Chapter 27
MILA
The kitchen is dark when I come down, but Nonna is already at the stove, the household pot going, the smell of coffee reaching me before I've cleared the last stair.
The thermos is on the counter. I’m in my own clothes for the first time in days. The cream sweater Cassia bought me. The chain at my throat under the collar. The folding knife in my pocket. The Tsvetaeva-in-translation folded inside my sweater against my ribs.
Nonna doesn’t turn. “Eat the bread, ma chère. You’re going. Eat the bread anyway.”
I eat half.
Oksana’s day. The shower she made everyone promise to attend in the music room weeks ago. You have to show up. Yes? Yes.
“Pronta, ma fille?”. Ready, my girl?.
I nod. She turns. Sets the thermos in my hand. Squeezes my wrist once.
“Nico is at the SUV. You ready or not, cher, he’s been waiting since before dawn.”
The first time anyone has said his name to me in the kitchen since the morning he told me.
I don’t answer. I walk to the side door.
The SUV is at the front of the compound. Nico is at the driver’s door. Black shirt. Black pants. He hasn’t slept. I can tell because his jaw is tight. He opens the back door for Sofia. Sofia is already there. Notebook against her chest. Hair pulled back. The dress Maria’s daughter wore.
He opens the front passenger door for me. He doesn’t look at me. His jaw stays locked. He is close enough that his sleeve brushes the door frame, close enough I could reach out and touch his wrist.
I don’t. The space between us holds.
I get in. He closes my door. Walks around. Gets in.
The SUV smells of leather and his cologne. He starts the engine. The compound gate opens. The guard at the gate is one of the new men Marco brought in. He looks at the SUV. Looks at Nico. Nods. Looks at me. Doesn’t smile.
The gate closes. We pull onto Magazine.
Nico doesn’t speak the whole drive. He drives the new route.
The streetcar tracks. The left at Audubon.
His right hand is on the gearshift. The tendons stand out across the back of his hand.
The same as the morning I said Spasibo. He’s watching the mirrors.
Every block. Every light. Every passing car.
My eyes are on his hand on the gearshift. Heat moves low in my belly, slow and unwelcome. My pulse is a little wrong. Not since the morning he told me.
The chain at my throat is warm against my collarbone. I don’t speak either.
Casa Lucia. The badges at the gate are different again. Marco’s plainclothes men at the corners of the property. The lobby half-rebuilt, scaffolding still on the back wall. Nico pulls the SUV to the curb. He puts it in park. He doesn’t turn off the engine.
“I’ll be here,” he says, quiet.
The first words he’s said to me since the morning I left his room. His voice is rough.
I don’t answer. I open my door. Sofia opens hers. I get out. I don’t look back.
Sofia takes my hand on the steps. We walk into the lobby together.
The new reception man. He says.
“Good morning, signora.”
I don’t answer. He’s been vetted. He knows not to expect me to.
Sofia and I walk down the corridor to the music room.
The music room.
Someone has moved the chairs to the walls and pushed the tables together in the center. There are flowers, yellow and white, the kind Cassia orders when she wants a room to feel like spring.
A tablecloth Nonna embroidered. Plates of food down the center. Cabbage rolls in the big ceramic dish, still warm. Bread. Honey cake. Fruit cut into wedges. A stack of wrapped gifts at the far end of the table with ribbons in every color Oksana apparently requested specifically.
The women from Tuesday group are already here.
Cassia is at the door. She sees me.
She doesn’t say anything. She puts her hand briefly on my arm and squeezes once.
I nod.
I look at the room. The Vietnamese woman has her hair down for the first time I have seen.
The blonde woman is in a yellow dress. The other women from the clinic, faces I know from the corridor, from the garden, twelve women, maybe fifteen, talking, filling plates, laughing at something near the window.
The Romanian girl isn’t here.
I don’t say anything. Neither does anyone else.
Sofia and I sit near the window.
The food is good. The cabbage rolls are Oksana’s grandmother’s recipe, which she told the Casa Lucia kitchen staff about in such specific detail that Cassia said the head cook wept. I eat one. It is very good. I eat another.
The Vietnamese woman catches my eye across the table and lifts her chin. I lift mine back.
Then the door opens.
Oksana.
She is wearing a white sash across the man’s button-down shirt that reads MAMA in gold letters someone has glued on in sequins.
Her hair is piled higher than usual. The mother’s ring on the chain.
She has a cup of something in each hand and she is already talking before she is fully through the door.
