Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Yana
Lucia’s leg is trembling under my hands.
I work the ointment into the muscle along the back of her calf, slow and firm, following the line of the old injury up toward the knee. The water in the basin beside the bed is still hot. I have wrapped the joint twice already and let the heat soak in. Now comes the part she dreads.
She is crying as she holds onto my forearm with both hands, and she cries the way people cry when they are trying very hard not to, in small breaths, biting down on the worst of it.
The two maids stand at the foot of the bed with the towels and the basin, and they are not much better off.
Both of them are silently sobbing. Three days in, I have learned that these two love her.
Genuinely, the women who tend Lucia would lie down in the road for her.
“Almost done,” I tell her. “Almost. Breathe.”
I work the last of the tension out of the muscle and ease her leg back down onto the cushion.
“There. It’s over.”
The maids come forward and take away the basin and the towels, sniffing, trying to hide it. Lucia wipes her face with the heel of her hand and laughs at herself.
“There, there,” I say.
She sits up, wraps both arms around my waist, and presses her face against my side.
I freeze.
In three days, I have been hugged more than I have in my entire life. The first time she did it, I nearly put her on the floor on instinct before my body caught up and remembered how frail she is. Now, I have learned to hold still and let it happen. To endure it. It is not the worst thing.
I pat her back slowly.
“Do you think you can stand?” I ask. “Without the pain. Do you want to try?
She nods against my side.
I step back. She gathers herself, plants the good foot, pushes up off the edge of the bed, and gets to her feet.
I nod.
She takes one step. Then another. Her face changes.
“It doesn’t hurt as much,” she says. “Yana, it doesn’t hurt as much.”
I clap, with a smile, and help her sit back down before her leg tires.
“It’s only been three days,” I tell her. “But your leg was never as bad as they made you believe. The muscle wasted from disuse. The joint stiffened because no one moved it. With the physio, properly, every day, in about four months, you’ll walk without pain at all.”
She swallows. Her eyes well up again, a different kind this time, and she hugs me.
I pull her gently off me.
“Have you been doing what I told you?” I ask.
“Yes.”
She glances at the door.
I go and lock it. There is no maid in the room now; they have taken the basin to the kitchen.
Lucia lifts her pillow. Underneath it is a small pile of pills, three days’ worth, the ones she has been pretending to swallow and palming instead.
Then she leans over the side of the bed and pulls out a hidden ridge in the frame, a gap I showed her how to use, and shows me the small capsules tucked into it.
The injection ampules. The ones I have been swapping for saline before the nurse loads the syringe.
I help her sit back up.
“How do you feel?”
“Better than I have felt in years.”
She reaches out to hug me again. I lean back out of range.
“That’s enough hugs.”
She laughs and lets her arms drop. Then she looks at me, and her face goes thoughtful.
“Why don’t you tell my brother?” she says. “That you think my medicine is being tampered with. It was the first thing you said to me.”
It was. The first day, the moment I had her alone for ten seconds with the maids’ backs turned, I whispered it to her: I think someone is making you worse. Trust me. Hide the pills. Let me handle the injections. I had no right to expect her to believe me. She believed me anyway.
I think it is because she has decided I am Giovanni’s fiancée. She decided that on the first day in the study, and I have not corrected her because the correction was not worth the cost and because a woman who trusts her brother’s bride is a woman who will hide pills under a pillow for me.
“Your brother is busy,” I say.
That is the easy answer. The true answer is more complicated.
After day one, my plan had been simple. If Lucia got worse off the medication, then the medication was keeping her alive, and I was wrong, and I would abort.
If she got better, then someone in this house was poisoning her slowly and dressing it up as treatment.
Three days in, she is standing, walking, and crying from physio instead of from her own nerves.
That is not the body of a woman whose medicine was helping her.
But I am not going to move on a suspicion. I want day five. I want to be certain before I put this in front of a man who points guns at people for sport and adores exactly one person on this earth.
“As long as my brother trusts you,” Lucia says, “that’s fine.”
She looks at me and then toward the window.
“Can I go to the garden?”
“Of course.”
I help her into the wheelchair by the wall and tuck a blanket over her legs. Before I unlock the door, I crouch to her level.
“If we see anyone,” I say, “you can’t be too energetic, all right? You’re still weak. As far as anyone watching knows, you’re still weak. Let them think it.”
She nods, solemn, pleased to be in on a secret.
I unlock the door and wheel her out into the corridor.
She is smiling, her face turned up toward the light coming through the tall windows, and I am watching her color, which is better than it was three days ago, when we round the corner and nearly run into Fabiano.
He is on his crutch. He stops.
He looks at Lucia in the chair. He looks at me behind it.
Then he looks at me, and his voice is flat.
“Who gave you permission to take her out?”
Lucia coughs on cue.
It is a good cough, and she sags a little in the chair as she does it. The girl is a better actress than her brother gives her credit for.
“I asked her,” she says faintly. “I wanted air. Please don’t be cross.”
Fabiano does not look reassured. His eyes move over her, over me, slowly.
“Have you been taking your medicine?”
I see Lucia freeze. Just for a second. A small stillness in her shoulders that anyone watching closely would catch.
“Yes,” I say. “She has.”
Fabiano’s eyes come back to me.
“I don’t think I’m comfortable with this,” he says. “I think a doctor should examine her. Today.” He turns to Lucia. “Back to your room, please.”
“No,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Pardon?”
“The Don gave me direct instructions to care for her. I take orders from him. Directly. Not from anyone else in this house.”
The rage moves into his eyes fast. His face stays composed, but his eyes do not.
“This is not a joke,” he says, low. “This is the Don’s sister. If she is harmed under your care, he will not spare you. Do you understand what kind of man he is when it comes to her?”
“I have no intention of harming her,” I say. “Under her brother’s roof. I take my orders from the Don.”
I take the handles of the chair, and I wheel Lucia past him, down the corridor, around the next corner, out of his sight.
I stop the chair in an alcove.
I press my ear to the wall.
I can hear him. He has stayed where he was. He is making a call. His voice is low, but the corridor is stone and stone carries.
“I think we have a problem. A small one.” A pause. “We need to get rid of the Russian.”
Lucia goes white.
I put a finger to my lips. She presses both hands over her own mouth.
“To be safe,” Fabiano is saying, “I’ll have a doctor look at her. Yes. I’ll be more careful now.” Another pause. “But we may need to be more decisive.”
The line ends, and Lucia gasps.
It is small. It is involuntary. It is loud enough.
Fabiano’s voice cuts through the corridor. “Who’s there?”
“Fuck,” I breathe.
I wheel Lucia fast and quiet into the nearest room, a sitting room with the curtains half-drawn, and I pull the door shut behind us and hold the handle.
His footsteps come down the corridor. The crutch and the dragging step. They pass the door. They stop.
“Is anyone there?”
I do not breathe. Lucia does not breathe. My hand is on the handle, and my other hand has found the lamp on the table beside me without my deciding to, fingers around its base.
I see Lucia hold her breath.
The footsteps move on. The crutch fades down the corridor and around the far corner and is gone.
We wait. Ten seconds. Twenty.
Lucia lets her breath out in a thin, shaking stream. She turns in the chair to look up at me, and her eyes are huge in her pale face.
“Yana,” she whispers. “I— I think Fabiano—”
She doesn’t complete it. But I nod at her — something is fishy about Fabiano.