Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Yana
“How is she?” Giovanni asks the doctor.
The doctor is checking her pulse. He listens to her breathing.
He shines a small light into her eyes, lifts each lid carefully, and watches the way her pupils respond.
He does all of it in silence, with Giovanni standing two paces behind him.
I am at the wall by the door, and the men with guns are still at my back.
The doctor looks up.
“She is fine, Don Mondi. Her vitals are steady. The pressure on the carotid was applied correctly. She will wake in a few minutes with no lasting effect.”
Giovanni’s hand is on Lucia’s wrist. He has not let go of her wrist since he laid her down. His thumb is moving in small, slow circles against the inside of it, the way you might touch a child to keep them calm in sleep.
“The episode itself,” the doctor continues, “was a severe one. Stronger than the last. The pattern is consistent with the diagnosis. She was stimulated.”
“Stimulated?” Giovanni asks
“A presence in the room she was not expecting. Unfamiliar voices.” The doctor pauses carefully. “It does not take much, Don Mondi. With patients in her condition, even gentle interruptions of routine can trigger a severe episode.”
Giovanni is quiet for a moment.
“Why doesn’t she recognize me?”
He says it without turning.
The doctor hesitates. He is choosing his words very carefully. I watch him decide which true answer he can afford to say.
“In her dissociative states, Don Mondi, she is reliving. She is in the original time. The trauma. The body she remembers having.” Another pause.
“She cannot reconcile the man you are now with the boy she is trying to protect. So she does not recognize you. She is looking for a child, and you are not one. Her mind refuses the match.”
Giovanni does not say anything.
The doctor waits a moment, sees that nothing more is coming, and turns to gather his bag. His Capo is beside him, and he steps in, touching the doctor’s elbow.
“This way, Doctor.”
At the door, the doctor stops and looks back.
“Don Mondi, please, she must not be stimulated further today.”
The doctor goes, and the door closes.
Giovanni stays where he is, on the side of the bed, his thumb at his sister’s wrist, his eyes on her face. The room is very quiet. I can hear the breathing of the men behind me. I can hear my own, too.
He stays like that for a while, then he stands. He walks towards me without looking at me. His face has gone blank again. He passes within a hand’s width, and he does not slow.
“Bring her.”
His hand grabs around my upper arm before either of his men can react. He yanks me, and I stumble two steps to regain my balance. He does not let go or slow down, and he is walking me out of Lucia’s room.
“Giovanni —”
He does not answer or look at me. His grip is bruising.
He drags me past two rooms and down a flight of stairs.
Through a hall I have not seen before. He stops at a heavy wooden door, pushes it open with his shoulder, and pulls me into the room behind him.
It’s a study with books along one wall — a desk near the window. A heavy rug covers most of the floor.
He releases my arm and shoves me so hard that my shoulder hits the bookshelf. Two books fall behind me. I plant my feet on the floor, and I try to turn fast, but he is on me, his hand at my throat, pressing me back against the spines of the shelf.
I gasp for breath, and I drive my knee up into his stomach. He grunts, and his grip loosens for a half second. I shove off the shelf and put a few paces between us before he has fully recovered, but he recovers fast. Fast enough that the gun is in his hand before I have my own back foot set.
He points it at my face, and I swallow.
There is anger in his face. I have not, until this room, seen Giovanni Mondi at the edge of his control. The way he is now.
His eyes are not laughing. There is no smile playing under the surface waiting to come out. There is pain behind his eyes that I have never seen there before. I move slowly backward toward the far wall, my hands open, my eyes on his.
My back finds the wall. He follows, and the barrel is still on me.
“Why?”
His voice is quiet.
“Why were you in my sister’s room?”
“I was walking in the corridor.” I keep my voice even. “I heard her call out. The door was open. I stepped in.”
“Cazzata.” The word is low, and he barely opens his mouth around it. “Do you think I’m an idiot? An accident?”
“I’m telling you what happened.”
“You’re telling me what’s convenient. You must think that I am easy to fool.”
“I have nothing else to tell you.”
He clicks the safety off, and it echoes.
“I have a very good mind to blow your brains across that wall,” he spits between his teeth.
I look at him, and I know he is not bluffing.
I have seen him do worse things to people who irritated him less.
I have nothing to negotiate with him about; he wants to hear what he wants to hear.
I have nothing to lose by pushing back because if he is going to fire, he is going to fire whether I make myself small or not.
I get off the wall and step into the gun.
“Then do it,” I say. “But don’t take your failure out on me. It is not my fault that you cannot keep your own sister safe in your own house. I went into a room and helped a woman drink a glass of water. That is all I did.”
He slams the gun against the wall beside my head. The sound goes through the room, and the wood splinters. My ears ring, but I do not flinch.
“Don’t think I can’t kill you!”
I look at him calmly. “You can.”
We are very close now.
The gun comes back up, and he presses the barrel into the soft place under my jaw. He angles it so it tips my chin up. My pulse is against the cold metal.
I am supposed to be afraid.
I am not afraid.
What I am is something else, and the recognition of it is more disorienting than the gun.
The heat is moving down my throat into my chest and lower.
The feel of him is this close to me — the smell of him and the shake in his hand.
The barrel under my jaw is doing something to me it should not be doing, and the body that betrayed me last night is betraying me again.
