— MIA —
The room was too quiet.
That was the first thing I noticed after Damien left. The kind of quiet that doesn't feel like peace, it feels like pressure. Like the walls are waiting for something.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the door he had closed behind him and tried to think clearly. Tried to make a list, the way Ryan always told me to when things got overwhelming. He used to say: write it down, Mia, make it a list, lists make things smaller.
I didn't have a pen.
I didn't have anything.
I had a room that wasn't mine, in a house that wasn't mine, belonging to a man I despised.
That was the list.
I lasted forty minutes before the walls started closing in.
I'd always been like that. Ryan used to joke that I had the stillness tolerance of a caffeinated squirrel. He wasn't wrong. Sitting with my own thoughts in an unfamiliar room while the rest of the house hummed quietly around me was a specific kind of torture I wasn't built for.
I got up. Tested the door, half expecting it to be locked.
It wasn't.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, listening. Nothing. The corridor stretched in both directions, lined with dark wood panels and low lights that cast everything in amber. It felt like a place that had been designed to look like old money, and probably was.
I went left.
The house was larger on the inside than it looked from the drive, which was saying something. I moved slowly, not sneaking exactly, but carefully, the way you move through someone else's space when you're not sure what the rules are yet. I knew the rules. Damien had listed them clearly. Ground floor, east wing, library on the second floor.
I wasn't breaking any rules.
I was just learning the shape of the cage.
The ground floor was all clean lines and controlled darkness. A formal dining room with a table long enough to seat twelve people and no sign it was ever used. A sitting room with furniture that looked expensive and untouched. A kitchen that was startlingly normal, warm and bright, smelling faintly of coffee and something herbed.
I found the staircase to the second floor at the far end of the east wing. The library door was slightly open.
I pushed it.
I stopped right at the entrance to the library, it was huge.
It was floor-to-ceiling on three walls, every shelf packed. Not decorative packing, not the kind of library that exists to look impressive, but the real kind, where books are stacked sideways on top of other books and some of the spines are cracked and there are paper slips marking pages throughout. Someone had actually read all of this. Someone spent time in here.
There was a reading chair by the window, worn at the arms. A lamp beside it, angled just right.
I ran my fingers along the spines without pulling anything out, reading titles in the dim light. Fiction, mostly. History. Some philosophy. The organization was loose, almost organic, like the collection had grown without a system and nobody had tried to impose one.
I nearly missed it.
It was on the third shelf from the bottom, spine faded, tucked between two thicker volumes like it was hiding. I pulled it out and looked at the cover.
The Brothers Karamazov.
Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I stood very still.
Six years ago on Ryan's floor, I had asked Damien what he was reading. He had held up a book with no picture on the cover and said: Dostoevsky.
That was that book from six years ago.
That was also the last day that I saw Damien, until today...
I opened the cover.
There was writing on the inside page. Small, precise, in dark ink.
"For when the world stops making sense. It won't fix anything. But it helps to know someone else felt it too."
No signature. No date.
I closed the book carefully and held it in both hands and didn't know what to do with the feeling that came with it.
✦ ✦ ✦
I was still in the library when he came in.
I heard him on the stairs first, unhurried, and then the door opened and Damien stood in the frame looking at me the way he had looked at me at the cemetery. Like he was confirming something.
I was sitting in the reading chair with the book closed in my lap. I didn't try to hide it. There was no point.
"You are late for dinner," I said.
"I know." He came in without being invited, which was technically his library in his house, but still. He stopped a few feet away and looked at what I was holding. Something moved through his expression, brief and unreadable. "You found it."
"Was it hidden?"
"No."
"Then I found it." I paused. "Who wrote in it?" He looked at the book for a moment. Then he sat down in the chair across from me, which surprised me. I had expected him to stay standing. Standing felt like Damien. Sitting felt like...someone else.
"I did," he said.
I looked at him.
"To yourself?"
A pause. The kind that means someone is deciding how much to say.
"It was Ryan's copy." He said it the way you say something you have been carrying for a while. Flat, careful. "I gave it to him the year before he died. He never opened it. It was not far from where he was killed, it probably fell out while he was running away, it was in his backpack along with his phone and wallet."
There was an uncomfortable pause and then he continue.
"That's what someone told me a long time ago when my world was falling aparat. Ryan was dear to me, that's why I wanted him to have such a reminder, that he knows that he can always count on me. But in the end I was the one who dragged him into all that and left him. I hoped that he would understand that he shouldn't enter my world and that he would leave it when I stopped seeing him, but without me he got involved in many bad things. I really wanted to help him even then and near the end of everything, but I didn't succeed. I failed him. I let you down too..."
The room was very quiet.
So many questions were going through my head at that moment, both about Ryan and Damien, but I didn't ask anything about Damien, I know that he wouldn't reveal any of that to me now, and what I know that he is the head of the mafia is too much.
But again, I couldn't help but feel sadness for him as well.
What made him do all this, how did he become the head of the mafia in the first place and why didn't he try to get away from this kind of life that he didn't want for Ryan? Where did he disappear for whole year after Ryan was killed?
I couldn't muster up the courage to ask him about any of that, I can see from him that he said more than he thought he would say.
He probably expected anger or tears, but neither of them showed on my face, I wanted to reveal the truth more.
"Tell me how he died."
✦