Chapter 16
NICO
The coffee on my desk has been cold since Nonna made it.
The household is slow this morning, hungover and quiet in the way a house gets after a night that cost something good.
Through the study window before dawn I watched Dante walk Cassia through the garden, his hand at the small of her back and her hand on her belly, moving slow, the way people move when they are trying to make a moment last.
I sat at the desk and watched them and thought about a woman three doors down who left her door open last night and stayed on her side of it.
The door was open.
She didn’t come through.
I sit with that.
Cassia stops at my study door on her way to the kitchen.
Silk robe. The bump full under it. Folder under her arm, printout in her left hand, the intake board for Casa Lucia already running because Cassia has never in her life waited for the day to start.
“He’s not here.”
“Who.”
“Andrei Volin. Reception. I removed him on Friday. Quietly. The new man started this morning. Marco vetted him. The clinic doesn’t feel the change.”
“And the Naples thread.”
“Izzy is on it. The sister is alive. The family that took her has been paid by us through a shell that doesn’t have our name on it. She’ll be on a flight to New Orleans this week. Andrei won’t know we paid. He’ll know his sister has been moved because of him.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“You didn’t need to be asked. You needed it done. I did it.”
“Cassia.”
“Nico.”
Her mouth curves. Her eyes don’t.
“Drink the coffee.”
She turns. Calls back over her shoulder.
“And Nico. Whatever you’re sitting there carrying, it has a face today or it doesn’t. Either way you’re going to have to look at it.”
She’s past before I can answer.
I stay at the desk.
She can’t know. She’s talking about the clinic, the surveillance, the operational picture. That’s all she meant.
I sit with the coffee going cold in front of me and the library door open across the antechamber and a woman on the other side of it and I think about what it means that I wanted her to come.
The library door has been open all my life.
Cassia’s library on one side of the antechamber. My study on the other. The doors between them open since I was a boy doing homework at this desk while Papa worked in the study beyond and Mama read in the chair by the window and the household moved around all of them like water around stone.
Mila is in the chair by the window.
The Tsvetaeva-in-translation Cassia left her is open on her lap. Her left hand is on the page. Her right is on the arm of the chair. Her hair is down. She is wearing the sweater that is not hers and the chain at her throat catches the morning light when she shifts.
She hasn’t looked up.
I don’t move.
I sit at my desk across the antechamber and I watch her read and I think about how I have been watching her read and watching her eat and watching her exist in this house for weeks.
I’m going to lose her.
Not today. Not yet. But I am carrying something that is going to cost me her. I sit here and watch her read and I do not let myself name it.
The day moves.
I take a call from New York. Draft a letter. Eat the sandwich Nonna puts in front of me in the kitchen without tasting it.
The library door stays open.
She sets the Tsvetaeva down and looks out the window at the garden for a long time with her chin in her hand. The light moves across the floor in the afternoon, the slant off the magnolia that Mama used to say was the house breathing.
I go back to the desk. The Pushkin is still closed where I left it this morning. The library door is open across the antechamber and I should cross it and I sit here instead.
I sit at the desk until the light through the windows has gone weak-tea pale and I have run out of reasons not to go, and then I stand and walk through the antechamber and stop in the library doorway.
She looks up when I come in.
She has closed the book with her finger marking the page. The dress from last night is folded on the chair by the window. She hasn’t put it away.
She looks at me and then she stands, and the breath goes right out of me and doesn’t come back, my hands at my sides and my chest gone tight and silent.
She crosses the room.
Library floor between the chair by the window and the doorway where I’m standing. She covers it in steady steps. She stops one step short of me.
She looks up at me.
Her eyes are gray-green in the evening light. The chain moves at her throat.
She lifts her right hand and puts it flat against my chest.
The hand stays there.
My heart is slamming against my ribs hard enough she has to feel it through the fabric. I hold. I hold everything I have. My hands at my sides. My breath even. Every muscle locked.
She rises onto her toes and her mouth finds mine.
For a breath I don’t move.
A full breath with her mouth soft against mine and my hands at my sides and my jaw locked against it, because if I move I’m going to pull her against me and feel every line of her through that dress and I cannot do that here, not like this, not when I am standing in a library with a woman who came out of a Benedetti basement and chose me to trust with the slow work of becoming herself again.
Then my right hand comes up to the back of her head and I kiss her back.
She exhales against my mouth when my hand hits her hair. Slow, thorough, hers. The kind of kiss that says everything I have not been allowed to say. All of it. Every week of it, going in because there is nowhere else for it to go.
She makes a sound against my mouth.
Small. Surprised. Her hips shift into me without her meaning them to, just a fraction, involuntary. She is warm and pressed against my chest and her pulse is jumping at her throat.
Cristo.
My left hand stays at my side. My cock is hard against the seam of my pants and my pulse is in my ears and she is pressed against me with her hand warm through my shirt and I give her everything I have, every restrained hungry careful inch of what I have been carrying, and I do not take a single thing she hasn’t offered.
She pulls back first.
I let her.
I keep my right hand at the back of her head for one beat after she pulls away.
Then I move it to her shoulder.
Then I drop it.
One step back. The same step she gave me.
My hands are shaking and my breath comes wrong and I stand here and I let her see exactly what she just did to me because she earned the right to know.
She looks at me.
Her mouth is swollen. Her breathing is uneven. A flush has climbed her throat, heat high on her cheekbones. Her hand goes briefly to her lips, the tips of her fingers touching the place my mouth just was.
No words.
There are none I’m allowed to say yet.
