Chapter 21
MILA
The light at the edge of the curtain is gold.
It got through today. I don’t know what’s different about today. The gold is on the rug — the rug he slept on the first night I let him stay.
I’m curled into him.
His shirt. His arm under my head. His hand on my hip.
I haven’t left.
I always leave.
He’s awake.
He’s been awake.
He’s watching me watch him.
His hand on my hip is still, but the warmth of it goes all the way through the fabric. My pulse moves low. Not fear. Something else entirely, and I’m not going to name it with his eyes on my face.
The first morning I haven’t left before dawn is the morning he didn’t ask me to. He didn’t ask me to stay either. He just kept his arm around me and I kept waiting for myself to pull away.
I didn’t.
That means something. You know that means something.
I know.
I’ve been lying here for a long time deciding whether to say what’s been pressing at the back of my throat.
About Papa. About Yelena. About when we still had a house that was ours.
The parts of me that were mine before Alexei, before the selling, before I learned to make myself small and gone. The parts I haven’t given anyone.
If you tell him, you can’t untell him.
I know.
I open my mouth.
“My father threw me in the water when I was three.”
It comes out quiet. Like it costs less than it does.
It costs. You know it costs.
He doesn’t interrupt or move. His chest keeps rising under my hand. He’s listening — only that, nothing more — and something in my throat pulls tight.
“Yelena pinched him for it. She was six years older.”
He’s still. His chest keeps rising under my hand, steady. I keep my hand flat against him.
“He taught me languages in the garden. The horse’s name was Buran. The stable was French but he didn’t like to say so. Yelena taught me how to read men in a room. Papa taught me the languages they spoke.”
Mila, watch his hands. Watch where his eyes go when he thinks no one’s looking.
I can hear her when I say it. Her voice. She was sixteen and I was ten and she already knew everything she needed to know about men in rooms.
My chest aches.
His chest rises and falls under my hand. Steady.
He doesn’t speak or try to fill it.
I’ve never told anyone any of this. There was never anyone to tell.
I keep going.
“On Sunday he didn’t take calls. Ever. The Bratva could wait. Mama made eggs. He put them in front of us and said this was all God gave our house that week. That we had to eat it with gratitude.”
His arm tightens around me. Just slightly. Not much. Just enough.
I keep going.
“He was joking. He never joked the rest of the week. Only on Sunday.”
The light moves a quarter inch on the rug.
My face does something before I’ve told it to.
I’m smiling.
It catches me off guard. My own face catching me off guard. My right hand on his stomach tightens — reflex, like I’m bracing for something — and the smile doesn’t go away. It stays.
I haven’t smiled in years. Not in a room with a man in it. I’ve smiled in bathrooms. At walls. Where no one could see it and take it.
He’s watching me. He’s stopped breathing.
I don’t stop.
The diminutive comes out before I’ve decided.
The name my father gave me. The name Yelena said when I was small and needed to be called back from somewhere far away. The name I’ve kept in a closed box for years because saying it means those people existed, means I was that girl once, means I lost her.
“Papa called me Milochka.”
His chest stops moving.
I have my right hand on his stomach. His chest stops under my hand.
A long beat.
The pulse at his throat stutters. Once.
Then his jaw goes hard. His mouth goes flat. His eyes go cold.
Distant.
His eyes go somewhere I can’t follow.
I don’t say anything. I stay still.
Why.
I don’t say the word. I hold.
He pulls back.
He doesn’t push me off. He moves his arm out from under my head, slow, careful, and sits up.
He swings his legs off the bed.
He sits on the edge of the mattress with his back to me.
I wait.
His shoulders don’t move.
“Nico.”
He stays still.
“Nico.” Flat. “Look at me.”
His right hand goes to the back of his neck.
My chest is tight. My throat is tight. Something is wrong and it’s the name — it’s my name in his mouth and now he won’t face me and I don’t know what that means but I know it’s bad. I know it’s the worst thing that’s happened in this bed.
“Look at me,” I say again.
The hand stays at the back of his neck.
He looks at the floor.
His shoulders tense.
I sit up. I pull the sheet up to my collarbone. The chain at my throat moves with my breath.
I wait.
Maybe I said too much.
Maybe I’m falling alone.
He turns his head one half-turn.
He doesn’t look at me fully.
His voice comes out broken.
“Mila.”
He stops. He breathes out.
“I knew your sister.”
My heart stops.
Not metaphor.
Stops.
Then starts again. Too fast. Too hard.
I can’t breathe.
He turns. Sits facing me on the edge of the bed. His hand still at the back of his neck.
His eyes won’t meet mine.
