He begins rattling at me, long sentences of gibberish I can’t ever hope to understand. I heave a sigh and wonder how long he has been knocking boots with the woman I’ve nicknamed Slinky.
Then something changes in the way he is looking at me, and dread creeps up my spine leaving a cold trail of goosebumps.
Fuck.
He snatches the keys up from the small table and begins unlocking the door to my cell.
“No,” I say, holding up my hand in front of me like that would be enough to stop him advancing on me with that look in his eyes.
I shake my head from side to side as he gets closer and closer and wonder if anyone will come if I scream.
That’s what I do. I scream so loud, let all the rage and fear and sadness I feel, fill it from the depths of my soul.
The sound startles him and he jumps back, wide-eyed. Only then he seems to panic, and he lunges at me. One hand at the back of my head and the other clamped tightly over my mouth.
Boots are thudding down the corridor. The door is thrown open hard enough that it makes a splintering, cracking sound when it smashes against the wall. Then Moustache is behind Ken, fury pumping from him as he pulls Ken off me and throws him out of the cell, yelling words I don’t need to understand to know they are bad.
Ken spits near the old man’s boots, answers back with no regard or respect for the older man. Then Moustache says something that makes Ken go white, and I wonder if it’s in relation to Slinky.
After Ken storms out, Moustache turns to me.
“Mi dispiace, Signorina Orlova,” he says, and despite me knowing not a bloody jot of this language, I know he is apologizing.
“It’s okay,” I say, with a small smile. It’s all I can muster. “Grazie,” I add, hoping to lighten the tension in the small space.
But he doesn’t say “Prego,” like usual, in his gruff despondent tone. He just looks at me with big sad eyes like he regrets every decision in his life that brought him here.
“You have a daughter,” I say to him. “Bambino?”
He looks at me for a long moment, then leans back to look through the doorway that leads to the corridor beyond. He reaches behind him and pulls his phone out of his back pocket. After he unlocks it and swipes around the screen a few times, he turns it to me.
A picture of a woman about my age smiles out at the phone, holding a kid that could only be around three or four years old.
“Mia figlia, Marina,” he says, pointing at the woman and then pointing at me. I make him think of his daughter. “Mia nepote, Ginevra,” he adds, lowering his meaty finger to the little girl in Marina’s arms.
“Bella,” I say, wishing I knew more words. Since I don’t I settle for my hand on his arm again and repeat myself with a smile. “Bella.”
He smiles for a moment, then locks his phone back up and places it in his pocket.
I don't sleep so much as I surface and sink, over and over, all through the night. Every sound outside the door yanks me up out of whatever thin rest I've managed, heart slamming, until I recognize it as nothing, as a door somewhere else, as a dog barking outside, as the ordinary noise of a house full of dangerous men going about their evening.
Somewhere in the black hours I catch myself doing the thing I do at home when the kitchen goes quiet and someone needs a distraction. I start humming, low, under my breath, one of Ma's old songs, the one about a girl waiting by the water for a sailor who never learned to swim. It's a stupid, sad little tune, and I don't even like it that much, but it's hers, and it's mine, and it's the only thing in this stone room that belongs to me.
Nobody comes to silence me this time. Maybe they're asleep. Maybe they've decided the crazy girl singing to herself in the dark isn't worth the walk down the hallway.
I sing it twice through, quiet, and somewhere in the second pass I stop shaking.
I press my forehead to my knees and I make myself a promise, the same one I've been circling for days now, except this time I let it sink all the way down.
If I get out of this, I stop waiting.
I stop scrolling through strangers looking for the version of a life I'm supposed to want. I stop being so good at making everyone else happy that I forget to go looking for my own. I stop letting people assume I'm fine because fine is easier for them to carry.
I don't know who's coming for me yet, whether it's my brothers with their guns and their fury, or something else entirely. But I know they're coming. I believe it the way I believe the tide, the way I believe blood.
And when they do, I'm not going to be the woman I was before.
I lift my head, and in the dark I can just make out the shape of the door, the bars, the shadow of the small table and chair, empty now because no one watches me at night. I suppose they think I sleep through.
