Chapter 4
NICO
I am refilling Marco’s wine when she walks in.
Cassia’s hand stops mid-reach for the salt. Renzo’s hand comes off the back of Izzy’s neck and comes down knuckle-first on the mahogany table. Gia sets her fork down without realizing, the metal clicking against the china.
I look up.
Mila is in the doorway.
She is barefoot in the same faded dress she had on this morning, her hair loose over her shoulders. She isn’t hovering at the threshold the way she has every other time. She is moving, keeping her shoulder near the wall as she crosses into the dining room and does not stop.
I stand up.
She doesn’t look at the rest of the family.
She looks at the empty chair. The one right next to mine.
She walks to it, pulls the oak frame out with both hands, and sits down.
Her bare shoulder is two inches from mine.
Don’t.
I sit back down.
Cassia’s voice is quiet, that low tone she drops into when the table is about to tip.
“Pass the bread to your right, Marco.”
Marco passes the bread without asking a question. The loaf comes around the table and arrives at Mila’s place because Nonna set one for her tonight. Nonna has been setting Mila a place every Sunday, ignoring the empty wood.
Mila doesn’t touch the crust.
She lifts her right hand off her lap, slow and deliberate. Her fingers find the cuff of my shirt and hold.
Cazzo.
Her fingers are small and warm. They have closed directly on the linen, locking around the bone of my wrist, and they do not let go.
I go very still.
Her hand is on me. Right there, at the table, in the light, with my entire family six feet away. The pulse at my wrist is going to give me away and there is nothing I can do about it. She can feel it. She has to feel it. Her thumb is directly over the vein.
The family doesn’t look at us.
Cassia turns her gaze to Giada. “Tell me you finally hired the night nurse for the clinic.”
“Next week.”
“Thank God.”
“Don’t thank God, cher. Thank the woman in Algiers I poached her from.”
“What’s her name.”
“Renée.” Gia picks up her wine glass. “Loyola Med. Two years on a trauma ward. She knows what she is walking into.”
“Good.”
The conversation has moved on. Nobody mentions Tuesday, the drive, or the Russian enforcer tracking her through the ports. Nobody says her name aloud.
Mila’s grip on my sleeve does not move.
I cannot shift my arm. If I move, she lets go.
I do not look at her face.
I keep my eyes fixed on my plate. On Dante’s gold signet ring on the other side of the table. On anything that is not her small hand pinned to my wrist.
Nonna Rosa comes through the arched doorway carrying a hot plate.
Mila’s plate. The gravy is fresh, still steaming.
She doesn’t look at Mila’s eyes. She walks behind my chair, leans across my shoulder, and sets the china down in front of her as though this has always been her seat.
Nonna’s rough hand brushes my shoulder on her way back to the kitchen.
“Bene fatto, cher.” Well done.
She keeps walking.
Mila doesn’t pick up her fork.
Her fingers stay locked into my linen.
Renzo looks across at Marco. “What time were you home last night.”
“Three.”
“Three from where.”
“You don’t want to know.”
Renzo’s mouth twitches at the corner. “It’s Linda again, isn’t it.”
“It is not Linda.”
“It’s Linda.”
Izzy laughs. Cassia joins her. Giada lets her shoulders drop the inch they have been holding up since the front door opened. Dante drinks his wine, his eyes tracking the room.
The conversation is moving.
Mila doesn’t laugh.
Her eyes stay on her plate. She is using her left hand finally, picking up the bread slowly and tearing off a piece.
She hides each piece behind her fingers before she takes a bite.
Her right hand does not shift from my sleeve.
The fabric of my shirt is thin. Her pulse comes straight through the linen.
The muscle at her throat moves.
So does mine.
Her breath is slow and steady.
She picks up the meat with her fork, takes a bite, and chews. Takes another.
She has put weight back on. The cheekbone that used to cut like a blade is softer. The wrist locked onto my sleeve is not the frail bone that came out of the basement.
Until tonight, I have been counting those inches as her recovery.
That is not what I am counting them as right now.
Don’t.
Three years of keeping this locked down. Right now it won’t stay locked.
Fuck.
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
The heat does not stop.
I keep my hands flat on the wood where everyone can see them. I keep my expression where it needs to be.
I pick up my wine glass and drink.
I am going to lose my mind.
I am hard at my sister-in-law’s table. My pregnant sister-in-law, sitting four feet away.
I want to put my forehead against the table.
