Chapter 34
MILA
The boat is moving against the current.
The Mississippi at this hour is flat and slow and the boat is pushing upstream and the water is letting it. Black hull, dark waterline, low profile. Marco’s. Six men at the bow in tactical gear. Renzo at the front of them.
I am at the rail.
Dark layers. My own boots. The chain at my throat under the dark shirt. The folding knife in the side pocket of my pants.
The wooden cross is in my closed left fist.
I have not opened my hand since Nico put it there at dawn. The wood has gone warm from my skin. The bevel. The cross-piece. The impression of it pressed into my palm now, part of the lines there.
Carry it. Bring it home.
I press my fingers in harder.
He said it in English. He wanted me to hear it in the language I am still learning to trust. I understood that without him saying it, the same way I understand most things about him now, in the body, before thought, the way I used to understand music before I understood that I was playing it.
I understood it and I did not say anything back and I have been carrying that too, since dawn, alongside the cross.
He said I love you in the dark before we dressed.
He said it three times. I love you. Do you hear me? I love you. I have loved you since the first minute.
My mouth did not open.
I wanted it to. The words were there, not in Russian, in English, the language of the household and the kitchen and the back room, the language I have been learning to live in.
Three words. Simple. The kind of words I have known the shape of since I was a child, in Papa’s house, before Alexei took the house and everything in it.
Ya lyublyu tebya. Papa said it to Yelena and me every Sunday morning. Every Sunday for ten years until there were no more Sundays. He said it like it was ordinary, like it cost nothing, like breathing.
I forgot that it could be simple.
I have not said those words to a living person since I was ten years old.
My body did not know how to form them. Not because I didn’t feel them.
Because the last time I felt them for someone, I brought him tea and sat beside him while he died and did not know it was a death at all until it was over, and the words went into the ground with him.
Nico’s arms were around me and his face was in my hair and the words sat in my chest like a closed fist and I pressed my forehead harder into his neck and I held on instead.
I am going to say it when he comes back.
When. Not if.
Renzo crosses to me at the rail. Vest, comms set in his ear, sleeves rolled. His jaw set, his hands still, watching the tree line.
“Stay at the rail until Marco sends for you. You stay in the boat until I come for you myself.”
“I know what I have to do.”
He looks at me for a beat. Nods. Turns back to his men.
The boat anchors in a small cove near the riverbank.
The team moves over the side and into the cane. Spanish moss heavier here than at the compound. The cane is half-fallow. Alexei has not been farming, only maintaining the appearance of a plantation. The air smells like silt and cane gone past its harvest. The sun is not yet at the horizon.
Renzo at the front. Then four men. The medic stays on the boat with me. One guard at the bow.
They go through the cane and the cane closes behind them and they are gone.
I have the earpiece in.
I wait.
The cross in my closed left fist.
The earpiece is silent.
I look at the river. The light has started at the edge of the trees, gray-pink, the water going from black to that flat dark gray it goes at the moment before the day decides.
It is the same sky Nico was watching when I woke and found him awake.
The same dark lifting. He was brushing my hair off my face and his eyes were somewhere far away and I watched him do it from across the pillow: this is what safe feels like.
Not the absence of danger. This. A man who watches you sleep and does not want anything from you except that you keep breathing.
The earpiece crackles.
Marco. Quiet.
“Brick is empty. Perimeter holds. Moving to the main house.”
My pulse is in my throat, high and fast. Not only fear.
Fury underneath it, old and clean, my jaw going tight with it, the kind that has been sitting in my chest since I was twelve years old and learned that the man who smiled at Mama across the dinner table had different eyes when no one important was watching.
The cross in my fist.
I press harder.
Three minutes.
I have not been within reach of him in years.
I am going to be soon.
Yelena knew this moment was possible. She planned for it from Moscow.
She gathered intel for years, traced the financial threads, mapped the routines, documented the lieutenants.
She gave everything she had to the man she trusted, and the man she trusted found me, and now I am standing on a boat in the Mississippi at dawn with her cross in my hand and her work in my head and her name in my chest.
For you, sestra. Sister. For you and for Papa and for Mama and for every girl in every basement who does not have someone standing on a river at dawn.
The earpiece crackles.
Marco.
“Front door breached. Two down. Three minutes to dining room.”
Three minutes.
I breathe.
The light is coming up at the edge of the trees and somewhere past the cane field and the oak alley there is a house, and in that house there is a dining room, and Nico is moving toward it right now, taped ribs and healing eyebrow and all of it, moving toward the man who killed Yelena while I stand here with her cross in my hand.
Come back. Come back. Come back.
I did not say it at the door this morning. I did not say it at the boat. I am saying it now, too late for him to hear it.
Come back and I will say it in English and in Russian and in every language Papa gave me. I will say it until he believes me. I will say it until I stop being afraid of what it costs to mean it.
The earpiece crackles.
Marco. Voice flat and steady.
“House clear. He’s alive. Bring her up.”
He’s alive.
My hand opens. Just for a second. The cross in my palm, the impression of it, the warmth of the wood. I close my fingers back around it.
He is alive and the man who killed Yelena is in that dining room and I am going to walk in there and name him.
I step off the boat onto the bank.
Renzo steps off beside me. He does not take my arm or lead. He walks at my left shoulder, slightly behind.
The cane field is in front of us. Past the cane, the oak alley. Past the alley, the house.
The man who killed Papa and Yelena and Mama and five years of my life is in the dining room.
Alive.
For not much longer.
I walk into the cane.