop directly outside the dark oak paneling, my pulse kicking up hard against my ribs.
I slide down the wall until I’m sitting flat on the floor, my back pressed against the plaster and my knees bent, the book resting open in my lap.
I stay still enough that she won’t see the shadows change, and close enough to hear her move if she does.
She hasn’t moved yet.
I read the Cyrillic characters, letting my voice drop into a low murmur that scrapes straight through the wood.
“Ya ne proshu tvoey lyubvi.” I don’t ask for your love.
The door stays locked.
It always does.
For weeks she has been living in this house and I have spent my midnights glued to this patch of floor, reading to a solid block of oak while she refuses to give me a single fucking word.
My hand finds the same split leather spine, my weight settling into the same patch of floor, my spine against the plaster.
I turn the page, the paper whispering in the quiet hall.
The cicadas are screaming out in the oaks, the jasmine turning heavy enough to choke, and my shirt sticks to my back while I force myself to stay perfectly still.
I keep reading to her.
Speaking Russian pulls at something behind my sternum that I can’t close back up.
I learned this language for one woman, and now the cadence of it tastes like the room she died in.
Don’t.
My hand goes flat against the wall behind me, my palm pressed to the plaster. I press harder, forcing my knuckles to feel the rigid wood frame underneath.
Plaster, plaster, plaster.
Not concrete.
This is not concrete.
My wrists are zip-tied to the chair. Concrete at my back. Concrete under my boots. One bulb on a wire above me, swinging in a draft I can’t find.
Yelena six feet across from me, the blood at her temple still wet. Her chin is up. She isn’t looking at Alexei. She is looking at me. She is humming through the knife at her throat and her eyes are—
Stop.
I pull my hand off the wall, shoving my fingers hard into the denim of my thigh until the tremor stops. I count thirty breaths through my teeth before I trust the plaster again.
Then I do.
The hallway is dead quiet.
There’s just the ragged drag of my own lungs and the jasmine drifting in through the glass like it has nowhere else to be.
I don’t know if she is listening to the poetry.
Don’t know if she is even awake in the dark.
Then I catch a sound from the other side of the oak panel.
The floorboard creaks, a weight shift that tells me she’s moved from the edge of the mattress to the floor, her bare feet sliding over the wood until she’s standing directly against the other side of the door.
She is on the other side of the wood.
She moved closer.
Cristo.
Heat drops straight into my gut, my fingers tightening against the pages until the paper wrinkles.
I want to put my hands on her so badly my palms itch with it, want to rip the door off its hinges and see if her eyes are still as wild as the night I took her.
My jaw goes tight. Every muscle I have locks down at once.
I stay still with my back pressed into the wall, and she doesn’t move away from the wood.
My voice goes rough on the first word of the next line and I have to start it again from the top.
She did not attack me when we broke into that black-site basement, even though the med tech who tried to check her vitals took a wooden chair straight to the teeth.
But the second I stepped into her line of sight, her feral glare dropped, and she let me carry her out without a fight.
Her slender arms wrapped tight around my neck, her wet face pressed directly into my shoulder, clinging to my shirt as if I were the only solid object left in hell.
I don’t know why she trusted my touch.
I am not going to ask her. Asking won’t get her to tell me because she won’t even open the fucking lock.
Giada checks the medical chart. The chart doesn’t tell us anything we couldn’t see with our eyes.
She has not given us her last name, and she has not given us a single syllable.
I carried her out of the Benedetti basement when the others had to be guided, and she walked into this house, locked herself away, and has not said one word.
At dinner I watched Marco’s bloody shirt and Cassia laughing into her water glass and slid the salt across the mahogany before Marco reached for it.
Nonna asked if I was hungry, and I told her no.
Giada asked if I was sleeping, and I lied and said yes.
Renzo said he’d been hearing that same script since Moscow, and I just looked at him and told him Moscow was three years ago, and I’m over it.
The smile held. The smile always holds.
I do not have to perform for a closed door.
