Chapter 33
NICO
She is asleep.
I have been awake watching her do it.
Her face is turned toward mine on the pillow, her hair loose around her shoulders, her mouth soft the way it only goes when she is all the way under.
The chain at her throat catches the low light from the curtain edge. Her hand is open on the sheet between us, palm up, fingers slightly curled. She breathes slowly and evenly and deep, the sleep of someone who has not slept like this in years, and I did that. We did that.
She is young.
Beautiful and here. In the dark, that is the whole of everything.
She has been through things that should have broken her into pieces so small you couldn’t put them back together, and instead she is here, in my bed, sleeping with her hand open between us like she is not afraid of what reaches for it in the night.
She trusted you. That’s what she said with her hands on my face.
She bet her life on you. She bet mine.
I look at her face.
I think about Papa.
Papa hollowed out for eleven years after Mama died. I was nine when it happened. I watched Papa become a ghost at his own table, in his own house, in his own skin.
The man who had run an empire with one hand went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with silence and everything to do with absence.
He was there. He was never there. And I took the lesson the way a nine-year-old takes a lesson, without language for it, in the body, before thought: love makes you weak.
Need makes you useless. Don’t ever let anyone matter that much.
I have been running on that lesson for years.
I look at Mila’s face in the dark and I understand Papa for the first time.
Not the ghost. The man before the ghost. The man who looked at Mama the way I am looking at her right now and felt the world reorganize itself around one person and knew it with the certainty of a man who has survived everything, that this was the thing that could finally undo him.
Not an enemy. Not a war. Her. Just her, breathing.
Just her hand on the pillow. Just the fact of her existing in the same room.
That’s what it was, Papa.
Not weakness. This. Exactly this.
I reach over and brush a strand of hair off her face. Light. I do not wake her. Her mouth stays soft. Her breath stays even.
I am not going to be Papa. I am not going to hollow out. But I understand now why he did, and the understanding sits in my chest where the old lesson used to live, and it is lighter now than it was.
I lie on my back and look at the ceiling and I let myself want her without making it a problem.
That’s new.
Her thumb finds my jaw.
I turn my head. She is awake. Her eyes on mine in the dark, pale gray-green, fully present, no sleep left in them. She has been watching me the way I have been watching her.
Her thumb traces the line of my jaw. Slow.
She climbs into my lap without a word and my mouth finds the hollow of her throat.
I have been putting my mouth there for weeks. I put my teeth there now. Small. Careful. Enough to leave something she will see in the mirror before she dresses for the boat. Her breath goes sharp on the first bite. Her hand finds the back of my head.
The scar above her left eyebrow. The one Alexei gave her when she was twelve. I put my mouth there and I keep it there for a long count and I do not bite. Just my mouth. Just the warmth of it.
She goes very still.
Her fingers tighten in my hair.
The inside of her wrist over the pulse. The small place above her left hipbone.
The faint scar I have never asked about and will not ask about because this is not for asking, this is for my mouth on every place that has ever been hurt, every place that carries the years before me, and I am not asking what happened there. I am just here. My mouth. On all of it.
She bites me back.
The hollow of my throat. The line of my collarbone.
The place under my jaw I have not had a mouth on in years.
The scar at my ribs, the left one, the one she traced with her thumb the first night in the dark.
Her mouth is hot and her tongue moves between each bite and I let her.
I let her put her marks on every place she wants them.
Let her mark me. All night. Every place she wants.
She moves on my lap. Her arms around my neck. Her forehead pressed to mine. Her eyes open on mine in the dark, not looking away, not flinching, and she says it on the third time with everything she has.
“Ya tvoya.” I am yours.
“Ya tvoya.” I am yours.
“Ya tvoya.” I am yours.
Three times. Like something that has been true longer than she has known it.
I hold her through the last one with my face in the side of her neck and my arms tight around her shoulders and my chest full and breaking at the same time, and I let it. I am done holding myself together in this room.
She is settled against my side. The room is quiet. The light at the edge of the curtain is still dark but it will not be dark much longer.
I speak into her hair. Quiet. Stripped down to nothing.
“I love you.”
A pause.
“Do you hear me?”
“I love you. I have loved you since the first minute.”
She does not say it back.
Her forehead presses harder into the side of my neck. Her hand finds the back of my arm and grips, fingers closing on skin, holding on the way she held on when her shoulders were shaking in the dark.
It is everything.
I open my mouth to tell her what to do if I don’t come back. What to do with herself. Who to go to.
Her hand comes up flat against my mouth.
She does not say anything for one beat. Her hand stays flat against my lips.
Then, voice flat and final.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t say it.”
I close my mouth. I kiss the palm of her hand.
She takes her hand away. She puts it back on my chest, flat over my heart, and I put my hand over hers and we breathe.
We dress in the dark without speaking.
I watch her pull the dark shirt over her head, button it to the collar over the chain, layer the jacket over that.
Her back to me. Her hair still loose, then her hands going up to pull it back, the efficient movement of a woman who has dressed in the dark before, who knows how to move quietly, who has been preparing for this longer than I have.
She is young and she is going on the river with me and I am going to bring her back.
I am going to bring her back or I am going to die trying, and the second option is not an option because she has had enough people leave, and I promised, and I am done breaking promises to Zakharova women.
I finish dressing. Black shirt. Dark pants. Boots. I leave the watch.
I reach for the velvet bag on the nightstand.
I open it. The wooden cross is inside, small and dark and plain, the same one Alexei has had, that he mailed to me like a taunt, the same one Yelena wore around her neck until he took it from her.
I got it back. I have been holding it here in this room waiting to give it to the person it belongs to.
I close my left hand around it for one second. The wood is warm from the bag.
I cross to her.
She is at the desk with her back to me. I touch her shoulder. She turns.
I take her left hand in my right. I put the wooden cross in her palm. I close her fingers around it.
“For after. Carry it. Bring it home.”
She does not say anything. She looks at her closed fist for a long moment. Then she looks at my face.
She nods once.
The cross stays in her closed left fist.
I put my hand at the small of her back. We walk to the door. I open it.
My hallway is the hallway it has been for weeks, the lamp at its low setting, the compound awake below us, Marco’s voice on the phone somewhere in the gallery, the smell of coffee coming up from the kitchen.
Mila is beside me. The cross in her hand. The chain at her throat. The marks I left on her under the layers and the marks she left on me under my shirt.
We walk down to the back room.
The river is waiting.