Chapter 10
NICO
I don’t remember falling asleep.
That’s the first thing. Not her, not the warmth pressed along my back, not the pale early light in the room. The first thing is that I slept through. I haven’t done that in years.
I slept through the night.
The second thing is her.
She’s curled against my back. Her knees are tucked behind mine. Her forehead is at my spine. Her breath moves the fabric of my shirt with every exhale. She’s still asleep.
I hold still.
Don’t you fucking move.
My arm is across her waist, hand flat on the mattress. At some point in the night I reached for her in my sleep. She’s beside me under the covers now, even though she fell asleep on top of them.
Neither of us did that.
We both did it anyway.
My back aches pleasantly in a way it hasn’t since before Moscow. I should move my arm.
Her breathing shifts. Deliberate.
Let her.
I stay still and keep my breathing even. My arm is loose across her waist.
She takes a long time.
The room gets a shade lighter. Then, slowly, she shifts her hips a quarter inch.
My whole body goes rigid.
The arm wants to tighten. The hips want to follow. I’m not going to take what I’m being offered before she offers it.
I can be still.
I will be still if it kills me.
My hand curls into the sheet. I make it flatten.
“Cara.”
She goes quiet. Doesn’t answer, doesn’t move. Her pulse is against my arm, elevated, and my own pulse answers it in my throat.
“I’m going to move my arm,” I say. “Slow. You don’t have to do anything. Giving you space.”
I don’t want to give her space. My throat closes around how much I don’t want to. But she’s young. She woke up in a bed that isn’t hers with my weight against her. She gets to decide.
I start to lift my arm.
Her hand closes around my wrist, small and deliberate, stopping me.
Cristo.
My breath stops.
Her hand stays on my wrist. Then, slow, she pulls it forward. Back across her waist. She pulls it back across her waist and presses my hand flat against her stomach.
Then she lets go.
I exhale against the back of her neck. It comes out shaky and I let it.
“Okay,” I say. My voice is wrecked. “Okay. I can. Dio. Okay.”
I stay loose against her. My hips stay back from hers even though she has to feel what my body is doing. She hasn’t moved away from any of it. My hand on the mattress in front of her is shaking and I let it shake.
She shifts her hips back into mine. A quarter inch.
The sound I make stays behind my teeth. Barely.
“Cara.” My voice is strained. “You’re going to.” Breathe. “Tell me what you want. Because if you keep doing that I’m going to. Fuck. I’m going to lose it.”
She holds where she is.
She stays in my arm. The silence holds.
She knows exactly what she’s doing.
God help me, she knows exactly what she’s doing.
“Did you sleep?” My voice has gone quieter.
She pauses. Then I feel it against my spine, the smallest nod.
“Good,” I say. “That’s good, cara.” I let it sit. “I haven’t slept like that in years.”
“You moved in your sleep,” I say. “I was asleep too. I woke up and we were like this. Under the covers. I didn’t put you there. I swear to God.”
There’s a pause. Then the breath goes out of her, slow.
“Okay.” I let the breath out. “Okay.”
I shift my hips away from hers.
She closes the space.
Madonna.
“You’re.” Try again. My voice is not steady. “You’re making this really fucking hard, milaya.”
“Cazzo. I didn’t mean. That’s not what I.”
A sound comes out of her.
I go completely still.
It’s not quite a laugh. Something between a breath and a sound I haven’t heard from her before. My heart goes violent and useless against my ribs.
“Did you just.” I stop. “Cara. Did you just laugh?”
She doesn’t answer.
I press my face against the back of her neck, forehead against her hair, and breathe her in.
“Dio. You’re going to kill me. You know that? You’re going to fucking kill me and I don’t even care.”
She’s quiet.
I’m quiet.
Her body is warm against mine. Her pulse slows under my arm but mine doesn’t. The sun moves across the floor a quarter inch at a time.
Somewhere downstairs the back door opens and shuts. Nonna starting her morning. A man’s voice at the gate, the overnight shift trading with the morning shift. We don’t move.
We stay until the light changes, and I make it last, because I know it ends the second she sits up.
Her stillness changes. She sits up slowly. I lie with my arm where she left it and watch her cross to the door.
She stops in the doorway, her back to me, and holds there for a breath. Then she’s gone and the doorway is empty. Renzo’s door opens down the hall. His footsteps slow as he passes my door. My door is open, and my bed has a man in it at early morning who hasn’t been alone tonight.
His footsteps stop.
A low voice from the threshold. He doesn’t step in.
“Brother.”
“Renzo.”
He’s quiet for a long beat.
“I’m glad.”
I close my eyes.
“Grazie.”
His footsteps resume. Same pace. He keeps walking.
