Chapter 5
MILA
Maria’s knuckles tap the oak paneling twice.
“They’re ready downstairs, ma fille.”
I have been dressed since before the Louisiana sunrise split the shutters. The folding knife sits in my pocket, the metal cool against my thigh, and the rusted chain flat against my collarbone beneath my collar.
The dark green sweater Cassia left on my chair sits over my shoulders like armor.
I turn the lock and open the door.
Maria murmurs, “Let’s go, ma fille,” turning on her heel without waiting, and I follow the quiet slide of her slippers down the corridor.
Yelena would not recognize you.
You don’t get to be chosen. You get used and sent back. That is the whole shape of you.
The voice inside my head is awake early today. I keep my boots moving, my spine straight.
The kitchen sits at the far end of the service hall. Usually, I snatch the bread Nonna Rosa leaves out on the granite counter and keep moving, but today I pause because my hands want a second piece for Sofia.
Nonna is standing at the stove with her back to me, stirring the copper pan. She doesn’t turn around.
“You took two.”
“Sofia.” The name leaves my mouth before I can lock my jaw.
I close my hand around the warm loaf, squeezing until my fingers leave marks in the crust.
The copper pan doesn’t stop sliding over the flame.
“Bene fatto, cher,” Nonna says straight into the steam. Well done.
She doesn’t repeat the phrase, and she doesn’t make a fuss over the sound of my voice.
I walk out of the kitchen with the bread in my left hand.
Sestra moya, ya zhiva, I tell Yelena. I am alive. I am waiting.
Nico is waiting by the front door in a black tailored suit and white shirt, no tie. His right hand is in his pants pocket, his weight shifted back as he watches the hallway.
My thighs press tight together.
An ache blooms behind my pubic bone, a slow pulse of heat that dampens the cotton between my legs and catches in my throat. My mouth has gone dry. I am standing in a hallway with bread in my hand and he hasn’t looked at me yet and my body is already doing this.
I hate that my body is already doing this.
He turns his head.
His eyes find mine for half a second before he looks back at the hallway.
The ache sharpens.
Wanting is the leash. You know how this ends.
I press my spine against the wall. My eyes stay on his chest, the muscle straining against the linen where his shirt stays unbuttoned. He looks like a blade someone forgot to put away.
At Sunday dinner, I sat so close his body heat reached me across the table. When I put my hand on his sleeve, his pulse went hard under my fingers and his whole body went still. He wanted me.
It was the same hungry look I know from dangerous men, but he didn’t lurch into my space. He just stays on his side of the room, bleeding out in the dark, and the fact that he isn’t moving makes the heat in my belly worse.
He opens the rear door of the SUV for Sofia, and she slides onto the leather with her notebook pinned flat against her chest. He closes the door with a quiet click, walks around the back of the vehicle, and pulls the handle open for me.
I don’t drop into the backseat.
I walk right past the open door, my bare arm brushing the wool of his suit jacket, and stand directly against the front passenger window.
His hand lingers on the rear handle for one long beat, the tendons sharp in his wrist. Then he closes the back door quietly, steps into my space to open the front passenger side, and waits.
He doesn’t command me back into the shadows. He doesn’t say a word.
I slide into the front seat, my thighs tight against the leather, and close the door myself.
I touch the chain at my throat.
The bastards who took me took my skin. They never took the name.
Nico gets into the driver’s seat, the door slamming to seal us in. He adjusts the rearview mirror to track Sofia’s reflection, then shifts it again so my face is cut out of the glass.
His eyes don’t return to the mirror.
“You tell me if you want out,” he says, his voice a low, clipped baritone as he watches Sofia in the mirror. “We stop the vehicle. No questions asked.”
Sofia nods behind us.
His eyes shift to the side mirror, finding the reflection where the edge of my jaw sits against the glass.
His voice drops, rougher, heavier. “Ty tozhe.” You too.
Two words.
Heat drops low in my belly and my ribs let go a half-inch.
He turns the ignition, and the engine rumbles to life.
The iron gate of the compound rolls back, opening onto Magazine Street. Spanish moss hangs thick from the giant oak trees, casting shadows over the white-columned houses and the wide verandahs where wealthy women drink from porcelain cups.
From the backseat, I was always trapped behind the bulk of his shoulders. From the front, I am sitting beside his skin, and I can see the precise line of his thigh against the console, the dark hair curling at the hollow of his throat where his shirt opens.
He is looking straight at the asphalt and does not drop his eyes to my legs.
I want to reach across the leather and cover his hand with mine.
My fingers curl in my lap instead.
The line of his thigh against the console is right there. Six inches. The muscle is hard under the fabric and I know what his hands feel like from Sunday and I am sitting in the front seat of his car and the cotton between my legs is still damp from the hallway.
He turns the dial down without looking at me, and the cool air finds my throat before I’ve registered that I was warm. Nobody has done that for me in a very long time.