“I am here. I am enormous. The sash was Cassia’s idea and I love it. Someone take one of these cups, my hands are full, Bozhe moy, someone—”
The blonde woman takes one of the cups. Oksana surveys the room. Her eyes find me at the window.
“Mila.” She crosses directly to me, the belly arriving two seconds before the rest of her. “You came. I knew you would come. I told Cassia you would come and she said maybe and I said no, she will come, and I was right.” She drops into the chair beside me. The belly settles.
She takes her cup back from the blonde woman. “Now. We are going to eat Babusya’s cabbage rolls and we are going to open the gifts and someone is going to make me cry and I am going to blame the hormones. Yes? Yes.”
The room laughs.
The gifts. Someone has organized it so each woman brings something small: a hand-sewn blanket, a wooden rattle, a jar of honey from the garden, a pair of knitted socks in yellow, a book with the pages worn soft from reading.
Oksana holds each one and says something about it, something real, not a performance. The blanket: she runs her thumb across the stitching and says my grandmother had one like this. The book: she opens to the first page and reads the first line aloud in Ukrainian and closes it against her chest.
The Vietnamese woman gives her a small embroidered cloth with a bird on it. Red thread on white.
Oksana goes quiet for a moment. “A swallow,” she says. “In Ukraine we say the swallow brings good luck to a house.” She looks at the Vietnamese woman. “Thank you.”
The Vietnamese woman nods.
I have brought nothing. I didn’t know what to bring. I looked at the dresser this morning and there was nothing there that wasn’t mine except the two lockets and the cross and the Tsvetaeva, and none of those were mine to give.
When Oksana reaches me she sees my empty hands.
“You came,” she says. “That is the gift. Sit down.”
“I’m sitting.”
“Then stay sitting. That is also acceptable.”
Her hand closes around mine. The room is warm. The honey cake is being cut. Someone is pouring more tea. The blonde woman is laughing at something the Vietnamese woman said, a real laugh, surprised out of her, and she puts her hand over her mouth like she forgot she was allowed.
Mid-shower, Oksana leans toward me. Low.
“Tvoy muzhchina privyel tebya segodnya. Eto khorosho.”
Your man brought you today. That’s good.
I don’t answer. I take her hand in mine.
The room is warm. The flowers on the table have opened further in the heat of the room. Someone refills the tea.
Oksana is telling the story of the night she thought she was in labor for the first time, contractions three minutes apart, three in the morning, the taxi driver who did not speak English, the emergency room nurse who spoke Ukrainian and held her hand and said scho zh, ditynko, well then, little one, and sent her home four hours later because it was false labor, and Oksana is acting out the taxi driver's face and the room is laughing and I am—
The first sound.
A thump. From the lobby. A fraction too loud.
My body is up before my brain catches up. Fear. Cold. Focused.
I know the exits. Primary, the door we came in. Secondary, the service door at the back left behind a panel.
Oksana stops mid-sentence. The room goes quiet.
The second sound is closer. Three suppressed rounds. The cough-flat kind. Not from the lobby anymore. From the hallway one corridor over.
I reach for Sofia’s wrist. “Andiamo.”
My first Italian. I pull her up.
I move us to the secondary exit at the back of the room. Oksana follows. The hallway is wrong. Smoke from somewhere I cannot see. A door open at the far end of the corridor that isn’t supposed to be open. A man in tactical gear at the far end, back to us, rifle low. He hasn’t turned.
The supply alcove is six feet to my right. I pull Sofia into the alcove. The space is barely wide enough for her body. She presses her back against the brick exterior wall. Her notebook still in her hand.
Oksana comes after her. The alcove is too narrow. She can’t fold against the wall. The belly takes the depth Sofia took plus six more inches.
I am in the doorway of the alcove shielding both of them with my body.
I take the folding knife out of my pocket. I open it. The blade is the blade Renzo gave me. In case. I have never opened it in front of anyone.
I open it left-handed. The grip my father taught me when I was small.
Ty ne molot, Milochka. Ty nozh. Nozh ne udaryaet. Nozh skol’zit.
You are not a hammer, Milochka. You are a knife. A knife does not strike. A knife slips.
The man in tactical gear has turned. He has seen us. He starts toward us. He’s bigger than I am by two of me. He closes the distance fast. His right hand goes for Oksana. The easy one. The slow one.
I have time for one motion.
I slip the blade up under his sleeve at the wrist and across. A scrap of his sleeve comes away on my blade as he pulls his arm back. The blade catches the pad of my thumb on the way back. A thin line. I do not look at it.
He swears. “Suka.” Bitch.
One of Alexei’s.
