20. Sasha
20
SASHA
I’ve never hated anything more than these fluorescent lights.
It’s not the first time I’ve had that thought. Nor is it the first time I’ve squinted at lights just like these and wondered what fucking demon manufactures them. They have to be the product of some lower level of hell. The buzz, the glare, the intermittent flicker—it’s designed to drive a man mad.
It’s working.
I pace back and forth this cramped, overheated hallway, growling under my breath. Back and forth. Back and forth. A caged tiger in a bloodstained shirt.
An elderly woman clutches her rosary tighter as I stalk past her chair for the hundredth time. One look at her and I can guess her whole life story. Born here, raised here, will die here, in this barren patch of dirt. She’s never seen anything like me and she never will again.
So what the fuck do I care if she’s frightened? Guess what, babushka ? I’m frightened, too. I’m fucking terrified—not only of what might be happening on the other side of those stubbornly closed doors, but also of what I myself might do if the news that passes through them is anything less than, “Mr. Ozerov, your family is perfectly okay.”
Family. That’s a fucking word. For a long time now, it’s been meaningless to me. Since I buried my mother and broke my father’s neck, “family” has been Feliks and no one else.
Like everything else in my world, that has now changed.
A nurse approaches warily. She’s holding a clipboard between us like it would protect her from me if push came to shove. In Italian, she says, “ Signore, you’re bleeding.”
I pause and look behind me. I can see the muddy path I’ve been treading up and down the linoleum. I can also see the red slash of smeared blood dripping next to every footprint. When I check my bandages, I notice that I’ve once again ripped stitches wide open.
I’m hyper-aware of everything going on around me. The old nonna whispering Ave Maria under her breath. Mud caked beneath my fingernails. Paper rustling, wheels squeaking, and the lights, the damned lights, shrieking endlessly overhead.
Most of all, somewhere deep in my head, I hear the echoing scream.
Ariel’s scream.
The crunch of impact, skull on stone.
My hands, always fucking useless when it counts.
Pathetic.
I look at the nurse. “ Non puoi aiutarmi in nessun modo che conti davvero.”
You cannot help me in any way that matters.
She backs away, making the sign of the cross over herself. Smart woman. I’m in no mood for their concern, their procedures, their fucking paperwork. My body can wait. Everything can wait.
I resume pacing. Another lap. The mud is starting to dry, flaking off my boots with each turn. I count the steps—seventeen from end to end.
The memory of Ariel’s face twisted in pain haunts me. I did this. I grabbed her. I caused her to fall. If anything happens to her or our children because of my stupidity, my impatience…
My fist connects with the wall before I realize I’ve thrown the punch. Plaster cracks; the old woman shrieks. More stares. A security guard shifts in his chair, hand drifting uncertainly toward the radio on his belt.
I almost wish he’d call for backup. Try and move me, motherfucker. I dare you to try.
But the doors I wish would open remain closed. I strain to hear something, anything, but there’s nothing.
A janitor slides past me, mopping down the hall. The scent of the antiseptic he’s using sears my nostrils. Citrusy. Mama’s perfume used to smell like that. Like lemons.
Right up until it didn’t.
Her body splayed on the sidewalk. My hands, too small to stem the bleeding. Eyes blank…
My wounds pulse in time with my heartbeat. Blood trickles warm down my side, but the pain is almost welcome. It’s something to focus on besides the crushing weight of helplessness.
I’ve killed men with my bare hands. I’ve built an empire from blood and bullets and sheer fucking bravado. But here, in this sterile hallway with its buzzing lights and judging eyes, I’m nothing. Less than nothing. Just a man who couldn’t protect what matters most.
Another lap. Another seventeen steps. The mud continues to flake away, leaving pieces of me scattered across the floor like breadcrumbs leading from nowhere to nowhere.
I stop my pacing halfway through a lap and rest my forehead against the cold glass of the door, willing it to open. On the other side, Ariel fights for three lives. On this side, I can only wait and pray to a God I stopped believing in long ago.
Don’t you dare leave me, Sasha Ozerov, she’d said.
But I’m the one left behind, pacing these seventeen steps in a loop I can’t escape.
Through gritted teeth, I pull out my phone. The screen is still damp from the springs, but it works. Kosti picks up on the first ring.
“Don’t talk; just listen. Ariel fell. We’re at—” I look around me until I find the name of the hospital printed above the door. Then I read it off in clipped, emotionless syllables. “Get here. Now.”
He doesn’t waste time with questions, just grunts his acknowledgment before hanging up. Good man.
But when the call ends, my thumb lingers over the screen. It’s strange to be so distant from a man I’ve always called my brother. Since our days in the slums of Moscow together, causing chaos and evading my father’s tyranny, Feliks has been at my side for everything of importance. Now, I’m half a world away from him, and it’s like missing a limb.
Fucking hell. I’m getting sappy. God forbid he ever learns about these thoughts; he’d never let me hear the end of it.
I hesitate for a moment longer. It’s not assistance I need; there’s precious little he can do from America. There’s nothing to coordinate, nothing to torture, nothing to kill.
Nothing but the demons in my head.
I press call.
“Well, well.” His voice is hazy with sleep, but the sardonic edge is there. “The ghost speaks. Speaketh. Whatever.”
“Shut up.” But there’s no real heat in it. The cadence of his voice smacks me harder than I expected, like homesickness for a place I didn’t know I’d missed.
“Your social skills haven’t improved in exile, I see. “
“Ariel’s in the hospital. I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
The humor drains from his voice instantly. “How bad?”
“I don’t know yet. She fell. There was blood. That’s all I’ve got.”
A sharp intake of breath. Then: “What do you need?”
“Nothing. I just…” I trail off, unsure why I really called. To hear a friendly voice? To confess my failures to the one person who’s seen me at my worst? “I fucked up, brother.”