I can feel his familiar breath on my face, my head snaps back to his tongue inside my mouth, the hardness of his bites, and how my body reacts.
My body is reacting similarly now. I can feel my nipples hardening just because he’s this close.
My eyes fall on his lips, and I swallow.
I lift my eyes to his, hoping my face isn’t betraying what this is doing to me.
“Kirill trained the fear out of you, did he?” Giovanni says. His voice has dropped lower. “Hmm? Is that the trick? You don’t fear anything?”
I reach up and close my hand around the barrel of the gun.
I hold it where it is.
“Kill me,” I say, “and you get nothing from Kirill. Nothing. You start a war you cannot afford while your sister gets worse in a room with the curtains drawn.”
He presses the gun harder into my jaw. It is going to bruise.
“What makes you think I cannot get whatever I want out of Kirill without you alive?”
He leans in. His mouth is close to my ear. I feel cold shivers.
“Hmm? You’ve got a smart mouth, Russian.”
I look at him. I am close enough to count the dark in his eyes. Close enough to see the snake at his collarbone where the open shirt has shifted. Close enough to see the muscles of his chest and the tattoos on his body.
I snap myself back to reality. He might really kill me here, I think. I can’t die yet; I haven’t seen Christov.
The words come before I have decided to say them.
“I have a brother too.”
His eyes do not move from mine.
“I would kill anyone who laid so much as a hand on a hair on his head,” I say. “I would never want to hurt your sick sister. Only a monster would think that, and believe it or not, Don, I am not that kind of monster.”
He looks at me for a long time, and then he smirks but does not make eye contact.
“A sob story,” he says.
“I was just.”
I admit, I said it to move him. He catches on quickly. But I can see that the tension in his face is gone.
“Whatever it is. Save it!”
He pulls away, and I say, “I can help you with your sister.”
His smirk fades; the gun does not move from my jaw, but the pressure changes. Then his hand drops it down to his side.
He turns and walks away from me toward the desk. He sets the gun on the wood. He does not turn back.
“Go to your room,” he says. “Stay there.”
I do not move. “I can help your sister,” I say again.
He is at the window now, his back to me, both hands on the desk.
“Don’t bother yourself,” he says before I have spoken. “I have doctors and specialists. I have flown half of Europe to that room. I do not need a Russian assassin’s opinion on my sister.”
“Keeping her locked up in that airless room is making her sicker. You heard the doctor; she is so cut off from reality that she can’t recognize you. She’ll soon forget you.”
“You don’t know anything! She is only having episodes!” he thunders, his face red with rage. It’s the third time today I have seen him lose his calm, and I am oddly fascinated.
I walk a step closer, not too close, not close enough to incur his wrath. Close enough that he hears me.
“She doesn’t look sick enough to be cooped up. Leaving her locked up in a dark room is only making her worse! She is all alone!”
“I spend time with her.” His voice is low. “You do not know anything.”
“She is physically safe,” I say. “Yes. I understand that part. I do.” I keep my voice low. “But her mind is not safe in that room. That is exactly why she is troubled.”
He turns, and his face is closed.
“I can help her.”
“You cannot.”
I think about the basement in Sokolniki.
Several men were tied to chairs, three days in, eyes already going dark.
Kirill’s voice teaching me how to tear a person’s psyche apart with nothing but information and the careful manipulation of what they thought they knew.
And how to heal their broken minds when he wanted them to be functional.
“I don’t know what your game is, but thank you for the offer. I’ll pass.”
“Give me a week.”
He looks at me.
“Supervised,” I add. “Your men in the room. Your capo at the door. I will not be alone with her. You watch every minute. One week.”
“And what exactly,” he says, “do you propose to do?”
I look at him.
“I’ll help you get her back.”
His hand reaches out, and he grabs my jaw. He tilts my face up, his eyes are on mine, I feel the heat of his palm against my skin, I feel the snake at his collarbone moving when he breathes, and I feel my body jolt.
I shut it down.
“What’s the catch? Why do you want to help my sister so badly?”
Of course, there is a catch. I couldn’t care less about him and his sister.
“You and Kirill,” I say. “Split the route ownership 50/50. He keeps half, and you take half. No more attacks on his family.”
He stares at me then laughs. His laughter has very little humor.
“Such loyalty,” he says. “I told you, didn’t I. I told you I could fuck you better than he does. And here you are, still negotiating for him. Even after he had already agreed to the deal.”
His hand stays on my jaw a moment longer.
Then he lets go and steps back.
“I am not in the mood,” he says, “for your wagers.”
He walks toward the door.
“Go to your room. Avoid my sister’s wing. If I find you near her room again without my permission, we will not have a conversation. Are we clear?”
He stops with one hand on the door.
“Are we clear?”
“Clear.”
“No one knows about her existence. I have a good mind to get rid of you for this,” he turns to me with a smile, “but I did give the Pakhan my word.”
His eyes find mine. “I’ll kill you if any soul outside this house learns about her existence.”
He pushes my shoulder on his way past. I stagger back a step. He is through the door, the door is closing, and his footsteps are moving away down the corridor.
I stand in the empty study.
The gun is on the desk.
I stand, look at the door where he disappeared, and think about what just happened.
I think about his sister and the strength with which she held my wrist. There is something fishy about her illness, and finding out about it would help Kirill.