Chapter 9 #2
I step out, but I do not have a plan. I am not sure I am supposed to be out of the room, but the door was unlocked, and no one stopped me. I am not going to spend the day in the bed where he put me last night.
I take the corridor slowly, and for the first time, I look at the house properly for the first time. The walls are pale stone, and the light comes in through tall windows. The house is enormous and quiet, and there is no one in any of the rooms I pass.
I am at the end of the second corridor when I hear a soft, faint voice.
“Please.”
I stop.
“Please, someone. Anyone.”
It is coming from a door three paces ahead of me. The door is ajar, and the room beyond it is dark, the curtains drawn against the morning.
I draw closer, and my hand drifts toward the pin in my hair on instinct as I remember I do not have a gun.
“Who is there?” I call out as I step closer.
A weak cough comes, and the voice follows. “I’m — I’m here. By the window. Please.”
I push the door open, and the room is shadowed. There is a four-poster bed against the far wall, and a figure in it, propped against pillows, one hand stretched toward a glass of water on the bedside table which has slid too far for it to reach.
It’s a woman. She looks young, maybe my age, maybe younger. She is so thin that the bones of her wrist look like they are about to come through the skin. Her face is the color of paper. Her hair has been brushed by someone who cared, but the woman herself looks like she has not stood up in days.
She turns her face toward me when I step in. Her eyes are large in her thin face. They are dark brown with a gold tint in the iris.
I know those eyes.
From where?
I stop in the middle of the room.
“The water,” she says. “Please. I can’t reach.”
I go to the bedside. I pick up the glass, and I hold it for her, my hand under hers because her hand alone is not steady enough. She drinks in small sips. Some of the water runs down her chin, and she does not seem to notice. She finishes and sinks back against the pillows.
“Thank you.”
I set the glass down, but I don’t move from the bedside.
“Who are you?” I ask.
She smiles weakly. “Lucia.”
The name means nothing to me. I look at her. I look at the thin wrists and the pale skin and the careful way she is holding the side of her body as if something underneath the blanket hurts.
And my heart skips as I think of Christov.
The thought arrives out of nowhere. The image of him I do not have because I have not seen him since he was ten, but an image my mind constructs anyway, of a thin boy in a dim room in a house somewhere far from anything he knows, waiting for someone to bring him water.
The grainy photograph in Kirill’s file. The line of a jaw I half-recognize.
I steady myself and snap out of it.
“Are you a prisoner here?” I ask. My voice is more careful than I mean it to be.
Lucia’s eyes widen slightly. Then she laughs. It is a small, thin laugh that turns into a cough, and she presses her hand to her chest until it stops.
“No,” she says. “No. I’m — I’m sick. I’ve been sick for a long time.”
I look around the dim room. The drawn curtains. The closed window. The cup of water is just out of reach.
“This room is making it worse,” I say. “You should have light and some air.”
She shakes her head. “He says the light hurts my eyes during the bad days. He’s — He wants me comfortable.”
He? Giovanni?
“Who looks after you?”
She opens her mouth to respond, but a voice from the corridor cuts across the room.
“Who is in there?”
It is loud and sharp. A man’s voice I do not know. I tense up, and Lucia’s whole face changes.
It happens in less than a second. The weak smile is gone. Her eyes have gone wide and dark, and the present is leaving them, the way I once watched my brother’s eyes leave during a fever. She is looking past me, but it’s almost like she is not in this room anymore.
“Giovanni,” she whispers.
I freeze, and she grabs my wrist. Her grip is shocking, much stronger than her body should allow, the wiry grip of someone whose body has learned to summon strength for one purpose only.
“Giovanni, hide.” Her voice is rising. “Get behind me. Get behind me.”
The door bangs open, and two men stand in the doorway, their hands on their holsters. Behind them, I can hear running in the corridor, more voices, the percussion of boots on the floor.
“Step away from her,” the first man says to me. He has his hand on his gun. “Hands up! Step away from the lady.”
Lucia is on her feet.
I do not know how. Her legs cannot hold her, the body underneath the blanket cannot support her weight, and yet she is on her feet, and she has pulled me behind her with a strength that does not belong to her. She is between me and the door, her arms spread wide.