Cassia walks past the open library door.
Phone to her ear, folder under her arm, the intake board for tomorrow.
She sees us.
Her step doesn’t change. Her head doesn’t turn. Phone, quiet: “Yes. Thursday is fine. I’ll be there.”
She is past.
The household knows without being told. It has always known, and it was always going to know. Everyone has been watching me since I carried her out of a Benedetti basement and it has been patient with me. The way it is patient with everything I don’t say out loud.
Neither of us speaks.
Mila turns.
She walks toward the door of the library.
At the threshold she stops.
Her back stays to me. The chain at her throat catches the last of the evening light. Her left hand rises and her fingers brush the wood of the doorframe.
She walks out.
And then, into the hallway, without turning her head, without knowing she is doing it.
She hums.
I go still.
Three bars. Four. The intervals are Russian. The third bar bends into the fourth. The same bend it had in the safehouse in Moscow when the wine was bad and the bulb was yellow and the woman across the table from me had decided to be drunk for the first and last time in my presence.
The woman across the table from me who was days from being dead.
The melody surfaces all the way.
Tonkaya Ryabina.
The slender rowan tree.
I have heard this melody once in my life.
Mila’s footsteps go quiet at the end of the hallway.
The house is silent.
I stand in the library doorway with my hand on the frame and the melody in my ear and the taste of her mouth still on mine and I think.
No.
No. It cannot be.
I go to my desk. I pick up the phone.
Izzy picks up on the first ring.
“I need a photograph,” I say. “Zakharov household. Saint Petersburg. Dmitri Zakharov, Bratva Pakhan, died approximately nine to ten years ago. His daughters. Both of them. Whatever you can pull from the intelligence files. Family photograph, surveillance, anything with faces.”
Silence on the line.
“Nico.”
“I know.”
“That’s the Zakharova bratva file.”
“I know what file it is.”
Another silence. Shorter.
“Why now.”
I watch the hallway where Mila’s footsteps went quiet.
“Three years ago I came home from Moscow and I told Dante the mission failed. I decided the younger sister was dead. Easier to carry dead than missing. Dead means the promise ended with Yelena. Dead means I didn’t spend three years failing a fifteen-year-old girl who got sold by her stepfather while I was sitting in New Orleans running protection rackets and eating Nonna’s food.
I stopped looking. I need to know if I was wrong to stop. ”
The silence on Izzy’s end is the longest she has ever given me.
“Nico.” Her voice is careful and quiet and full of something she is not going to say out loud. “How wrong do you think you were.”
I close my eyes.
“Send me the photograph, Iz.”
“Tonight,” she says. “Give me two hours.”
I hang up.
I sit at the desk.
I wait.
The photograph comes through at eleven.
The house is asleep. The kitchen light is on at its lowest. Somewhere upstairs a door is open. Hers or mine, I can’t tell from here, and I don’t go to check.
I open the photograph on my phone.
A family photograph. The kind that ends up in Bratva intelligence files when an organization is building a picture of a Pakhan’s household. A sitting room somewhere in Saint Petersburg. Formal. Backs straight, smiling, everything they are in every line of their bodies.
Dmitri Zakharov in the center.
A woman beside him I don’t recognize. The mother. She is smiling. So is he.
And the daughters.
Yelena on the left. Dark hair, sharp jaw, the eyes I watched go flat in a Moscow basement while a man who called himself her stepfather put a blade to her throat. I have been carrying her face for three years. I would know it anywhere.
My eyes move to the girl beside her.
Younger. Smaller. Blonde hair down. Gray-green eyes that are Yelena’s eyes in a softer face, a face that hasn’t learned yet what the world is going to ask of it.
A mouth I had against mine tonight.
No.
I set the phone down and my palms go flat on the desk and then I pick it up again and set it down again.
No. It is not her. It cannot be her. This is a girl in a photograph from Saint Petersburg and the woman upstairs is a woman I pulled out of a Benedetti basement in New Orleans and there are thousands of Russian women with gray-green eyes and this is not.
I pick up the phone.
The gray-green eyes look back at me.
She is dead. I decided she was dead.
I came home from Moscow and I sat in Dante’s office and I said the mission failed and I put her in the ground in my head.
Because dead means the promise ended with Yelena.
Because dead means I don’t have to carry three years of failing a fifteen-year-old girl who got sold while I was here. Easier. Cleaner.
I decided she was dead so I wouldn’t have to know she wasn’t.
The girl in the photograph has a mouth I just kissed.
She has been sleeping a few doors down from me for weeks.
She has been in my car every week.
She counted in Russian when she was afraid.
I have refused to run this for weeks. I run it now.
Every detail clicks. The eyes. The accent.
The timeline. The age. The network. The conservatory training from the one city in Russia that takes it seriously, and it is the city this photograph was taken in.
There is no version of this where the girl in the photograph is not the woman upstairs.
Milochka.
She is Milochka.
I stopped looking for her three years ago.
I told myself she was dead because it was easier than carrying a promise I couldn’t keep.
And she walked into my basement. And I drove her to therapy every week.
Tonight she put her mouth on mine and walked out of my library humming her dead sister’s song without knowing I was listening.
Yelena spent her last breath on her name.
I buried it.
She found me anyway.
I set the phone down on the desk face-down.
I put both hands flat on the wood and I stay there a long time, breathing.
Then I pick up the phone.
I look at the photograph one more time.
Yelena on the left. The girl beside her.
Mi dispiace. I'm sorry.
To both of them. I don’t know which one I mean more.
I have to be sure.
I am already sure.