Chapter 31
NICO
Maria delivers the message and goes down the back stairs.
The plan is final. The compound is in motion. My room is still.
The painting space door is open across the room. Yelena’s canvas faces out. The velvet bag with the wooden cross is on the nightstand. I do not look at either of them.
My ribs pull when I breathe too deep. Gia’s tape has loosened at the edges and I have not gone back to have it redone. My eyebrow has closed. My forearm works. I am going after Alexei carrying days of damage and I have had worse.
She has not come to my room since she found out. She has been in this house, in this hallway, at this table, three feet from me at meals, and I have not gone to hers, and the distance has been its own kind of damage, the kind Giada cannot tape.
Now she is coming to me.
I have been standing here for twenty minutes unable to move, which is not something that happens to me, which I am not going to look at directly.
Her steps in the gallery. My pulse goes wrong before the door opens and I am glad no one is in this room to see it.
She walks in. She does not close the door behind her.
Her hair is down around her shoulders and I want to put my hands in it, not gently, not carefully, just my fingers in her hair and her face tipped up to mine, and I am not going to do that.
I gave up the right to touch her. I know exactly when I gave it up and I have been living in that moment ever since.
The chain at her throat catches the light. No knife in her pocket. She came to me without the knife and my chest closes around that.
I cross the room to her.
I stop close enough that I could reach out, close enough to see the pulse at her throat and the way her breath has gone careful and shallow, the way it does when she is holding herself very still on purpose.
My voice comes out low and controlled.
“Ya idu odin.” I am going alone. “Alexei Morozov has been breathing the same air as you for a long time and I have let that go on long enough. He touched what is mine. He took what is mine. As long as he is alive you will never be free. You will never be safe. You will never be able to stop looking over your shoulder and I cannot live with that.”
I look at her.
“I am going after him. And when I am done there will be nothing left of him to find you. And I am coming back to you.”
Her face shuts. Her body, already still, goes stiller. The chin up. The eyes flat. The hands at her sides not closing. Her jaw goes tight.
My right hand goes to the back of my neck. One second. I drop it.
“I failed your sister.” My voice goes and I let it go. “I buried her name and yours because saying them out loud meant standing back in that room.”
I hold her eyes.
“I will not fail you. I will burn the world before I let him take you. But I need you to stay.” The word costs everything I have. “Please. Let me do this.”
She does not speak. She does not move. Her jaw stays tight and her eyes stay on mine and the silence between us has weight and I stand in it and I do not look away.
Then her feet move.
She comes the last step toward me and stops with her face lifted to mine, close enough that the chain at her throat almost touches my chest, close enough that her breath reaches my mouth, and my hands go still at my sides because if I reach for her right now I will not stop and I have not earned that yet.
She reaches up and takes my face in both her hands.
The pulse at my jaw is going wrong and she has her palms on it and she knows, and the heat that moves up the back of my neck has nothing to do with grief and I let it stay anyway.
Her thumbs at the line of my jaw. Her fingers at my temples.
She is the size she is and her hands are holding my face like they have the right to, like she is deciding something, and I hold still and let her decide.
She begins to speak. Her voice is rough — the same one that sang in the library, the one that cracked on the fourth bar — and it lands in my chest before the words do.
“My sister trusted you. She didn’t trust anyone. But she trusted you.”
Her thumbs press into the line of my jaw. She holds my face steady.
“She bet her life on you. She bet mine.”
She stops the first time. Her breath goes out slow. Her hands stay on my face. She breathes once. She keeps going.
“And when she was dying, the last thing she did was say my name to a stranger and ask him to find me.”
Her forehead presses to mine. The chain at her throat touches my chest. Her breath reaches my mouth and my hands close at my sides, knuckles white, because if I move them I am done. She is this close and she is breaking me open and I want her so badly it hurts.
Her voice drops and the rawness in it reaches me before the words do.
“I waited in the dark and no one came. I learned to stop waiting. I learned to stop hoping. I taught myself that no one was going to save me because that was the only way to survive it. And then you found me. You. The man she chose. The man who broke his promise and came anyway.”
She stops the second time. Her forehead presses harder against mine.
“I am not staying behind a door while you go. I am not letting you decide for me again. You buried me once. You don’t get to do it twice.”
“Yesli ty poydesh’, ya poydu. Yesli ty padesh’, ya padu.” If you go, I go. If you fall, I fall.
“I waited a long time to choose something. I am choosing this.” A breath. “Ya vybirayu tebya.” I choose you.
Her forehead presses harder against mine for one beat.
“Ne smey otnyat’ eto u menya.” Don’t you dare take that from me.
My forehead drops to her shoulder.
My hands come up to her back and I grip the fabric of her shirt at her shoulder blades and press my face into her neck and my shoulders shake, once, twice, hard, and then they go still, and years of it rise through my throat and stay there.
The concrete room. Her sister’s face. The promise I said and did not keep. All of it. Not coming out as sound.
She holds me through every second of it.
Her hands move to the back of my head, her fingers in my hair, and she is steady where I am not and I let her hold me there, my ribs pulling with every breath, the tape Gia put on pressing into the places that still hurt, and I do not mind. I do not mind any of it.
She lets it stop on its own.
I breathe. I count to ten. By ten I am steady.
I lift my face from her shoulder. Her face is in front of mine, her eyes dry, her hands still on me. She has been the steady one. Of course she has.
I want to turn my face the half inch it would take. I don’t. She gave me khorosho and I am not going to take more than she offered.
“Khorosho.” Okay.
Her hands stay at the back of my head and her forehead comes back to mine and she stays for one long breath, and the warmth of her goes all the way down through the grief and the tape and the damage, and my chest aches with it, and I am going to carry that ache into whatever comes next.
“Together,” she says.
“Together.”