Chapter 2 #2
Weeks of him glued to the plaster outside. Weeks of Russian poetry bleeding through the oak. Weeks and he hasn’t once tried the brass handle.
Blyad’. Fuck.
I don’t have a strategy for safe.
The corridor outside is silent now. The household has gone quiet.
I just open the door.
The grand stairs are wide, dark antebellum wood, engineered so cleanly the treads don’t give a creak under my weight. My left hand slides along the mahogany bannister, keeping my boots close to the wall where the joist holds the structure firm.
I move without sound. Five years of practice doesn’t go away because the floor is expensive.
I reach the bottom hall and follow the scent of chicory. Maria and Nonna Rosa are in the kitchen, voices low.
I don’t cross their line of sight.
Instead, I turn the corner that opens into the massive room I’ve only seen through a cracked doorway on my first afternoon.
Books line every wall, climbing all the way to the high ceiling. There are leather chairs that smell of old tobacco, and tall windows the color of weak tea where the drapes have been pulled half-shut against the morning sun.
Cassia is sitting at the mahogany desk.
She hasn’t seen me yet.
My fingers lock around the wood molding of the doorframe. Every muscle in my legs screams to pull back.
Go. Now. Move.
I am one split-second away from vanishing back up the stairs.
She looks up.
She doesn’t offer a fake smile. She doesn’t drop her pen.
“You can stay,” she says, her English flat and quiet. It’s a dry statement of fact, not a polite offer. “I won’t make conversation. I’m reading.”
My eyes stay on her face a beat too long, looking for the catch.
Her pen pauses on the page and she does not look up, the line of her shoulders shifting once before they go still again.
She’s already gone back to her accounting ledger before I’ve finished deciding whether to breathe. She doesn’t perform a welcome at me.
Other women in the houses I was kept in performed welcome. Italian women in expensive dresses, silver trays, smiling with too many teeth while they waited for me to do something with my mouth that my throat couldn’t manage.
Cassia just reads.
I cross the Persian rug, my boots silent. There is a small armchair tucked under the tea-colored window, and I drop into it, keeping my spine straight, my hands folded in my lap, and my ankles crossed.
My father’s posture, the princess lines.
I haven’t been able to unlearn the stance, even in the basements.
Cassia turns a page.
The window light moves across the dark floorboards by slow inches. Once, she makes a small, satisfied sound in her throat, there and gone.
She never looks at my corner.
The light shifts another foot.
She closes the ledger with a soft thud, stands up, and gathers her fountain pen and her empty porcelain cup. She walks toward the exit without angling her gaze toward my chair.
She stops right at the threshold, her back half-turned.
“I’ll be in here tomorrow afternoon,” she says, her voice the same as before. “If you want quiet again.”
A beat of silence stretches between us.
“There’s a book on the third shelf from the bottom. Russian, with the English on the facing page. It has been there a long time. It was my mother-in-law’s. I never met her. I have not opened it. It is not mine to give, but it has been waiting on that shelf for someone.”
Her linen skirt rustles as she walks out into the hall.
I don’t move for a long time, watching the dust move through the tea-colored light.
When my knees finally loosen, I stand and cross the room to the third shelf from the bottom.
The volume is there. Cloth-bound. Pale, faded blue. Tsvetaeva. Russian characters on the left, English translation on the right. The top edges of the pages are still uncut, raw and untouched.
I take it down with both hands, my fingers wrapping around the cloth. The spine is warm from where the afternoon sun has been striking the wood, the same warmth I find on my door after midnight before I pull my hand away.
I carry it back up the stairs to my room, holding it carefully against my chest, my movements identical to the way I handle the cup of morning coffee, like something precious that will break if I stop paying attention.
I place the volume on the single wooden chair. I don’t open the cover.
Put it back. Nothing here is free. You pay for it in skin, like always.
I just sit on the floor in front of it, staring at the blue cloth.
Cassia knows I understand her.
She’s known the whole time. She didn’t weaponize the information with her husband or her brothers. She simply told me she knew, using two quiet sentences in the only shared language we have left.
I won’t make conversation. I’m reading. It has been waiting on that shelf for someone.
The silence is still mine. She didn’t rip it away from me to prove her own power. She gave me the book and didn’t ask for anything back.
My throat tightens, a hot, sudden burn flaring behind my eyes. I press my palms hard against my face, breathing the scent of old paper into my skin until the shaking stops.
It has been five years since anyone handed me a gift I didn’t have to pay for with my own skin.
“Spasibo.” Thank you.
I whisper the word to the empty plaster walls. She won’t hear the sound. I say it anyway.
That night, his boots don’t come to my door. I don’t turn on the light.
I lie down on top of the covers in my layers, my right hand locked around the casing of the blade in my pocket, my left lifting the chain at my throat.
I am Lyudmila Dmitrievna Zakharova. I am my father’s daughter.
Nico doesn’t have a goddamn clue what he’s doing with me yet.
Neither do I.
But I am going to be the one who figures it out first.