“Three years ago,” he says. “Moscow. Dante sent me to map a network. I was posing as a buyer. French-Canadian cover. Martin Leclerc.”
The room tilts.
Moscow. Three years ago.
“I met Yelena at the first meeting.”
Yelena.
Her name in his mouth.
My throat is closing.
“She read me,” he says. “Took her a few meetings. She didn’t believe the cover.”
He stops. Swallows hard.
“After that, she came to me with an offer. Intel for extraction. Three women out.”
He looks at the floor.
“Herself. Your mother. Her sister.”
“Her sister,” I say.
He looks at the floor.
“You.”
My throat closes.
The room is spinning.
Her sister. Me.
“She told me about you,” he says. His voice cracks. “Sold by your stepfather when you were fifteen. To pay his debt. To show your mother and Yelena what defiance would cost.”
My hands have gone numb.
“Your mother was part of the plan,” he says. “Yelena wanted all three of you out.”
He stops.
“Your mother died two years after Moscow. Alexei had her killed when she tried to leave him.”
The world stops.
Mama is dead.
Mama is dead and he knew.
“We met for weeks after that,” he says. “Building the extraction route. Mapping safehouses. She was...”
He stops.
“She was smart. Careful. I thought we were safe.”
“She trusted you.” Each word comes out separate. Careful. “She fed you intel. She built a route with you. She trusted you to get us out.”
His jaw tightens.
“Yes.”
“And then.”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
Then he speaks again. Slower. Like the words are cutting his throat on the way out.
“The last meeting,” he says. “Alexei found out. Someone talked. A back-channel that wasn’t as clean as we thought.”
His hand tightens on the back of his neck.
“I woke up restrained. Concrete room.”
My vision blurs.
“I watched him torture her.”
No.
“She didn’t give me up,” he says. “She didn’t tell him I was there for extraction. She told him I was a buyer. That I’d been asking questions. That she’d been feeding me bad intel to protect the network.”
His voice breaks.
“He killed her anyway.”
My throat closes around something I can’t swallow.
“Was she looking at you.” Not a question. I’m not asking. “When he did it. Was her face turned toward you.”
The muscle in his jaw works.
“Yes.”
Yelena is dead.
Yelena is dead.
I can’t breathe.
Mama dead. Yelena dead.
Both dead.
He was there.
“Her last words,” he says. Barely a whisper. “Naydi Milochku. Obeshchay mne. Ty mne eto dolzhen.”
Find Milochka. Promise me. You owe me this.
The words land in my chest like a knife.
My sister’s last words.
My name.
She died asking him to find me.
“I swore,” he says. “I fucking swore.”
“And then.”
He looks up.
“You swore to her face.” My hands are in my lap. They’re shaking. I can’t stop it and I’m not going to pretend I can. “You swore and then what. What did you do after you swore.”
He doesn’t answer.
“What did you do, Nico.”
“Alexei threatened me and my family” His voice is barely sound. “He said if he even suspected I was looking for anyone connected to this, he would find them first. And he would make sure I knew it was my fault.”
I wait.
“So I stopped.”
My breath goes out.
“How long.” My voice is steady. It has nothing to do with calm. “How long did you look before you stopped.”
He doesn’t want to say it. I watch his jaw work. I let the silence sit.
“Months,” he says. Low. Like saying it smaller makes it smaller.
“Months.”
It sits in the air between us. I can’t make it mean anything. I try and it won’t. Months. She gave him her life and he gave her months.
“She was looking at you when he killed her,” I say. “And you gave her months.”
His eyes close.
I watch him close his eyes. His jaw is rigid. His hands are at his sides.
He’s quiet.
Silence.
“I flew home alone.”
His hands are shaking.
“I told Dante the recon was unsuccessful. That my contact went cold.”
Cold floods my body.
“I carried the lie for three years.”
Three years.
He’s known about Yelena for three years.
“I told myself you were already dead,” he says. His voice is flat now. Dead. “That looking would only get more people killed. That Yelena died for nothing and the best thing I could do was let it go.”
Let it go.
Let me go.
“I stopped looking,” he says.
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
My hands go to the mattress. Grip it.
Not to stop from falling. To stop from doing something else.
He stopped looking.
Yelena died begging him to find me.
And he stopped looking.
“I pulled you out of the Benedetti basement,” he says. “And I didn’t recognize you.”
My hands are shaking now too.
“Then I heard you hum a song,” he says. “In the hallway. I froze. I knew that song.”
Tonkaya Ryabina.
The lullaby. Yelena’s lullaby.
“I asked Izzy for a photograph that night,” he says. “She sent it to me. I looked at it once. I didn’t need to look again. I recognized it the moment I saw you.”
He looks at me for the first time since he started talking.