“You’re there with her?”
“Yes.”
“Then you haven’t fucked up completely.” A pause. “What about the babies?”
“No word yet.” My voice stumbles on the last word. Feliks is kind enough to pretend not to notice.
“Want me to fly out?”
“No. Stay in New York. Keep building.” Keep the empire standing for when I return.
If not for me, then for my children.
He hadn’t said much when I texted him about the pregnancy. Just a classic I’ll be damned. More Sasha Ozerovs soon? The world shudders. Maybe he knew that I wasn’t ready to assess the meaning of it all yet, and so it was easy to hide behind the usual jokes and bullshitting.
I start to say, “I—” But then the doors swing open and a man emerges.
He’s a doctor, by the looks of him, if white coats mean anything out here. He scans the room and sees me and his eyes widen.
“I have to go. The doctors?—”
“Call me when you know more,” he cuts in. “And Sasha… I’m here for you, brother. Always.”
He hangs up before I can give him shit for being so in touch with his feelings.
The doctor shifts his weight back and forth as I charge up to him. He’s got shadows under his eyes that say he’s been here for a while. With a gulp, he launches into rapid Italian, medical terms flying past faster than I can track. I catch fragments: monitoring, scans, distacco della placenta —placental something. My jaw clenches as it all washes over me in an incomprehensible wave.
I can’t deal with this shit. I need simple, direct.
“English,” I growl.
He switches over, though his accent remains thick and halting. “Placenta.” He mimes tearing. “ Distacco? Bleeding, maybe. We watch. One hour, no more.
My fists clench at my sides. “The babies?”
“Strong. Both, yes.”
“And she’s okay?”
If he’s intimidated, he hides it well. He nods. “She asks for you.” The doctor touches my arm—brave of him—and adds quietly, “Let us do our work. Soon. Soon, you see her.”
Then he turns and the doors swallow him whole. Behind me, the janitor mops my blood from the floor. Swirls of pink vanishing down the drain. Overhead, the fluorescents seem to increase in volume, like angry cicadas. I’m suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to be anywhere but here.
I see a sign over a nearby door: Obitorio.
I know that word. Morgue. That’ll work.
I push through and descend the stairs. The first thing that hits me is the smell: antiseptic masking decay, the same in every hospital across the world. My boots echo against linoleum floors that have seen too much death.
It might’ve been optimistic to hope for escape. The morgue’s fluorescent buzz matches the one upstairs—different circle of hell, but the same devils in charge.
And those devils seem determined to make me remember things I’d much rather forget.
I’m twelve again, sitting on a metal bench while technicians wheel my mother past in a black bag. Father’s hand clamps down on my shoulder, fingers digging into muscle and bone.
“Stop crying,” he hisses. “Ozerov men don’t cry.”
I’d bitten his wrist. A feral thing. As was he—he’d slammed my face against the corpse fridge. I swore into the metal, through bloodied lips: Never again. I’ll burn the world before I let someone I love die scared and cold and far from home.
Now, the morgue hums its old hymn.
Never again, you said.
Ariel’s blood streaks my palm.
Never again, you vowed.
So much for keeping my promises.
The morgue door creaks open. I don’t look up—don’t care if it’s the security guard, a meddling nurse, or even an animated corpse coming down here to awaken its brethren. But then a voice slices through the rot.
“I think all the security guys are too scared to tell you you aren’t supposed to be down here.”
Jasmine’s flats click against the tile stairs. She joins me sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, skirts pooling around her like ink. For fifteen years, I’ve only seen her in flickers of daydreams. I told myself she was happy, whole, free, because my conscience needed to know I’d done the right thing. Now, here she is: in a fucking morgue while her sister meets God knows what kind of fate upstairs.
How’s your conscience feel about that one, eh, Sashenka?
Her fingers wrap around my crimson-smeared hand. The gesture is so pure, so unthinking. It floors me. “What do we know?”
“Not much. They’re gonna be okay, I think.” The words rasp my throat raw. “For now. Alive, if nothing else.”
The scent of her steams between us. “And you?” She squeezes until I meet her gaze. “Are you alive, Sasha Ozerov?”
The refrigerating motors hum. Twelve-year-old me screams into the blank steel doors.
“I love her, you know.”
She brushes my knuckles. “I know.”
“I love her so much it fucking terrifies me. She makes me want to be… better. Different. More than just Yakov Ozerov’s son with his hands full of blood.” I swallow hard. “But look what I’ve done to her. To both of you. Look how close I came to?—”
“Stop.” Jasmine’s voice carries iron I’ve never heard before. “You are not him. You will never be him.”
“No?” I gesture at our surroundings: the morgue, the shadows, the guilt heavy as a coffin lid. “I put her here, just like he put my mother in the ground. The same violence. The same legacy.”
“The difference,” she says quietly, “is that you’re sitting here hating yourself for it. Where is he?”
“Burning in hell, if there’s any justice in this universe.”
“Hell is a place in your mind,” she murmurs, with the quiet of someone reciting something they’ve dwelled over for too many long nights. “You can walk out of it any time you like. All you have to do is?—”
The door bangs open. We both look up the stairs to see a timid nurse. “ Signore? Tua moglie…”
Jasmine’s grip on my hand tightens as I bound to my feet. “Sasha.”
I pause. The freezer at my back exhales frost. Jasmine is looking up at me. Her face is so like Ariel’s and yet so different, like someone drew one from the memory of the other.
“It’s going to be okay,” she tells me.
I wish I had her confidence.
I cover her hand with mine for a moment, unable to speak. Then I let go and follow the nurse up towards the light, leaving the ghosts of my father’s legacy behind in the morgue where they belong.
Upstairs, Ariel is waiting.