I do not get out of the bed for a long time. The warmth where she was is already going, and I keep my body in it until it is gone.
Nonna is at the moka pot when I come down the back stairs.
The smell of coffee reaches me first. The real coffee from the pot she won’t let anyone else touch. The last dishes are draining by the sink, including the good bowl she washes by hand because the machine doesn’t know how to treat old things.
She doesn’t look up when I cross the threshold.
“You look like a man who slept on a different floor last night, cher.”
She turns from the sink, pours, and sets the cup on the counter without looking at me.
“Mila was through here.”
I stop with the cup halfway to my mouth.
“When.”
“A few minutes ago. She didn’t look at me, but she came in. I gave her tea. Lemon and honey, the way Lucia used to make it for her girls when they were sick.”
“She drink it?”
“Every drop.” Nonna turns back to the sink. “Then she went up the back stairs to her room.”
“She say anything?”
“To me? No.” Nonna rinses a cup. “But she stood at the threshold for a long minute before she came in. Like she was deciding whether she had a right to be in my kitchen this morning.”
I set the cup down too hard.
“Nonna.”
“Cher.”
“If she comes back through here. Don’t ask her anything. Don’t push.”
“I never push.” She wipes her hands on the dish towel. “But I’m going to watch her. That’s not the same as pushing.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“And one more thing.” She turns now and looks at me, full on. “I’ve known you since you were born. The girl is twenty-one. She came from a place you and I are not going to talk about at this counter.”
“I know that too.”
“Then go slow, cher.”
“I’m going slow.”
“Go slower.”
I drink the coffee standing by the window.
The yard is gray-blue with early light. The jasmine on the south wall has gone wild again.
It always does in summer. The magnolia at the edge of the property is beginning to drop its flowers.
The compound is still. The men on overnight are trading with the morning shift at the gate.
The murmur of voices carries in the wet air.
I put the cup down and walk out.
The folder is on the study desk where Marco left it, plain cardboard with no label. That’s Marco’s system. The more anonymous the cover, the worse the contents.
I open it standing.
She laughed.
Bratva surveillance has shifted off the port.
I read the line twice.
The door behind me clicks. Marco doesn’t knock at this hour.
He crosses to the desk. He doesn’t sit.
“Tito picked the pattern up Friday. We backtracked four weeks. Multiple vehicles, rotating, all unregistered.”
“Frequency?”
“Tuesday and Friday. Three weeks running. They’re watching Casa Lucia drop-offs.”
“They know it’s our clinic?”
“They’ve made the family connection. They’re not interested in the patients. They’re interested in who goes in and out.”
“Sokolov?”
“Sokolov was named. This is the next hand. Newer. Quieter.”
“You dismantle the named ones.”
“The nameless ones grow new faces.”
I close my eyes.
They know where she is.
“No.” I open them. “Stop. They know where Casa Lucia is. Every Bratva man working the eastern seaboard knows the Santoro family runs a clinic in the Garden District. That’s not the same as knowing she goes there every Tuesday. That’s not the same as them knowing she’s alive.”
Not the same.
“That’s what I told Cassia at five-thirty,” Marco says.
I look up.
“Cassia called you.”
“Cassia called me because she had a feeling. Cassia has feelings the way the rest of us have facts. I gave her what we had.”
“What does she want.”
“You to pull Mila off the Tuesday rotation. Effective this week.”
“She’ll know I’m pulling her because of a threat.”
“That’s why I’m telling you Cassia called. Have Cassia make the call. Not you.”
“Cassia frames it as a clinic schedule change.”
“A new rotation through Algiers. Two Tuesdays a month, not four. The therapist’s caseload, not yours.”
“Mila trusts Cassia.”
“That’s the play.”
Marco picks up the folder and tucks it under his arm.
“Do it today. Through Maria.”
“Through Maria. Done.”
Marco doesn’t move yet. He waits.
“One more thing.” His voice changes. “Sofia saw her in the hallway this morning. Coming out of your room.”
“Sofia.”
“She’s not going to say anything. Yet. But she’s going to.”
“I know.”
Marco nods once. Turns for the door.
“Marco.”
He stops.
“The watch detail on Casa Lucia. Pull Tito off it. Put him on the trail back to whoever’s paying.”
“He’s already on it.”
“Of course he is.”
Marco leaves.
I close the folder.
I sit down at the desk.
Pushkin is open to the same page it’s been on since the week started. I haven’t moved past it.
The surveillance is tightening. She hummed through her door for days after I started leaving mine open.
I look at the Pushkin. I don’t read it.
My bedroom is at the other end of the house. I haven’t closed that door since the night she crossed.
I look back at the folder.
I open it again.