I read another line of Akhmatova, my voice dropping an octave, dragging through the oak until my hands go stiff around the spine.
On the other side of the wood is a woman I dragged out of a cage, and the thought of leaving her alone makes my knuckles itch.
I don’t know what the hell else to do.
I finish the poem, close the book, and wait.
She gives me nothing more than that single floor-creak from earlier, but tonight, that tiny shift of her weight against the door is more than I have gotten since she arrived.
I stand up, my lower back aching and my knees stiff from the concrete-hard floor.
The book goes under my arm, and I walk back down the corridor to my room.
I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the empty wall.
Stop.
I stand, walk out, and head down the dark stairs.
The estate is dead quiet, everyone asleep or pretending to be.
The kitchen light is on.
Nonna.
Of course.
She is at the sink, her silk robe cinched tight at her waist and her hair wrapped, slowly drying the last of the plates Maria washed hours ago. She doesn’t look up when my bare feet hit the tile.
“Took you long enough to come back downstairs, cher.”
“Didn’t know you were waiting.”
“I wasn’t.”
She sets the plate in the rack, dries her hands on the towel, and pours coffee from the copper pot on the stove. Chicory. Bitter. The blend Mama used to make before mass.
She slides the ceramic cup across the granite toward me.
I sit down.
Don’t drink it, just wrap both hands around the ceramic to let the heat sink into my palms.
“You gonna tell me what you were doing up there?” she asks.
“Reading.”
“To yourself?”
“To the door.”
She doesn’t react, just picks up another plate.
“She hear you?”
“Don’t know.”
“You ask?”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“She doesn’t talk.”
She sets the plate in the rack and picks up the next one.
“Doesn’t mean she doesn’t hear.”
I don’t answer.
Nonna sets the plate down, turning her sharp gaze straight onto my face.
“How long you been doing this, Niccolò?”
The coffee is going cold in my hands. She used my full name the way Mama said it when she was pulling truth out of me I didn’t want to give.
Three years since Moscow, since I came back wrong.
Years of closed doors, of smiling through Sunday dinners while my family pretends they aren’t watching me for cracks.
“A while.”
“Every night?”
“Most.”
“Dante know?”
“He assigned me to help her acclimate.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I don’t answer her.
She pours herself a cup and sits across from me, wrapping her hands around the ceramic. She looks at my bare wrist instead of my face.
“You came back from Moscow wrong, cher. Don’t think for one second I didn’t notice.”
The kitchen has always been this size, but tonight it feels too small to breathe in.
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. I drop my eyes to the coffee, my throat closing up tight.
“I’m fine.”
“No,” she says, her voice quiet and unyielding. “You’re not.”
I should say something to defend the lie.
She’s right, and we both fucking know it.
Three years of this shit. The mask at dinner and the cufflinks I can’t throw into the river. The whole house has been watching me perform.
I thought I was getting away with it.
Cazzo.
She stands, rinses her cup, and sets it in the rack.
Walks to the doorway and stops, her back to me.
“That girl upstairs?” she says, her voice dropping into the quiet room. “She’s hiding too. You see that, don’t you.”
I don’t answer.
“You don’t have to,” Nonna says. “Takes one to know one.”
She leaves.
The cicadas have gone quiet, the air dead, and the jasmine thick on top of it.
Somewhere on the third floor a floorboard creaks. Maria, probably, not making it all the way back to bed.
I sit at the table.
The coffee is cold.
I drink it anyway.
Renzo dropped Moscow at dinner, flat and empty, like it was nothing.
I set the cup down.
The wood of the table is warm where my hand has been on it.
I should get up, go back upstairs, and try to sleep, but the bed is three rooms away and my body will not move toward it.
I can sit at this table or I can sit outside her door, but the bed is where I have to stop moving. Where I have to be still, and where the second I close my eyes, I’m back in the chair, watching Yelena’s blood spread patient across the concrete while she hums through the knife.
Stop.
I do not get up.