The tires crunch over the gravel as we pull into the long driveway of Casa Lucia. Two stories of old brick, heavy white columns, and the thick scent of jasmine and roses choking the porch.
Nico kills the engine, his fingers lingering on the steering wheel. “I wait here,” he says, his voice dropping low. “The whole time. Sofia knows the room.”
He keeps his eyes fixed on the center of the wheel, a tendon tightening at his temple.
I nod once, letting my gaze linger on the opening of his collar before I open the door and step out into the heat. I shove the bread deep into my pocket.
The main lobby has a framed photograph hanging on the back wall that I’ve walked past without looking. Today, I force my head to turn.
A woman with dark hair pinned back watches the room. She was beautiful her entire life. She isn’t performing a smile for the camera. She’s looking at whoever took the shot as if she chose him of her own free will.
The brass plaque beneath the glass reads Lucia Santoro. Founder.
Nico’s mother.
I stare into her gray eyes.
The jaw is his. The set of it — like she’s already decided and isn’t asking for agreement.
She looks happy.
Not performing happy. Actually happy. Like she built this place because she wanted to, not because someone told her to.
I haven’t seen that on a woman’s face in a long time.
Sofia tugs hard at my sweater sleeve, and I follow her down the quiet corridor.
The therapist meets us at the door of the group room, her voice practiced and soft. You can leave the room whenever you need to. You don’t have to speak.
I sit in the plastic chair beside Sofia. There are other women in the circle, their shoulders hunched in the same shape mine held in Bucharest. I listen to the noise of their sentences. I keep my lips locked.
When the session ends, Sofia and I walk back down the brick hallway. Giada is waiting outside the examination door, her scrubs sterile. Today is vitals.
“Mila. The chair, please.”
I step inside the small room, Sofia keeping vigil in the open doorway.
“Cold tip on your arm,” Giada narrates, her voice landing before her hands do. “Then the cuff. Then I’m going to look at your eyes.”
She names every movement before she delivers it. My muscles stay loose. I don’t flinch from her hands.
“That’s it. Your vitals are good. I’ll see you next week.
” She studies my face a beat longer than the chart requires, her dark eyes on my face, her mouth opening once before it closes again.
Her pen stays flat on the clipboard, and she lets the silence sit between us before she signs the bottom of the page.
In the corridor, Cassia passes us with a folder tucked under one arm, gives me the same half-step pause she uses in the compound hallway, and keeps walking.
Through a half-open office door, I catch Izzy sitting at a laptop. Her coffee mug rises a fraction of an inch in a silent toast before her fingers go right back to the keys.
The music room sits on our left as we walk back toward the main lobby. On other days I walked straight past. Today, I let my neck turn the full way.
An old violin rests on a wooden stand in the corner. Russian-made, the dark wood worn smooth.
My father bought me one just like it when my hands were small.
That girl is gone. You don’t get her back.
Papa is dead. Mama and Yelena are in Moscow.
I keep my boots moving, Sofia matching my pace. I don’t look back at the stand, but the image is already burned behind my eyelids.
I know the wood is there.
The drive back to the compound is silent. The sun has slipped past its high point, casting long, dark shadows across Magazine Street.
Nico doesn’t ask for a report. Not me, not Sofia.
I let my eyes track the line of his hand on the gearshift, the hard line of his thigh, the dark skin at his throat where the linen opens.
He hasn’t looked at me once on the drive home.
That is worse than being looked at.
My thighs are pressed together and have been since Magazine Street. The ache from the hallway this morning never fully went away. It sat there through the session, the vitals check, the whole drive back, patient and low and getting louder the longer he doesn’t look at me.
He knows I’m watching him.
His hand on the gearshift is too deliberate. A vein at his temple moves once. He’s holding himself the same way he held himself at the dinner table — like he decided not to move and is paying for it.
Good, I think. And I don’t take it back.
The SUV stops at the front porch. I open the door and get out, my boots hitting the stone. I walk toward the entrance without looking back at the glass, but I pause for one long beat with my hand resting on the brass knob.
I want him to know I’m still here. I want him to know I felt his eyes on my back for the entire walk.
I turn the knob and step inside.
Behind the closed door of my room, I pull the bread from my pocket and eat half of the loaf slowly, forcing myself to taste the chicory on my tongue.
I sit in the armchair under the tea-colored window and open the pale blue Tsvetaeva volume Cassia left on the shelf.
“Mne nravitsya, chto vy bol’ny ne mnoy.” I like that you are sick, but not for me.
I read it again. I am already sick for him and have been since the hallway this morning.
I read the Cyrillic text, then the English translation on the facing page, then the Russian lines again until the words blur. The cloth binding is warm where my palms have been resting against the spine.
It has been five years since my hands held poetry.
Sestra moya, ya zhiva. Ya zhdu. My sister, I am alive. I am waiting.
I turn the page to the next poem.
The old voice in my head has gone quiet.