“Don’t you touch him!” Her voice is not weak anymore. It is high and certain. “Don’t you touch my brother!”
I am behind her shoulder, looking past her at the men in the doorway. My mind is moving fast.
Trying to figure out what is happening?
“Lady Lucia, please, step away from her —”
“I will not.” She is shaking with the effort of standing. Her grip on me has not loosened. “He is small. You can’t have him; you cannot take him from me again —”
“Lucia.” The man’s voice is changing now, less sharp, more careful. “Lucia, that is not — Please, that is not your brother; that is —”
“Giovanni! Stay behind me!” she screams.
The men do not move closer. They stand in the doorway with their hands away from their weapon.
Whatever this is, they have seen it before, and they have orders.
I hear running in the corridor, which feels monstrously fast, and Giovanni appears at the doorframe. He is half-dressed. A shirt thrown on but not buttoned. His feet are bare, and he is panting.
How far did he run?
His eyes find Lucia.
His face is panicked, and the amused arrogance is gone. The performance is gone, and calculating stillness is gone. What is left is something raw and small and frightened in a way I would not have believed his face could be.
“Lucia,” he says.
I expect recognition, but her grip on my wrist tightens.
“Sir.” She isn’t yelling again; she’s pleading. “Sir, please. Please, it’s you; it’s you again; please, please let my brother go; he hasn’t done anything; please —”
Giovanni takes a step into the room.
“Angel,” he says. “It’s me. Look. Look at my face.”
“Giovanni,” she says to me desperately, “don’t be scared. He won’t hurt you!”
He stops. I have watched him for weeks now. I have seen his cruelty and his calm and the particularity behind both. I have not, until this moment, seen him this helpless.
He stands a few meters from his sister, neither pushing nor giving an order.
His hands are open at his sides. His eyes have not left her face.
There is a wetness at the corners that he is not bothering to hide because every part of him is concentrated on the woman in front of him, and there is nothing left over for managing his face.
This. The thought lands in me. This is it.
Giovanni Mondi has a sister, and he loves her so much that he stands motionless in a doorway, his face one he would never let any of his men see because she is in front of him and does not know who he is.
Lucia is shaking, and her legs are about to give out. Her grip on my wrist is strong, but the rest of her is collapsing in slow motion, and the men in the doorway have started to inch forward because they know what is coming.
I step into her space and slide my arm under hers, the way I do for Kirill’s men going into shock, and I take her weight. I lean in close to her ear, and I press my fingers carefully against the side of her throat, and I press in.
Her eyes close, and she slumps against me.
“Lucia —”
Giovanni runs across the room, and his hand closes around my upper arm, and he shoves me away. I almost lose her dead weight before he has her, before he has both arms under her and is lowering her gently to the bed.
“What did you do?!”
His voice is not his voice. It is something underneath, something I have not heard yet.
His men are behind me. I hear two weapons, and I hear the cock of the closer one against my head. I do not turn my head.
“Calm down,” I say to him. I keep my own voice steady. “She is breathing. I just put pressure on the carotid. She’ll come back up in a minute.”
He has her on the bed. His hand is at her throat, two fingers under her jaw, finding her pulse himself. His other hand is on her cheek.
He does not turn to look at me.
“You had better pray,” he says, and his voice is the flat absence I am used to, only now there is something different within it, “that my sister is all right.”
The men behind me close in, and I feel the barrel of a gun touch the back of my head, just behind the right ear.
I slowly raise my hands.
“She’ll be all right,” I say.
He still has not looked at me.
He is bent over her, his fingers at her pulse, his other hand smoothing back her hair from her forehead with a tenderness I would not have credited him with possessing thirty seconds ago.
His shoulders are shaking very slightly.
He is holding himself absolutely still, and his shoulders are still shaking.
I watch the back of his head, and I watch his hand on her cheek.
I think about the man in the warehouse who had an air of insanity about him. The man in the yard who pressed a gun barrel between my thighs. That man, whoever he is, isn’t present in this room. The man in front of me is something I have never seen.
The barrel against the back of my head presses a degree harder. I keep my hands open.
If Kirill ever needs to make Giovanni Mondi stop, I know how, now.
I just spotted Giovanni Mondi’s weakness.