Chapter 5 #4
“Good. Keep it. You can scream, and nobody on this plane will come. You can take another piece out of my face—you’re welcome to it, you’ve made a start.
” My voice dropped. “But hear the one thing, Yelena Lvovna, and then I’ll let go.
That paper in your hand is a man writing down, in advance, what he intends to do the moment you say no to him.
He put it in a movement order. He had it countersigned.
He considered your refusal and decided it was a procedural inconvenience.
” I looked at her mouth, and then made myself look at her eyes.
“I don’t hand women back to men who do that.
Not for a case, not for a war, not for the whole of Sicily.
So there’s no version of tonight where I turn this plane around. ”
Her wrists were still in my hands. Her pulse was still going against my knuckles, fast, wild, and I could feel exactly the moment she stopped pulling.
I let go immediately.
She stepped back. Two steps, three. Sat down in the seat across the aisle with her spine straight and her ruined bodice held up against her shoulder with one hand, and put the dispatch order in her lap and smoothed it flat.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Of course I’m fucking bleeding.”
“Good,” she said.
We came into the Astor Street building through the garage at four in the morning.
The elevator went up. I put my card against the reader for the top floor because there was no other way to make it go, and she noticed it.
The penthouse was Marco’s, technically—leased through the shell, furnished by somebody’s decorator, four bedrooms, a wall of glass, the whole cold lake laid out black behind it. Beautiful. Immaculate. Nobody’s home.
She stopped four feet inside and stood there in my coat with the ruined silk under it, looking at a room she had never seen before.
Behind us the elevator doors closed. And then the lock cycled—that soft mechanical thunk the fire panel makes when the car goes back down and the floor seals, a noise I have heard ten thousand times and have never once thought about.
She heard it.
“There’s a bolt,” she said.
“It’s a fire lock. It—”
“It locks.”
“Yes.”
“Right.” Her voice came out bright and terribly pleasant.
“So. Let’s be accurate about tonight, because I want it on the record before I’m too tired to say it properly.
You didn’t take me out of a cage, Scordato.
You moved me to a fresh one. I told my brother this would happen— told him three days ago, sitting on a floor, that if I ran to your family I’d be trading my father’s cage for one with better manners, and he wanted so badly to believe there was a good one, and I said no, Kiryusha, there is never a good one, there is only ever a nicer—” She stopped.
She had run out of air.
I watched it happen. The sentence went, and then the breath went with it, and she pulled and got almost nothing, and pulled again, faster, and her hand came up to the base of her throat where somebody else’s diamonds had been eight hours earlier.
“Yelena.”
“I’m—” Another pull. Nothing. “I’m fine.”
She was not fine. Her lips had gone the color of the tablecloths in her father’s restaurant.
I turned my head. “Out.”
The man who’d carried the bags up went. The one on the stair went. I heard the service door, and then the floor was empty except for the two of us and the lake behind the glass.
And Olimpo.
He was here with us. I thought she might find some comfort in him.
He got up. He came into the room at his usual pace, which is the pace of a small bear who has not yet decided whether you are worth the trouble—
—and then he saw her, and he slowed.
Olimpo does not slow for anyone. He came the last six feet at a crawl with his big rough head low and his eyebrows working, and he stopped a yard short of her and stood there, patient, saying nothing, the way he stands next to men who have just been given bad news.
She looked at him, smiled.
Then, in a moment of madness or inspiration—maybe both, I got down on the floor.
Not near her. Eight or nine feet, my back against the front of the sofa, one knee up, hands where she could see them.
“I’m going to give you some choices,” I said. “Small ones. You don’t have to talk. Nod or shake your head, that’s all.”
She stared at me. Her chest was going like something trapped.
“Lights. Bright, or low.”
Nothing. Then, after a moment—the smallest movement—she looked at the switch panel and away from it.
“Low,” I said, and reached up without getting off the floor and brought them down until the room was just the lake and one lamp. “Better?”
Half a nod.
“Door. That one goes to the hall, and the hall goes to the service stair, and the service stair has a keypad, and the code is four-nine-one-one, and if you want it now I’ll say it again as many times as you like.
” Her eyes came up and locked on mine. “Four. Nine. One. One. You can leave whenever you decide to. There are men downstairs and their job is to stop things coming in. Do you want the door open or closed?”
She looked at the door. Then, hoarse: “Open.”
I got up, opened it, and sat back down on the floor in the same place.
“Water, or tea.”
“. . .Tea.”
“Sofa, or floor.”
Her mouth opened. She hadn’t expected that one to be on the menu. Nobody had ever put it on a menu for her in her life; that was written all over her.
“Floor,” she said.
“Good.”
I reached over the arm of the sofa and took the grey blanket off the back of it. I held it out at arm’s length and left it hanging in the air between us.
She looked at it for a long moment. Then she crossed the four feet, took it out of my hand, and went down onto the carpet with her back against the wall and the blanket pulled up around her shoulders over the top of my coat, both hands fisted in the wool at her collarbone.
Olimpo waited until she’d settled. Then he came and lowered his enormous drooling head onto her knee, unasked.
“He weighs a great deal,” she said.
“Ninety-one pounds.”
“What’s his name?”
“Olimpo.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Tonio named him. He is also absurd.”
Her breath hitched, hitched again, and went short.
“Yelena.” I kept my voice low and slow, the voice for frightened men on docks and, once, a girl in a warehouse office I did not save. “Breathe out. Not in—out. All of it. Empty your chest. Then wait, and it’ll come back on its own.”
She tried. She got half of it.
“Again. Out. Longer than you want to.”
Out. Better.
“Once more. Out, and hold at the bottom, and count with me. One. Two. Three.”
She did it. Her shoulders came down off her ears by an inch, and the blue went out of her mouth, and the fist in Olimpo’s ear loosened.
“That’s it,” I said. “Good girl.”
I had not planned to say it.
Her eyes came up off the dog and onto my face.
They stayed there. And something happened behind them that undid me: the fight went out of her shoulders. Not all of it. Just the top layer, the outermost coat of barbed wire, and underneath it was a woman with her hair down on one side, sitting on a floor in a scratchy blanket, breathing.
She didn’t say anything about it. She looked away, fast, at the lake, and I watched her decide not to have noticed, and I let her have that.
Fuck.
She could be a Little.
This just went from bad to dangerous.