He grabs Oksana with both hands. I lunge again. I don’t get him. He’s gone down the hallway with her in his hands.
“Mila!”
The hallway is empty in a breath.
Failure. I let her go.
Sofia is bleeding behind me. She came because I came. I turn. Sofia is sliding down the wall. Slow. Her left side is wet. I get my right hand on her left side. Below the ribs. The blood is the wrong color.
I press flat. The cotton of her dress under my palm.
Sofia’s eyes are open. She’s looking at me. I say her name.
“Sofia.”
She doesn’t answer.
Footsteps in the corridor. I lift the folding knife.
Renzo. Tactical gear. Black shirt under the vest. Blood on his right sleeve that isn’t his.
“With me. Now.”
I push Sofia out toward him. Renzo lifts her in one motion. I keep my right hand on the wound as he holds her. We move together. Renzo lifting Sofia at his chest. My hand at her left side keeping pressure. My left hand still on the open knife.
We walk the corridor. Renzo, English, low.
“Easy. We’re out in thirty seconds.”
I don’t answer. I keep pressure.
We come out the front entrance. The sun is up. Sirens distant. Marco’s men at the perimeter. One of his soldiers at the curb with a black SUV idling. A different SUV. The motor running. The back door open.
The SUV Nico parked is gone.
I stop. Renzo stops with me. Sofia in his arms.
The curb is empty. The SUV isn’t there. Renzo grabs my elbow.
“Mila. Move.”
“Where is Nico?”
“Move first, Mila.”
He pulls me toward Marco’s SUV at the curb. The wrong SUV. The Santoro driver in the front seat. Marco’s soldier at the back door. I look back at where the SUV was.
There’s a tire mark on the curb where the SUV’s right wheel was. The mark is fresh. Black rubber on the concrete. There’s broken glass on the asphalt three feet from the curb. The glass is from a driver-side window.
My chest seizes. The glass.
Renzo’s hand on my elbow is the only reason I’m still moving. He gets me into the back of Marco’s SUV. Sofia on my lap, my hand still on the wound. Giada climbs in after, already in scrubs, already with the duffel. The SUV moves before Giada has closed the door.
The Santoro driver is the one talking now. To Marco on the comm.
“Boss. Boss. The other SUV is gone. Window’s broken on the driver side. Nico is gone.”
A pause. The voice on the other end of the comm I can hear because the cab is small. Marco.
“Bring them home. Now.”
The driver: “On it.”
I look down at Sofia. I keep pressure. I don’t speak. There are no words in any language right now.
Sofia opens her eyes halfway. Her mouth moves.
“Izzy.”
Isabella. I should say something to her. In any language. I can’t. My hand on the wound is the only part of me that is working.
Giada looks at my face. Her mouth stays closed. She works. Her mother’s gold-emerald ring on her right hand catches the cabin light.
The compound. The gate opens. Marco at the gate, comm in his ear, his hand on the open SUV door before the SUV has stopped. Isabella is on the front steps in jeans and one of Renzo’s t-shirts. She sees Sofia in my lap. The blood. She makes the sound an older sister makes.
Giada is out first. Renzo is at the back door before I have lifted Sofia. Isabella reaches the SUV.
I don’t let go of the wound until Giada says I can.
Sofia opens her eyes. Looks at her sister. Says it again. Broken.
“Izzy.”
Isabella bends to the SUV door. Tears on her face. Her hand cups Sofia’s face.
Sofia goes with her sister into the medical wing on Renzo’s chest, with Giada at her side.
I get out of the SUV. My right hand is wet with Sofia’s blood.
I look at Marco. Marco’s jaw is locked. His eyes move to mine and stay there.
“Where is Nico, Marco.”
It comes out. Steady.
Marco doesn’t lie to me. “His SUV was hit at the curb during the attack inside. Window broken. Driver’s side. No body. No blood we can attribute yet. He didn’t come back.”
“They took him.”
A beat. “Yes.”
The compound goes very quiet around me.
Dante is on the steps of the front door behind Marco. He has been waiting for the SUV. He has heard.
I look at him. He looks at me.
I open my mouth. I close it. I open it again.
The words come out first. They have been the only thing in my head since the morning he told me.
“Idi za nim.” Go after him. “Go get him.”
A man’s blood on my hand. Another man’s absence at the curb.
I am not staying behind.
I look at Dante. I do not blink.
He looks at me a long beat. He nods. Once.
I walk into the compound with Sofia’s blood drying on my right hand. I don’t cry. I keep moving.
The man who left at dawn to drive me here did not come back.
I am going to bring him back.