I do not move a muscle.
I drink my wine.
Dante is talking about the ports. Renzo isn’t laughing, but the muscle at the corner of his jaw twitches.
Mila finishes the meat, sets the fork down, and lifts her water, drinking once before setting the glass back down.
Her hand never leaves my sleeve.
She tilts her head toward my shoulder but does not lean against the fabric.
She turns her neck.
She looks at me.
It’s the first time her eyes have landed on mine in a room with the lights on.
Her gray-green eyes do not flinch. They stay locked on mine, and her breath hasn’t changed by one beat, and she holds it long enough that I stop wondering.
I stop breathing.
Her gaze holds me for a full count of five.
Her hand rests on my sleeve, and my whole arm tightens.
She knows what is happening to me underneath the linen.
She doesn’t pull away.
She holds tighter, her fingers squeezing by half a millimeter.
Cazzo. Cristo.
I want to put my mouth against her wrist, right where her own pulse is running faster than it should.
I want to feel her breath catch when my lips land there.
I want to ask her in Russian what she’s doing to me, want to hear what sound she makes when I ask it.
I want to drag her up the stairs and lock the door behind us and find out how long it takes before she stops being afraid.
I am hard enough to hurt and she is holding my wrist and I am losing my mind at a dinner table.
I don’t.
Nobody at this table knows I haven’t been this hard in three years.
She doesn’t let go.
When dinner finally ends, she stands before I can push my chair back.
She lets go of my sleeve.
The place at my wrist where her hand lived is instantly cold.
She walks out of the dining room on bare feet, taking the same steps in reverse. She doesn’t look back once.
The family stays seated, the silence dropping over the plates.
Cassia’s voice is a whisper. “Go.”
I take a beat. Two.
I’m still hard, and the second I stand, anyone with a sightline sees exactly what she’s been doing to me all night.
I push the oak chair back and stand up.
Nobody looks.
None of the Santoro women look at the front of my pants.
I snatch my jacket off the wood, folding the dark fabric over the front of my body, and walk out of the dining room.
I follow her up the stairs, keeping six feet of distance behind her heels. Not closer. I don’t let myself narrow the gap.
She stops right outside her door.
She doesn’t turn the handle.
She turns her body to face me.
The hallway is dark. Her face is half-lit, her skin pale and clean. She isn’t flushed. Her breathing hasn’t changed by a single beat.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
Six feet of open hallway between our chests.
I keep the jacket locked over my lap.
Her eyes drop to the jacket folded across me and rest there for one full breath before climbing back to my face. She knew it at the dining table. She knows it now in the dark.
She doesn’t look away.
She holds my eyes and her face is still and her breathing hasn’t changed and she is looking at me the way a woman looks at a man when she wants him to know she sees exactly what she’s doing to him and she is not sorry about it.
My jaw goes tight. My hand on the jacket goes white.
Fucking hell.
She lets the silence hold for one more beat.
Slowly, she places her own left hand over her right wrist, touching the exact spot. She holds two fingers against the bone.
Then she lets go.
She turns the handle, opens the door, and steps inside.
The oak paneling closes. The deadbolt rolls home.
I stand in the dark after the deadbolt rolls home with my jaw locked and my hands at my sides and my blood somewhere it shouldn’t be, and she touched her own wrist in this hallway with her eyes on mine the whole time and she knew exactly what that would do to me.
Tonight is not a vigil.
Tonight she sat next to my skin and ate from the place Nonna set for her, and she held my sleeve while she watched my blood rise. She looked into my eyes twice before she walked up the stairs.
I do not get to read to the wood tonight.
I walk back to my own wing.
I don’t turn on the light.
I sit on the edge of the mattress in the pitch black.
She has been weeks under this roof, a survivor in my care, and tonight she came downstairs and put her skin against my wrist.
She came downstairs and I forgot everything else.
I unbutton my collar, my throat tight. I unfasten the silver cufflinks and drop them into the porcelain dish on the dresser.
The watch stays on my wrist. I do not take it off.
I sit back down on the edge of the mattress.
The window is open to the dark. The jasmine is heavy on the dead air, and the cicadas are screaming out in the oaks.
I close my eyes.
Her fingers tighten on my sleeve, a half-millimeter.
She felt the blood climbing under her hand, and she stayed right where she was.
I open my eyes.
The room is completely black.
I don’t sleep.
I don’t let myself think about her fingers.
I think about her hand the entire night.