Chapter 21
MOLLY
The light is too bright to go to it.
Instead, I shut my eyes tighter. Doesn’t matter, though.
It comes through my eyelids before I’m fully conscious.
I’m aware of it for what feels like a long time before I’m aware of anything else—before the sounds, the low, persistent hum of equipment, and the distant murmur of voices and the acoustic texture of a large institutional space doing its quiet, ceaseless work.
Before the feeling, which arrives in increments, a full-body inventory of sensations that are not pleasant and range from a dull generalized ache to a sharper insistence across my chest and shoulders that sharpens further when I try to take a deeper breath.
Before the memory.
Pieces arrive without regard for narrative order. Flowers. I wanted flowers. I needed something new and living, and I went with Vet to get it.
The babies.
I try to sit up, and my body registers a formal objection in the form of a pain that starts at my sternum and radiates outward in a way that makes sitting up both difficult and inadvisable, and I make a sound I didn’t intend to make, and then there are hands.
They’re careful, immediate, the hands of someone who has been waiting for exactly this moment.
“Easy.” Igor’s voice. Low and controlled, the voice of a man who has been keeping a great many things in order through sheer application of will. “Don’t sit up yet. Give yourself a moment.”
I open my eyes the rest of the way and find him—Igor Tabakov, my husband’s sovetnik, a man I have spent months learning to read, standing here with his hands on my shoulders until he’s satisfied I won’t budge much.
He looks tired, like a man running on something other than sleep, but his eyes are alert and fixed on my face.
“The babies,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I expect, abraded at the edges because my throat hurts. “Igor. The babies—”
“Are fine.” He says it immediately, before I can finish or spiral.
“Both of them. The doctors confirmed it. You were not shot—the airbag deployed on impact, and you lost consciousness from the force of it, but there was no penetrating injury. You have bruising across your chest and shoulders, a mild concussion, and you were knocked out. But the babies are fine, Molly.” He pages the doctor.
The relief that moves through me is so complete and so physical that it takes my breath, which hurts, which I don’t care about at all.
I press one hand to my abdomen—carefully, over the thin hospital blanket—and breathe through it and feel the relief settle into something that is not quite calm but is the shape of calm, is what calm looks like from the outside when the inside is still trembling.
“Okay,” I say. A fog rolls into my brain from the relaxation that hits.
The doctor enters my room. “It’s good to see you awake, Mrs. Drakov.”
“Drakov? I—”
Igor gives a subtle head shake, like I’m supposed to play along.
But I don’t know what I’m playing. “Um, my friend tells me everything is okay with the pregnancy.”
He smiles, and damn, he looks too young for this work. “Everything is great, actually. The fetuses are strong and healthy.”
“I believed you,” I tell Igor. “It’s just… it’s—”
“Better when someone in a lab coat says it?”
I nod, and abruptly, something else hits all at once. “Is Vet okay? You said I wasn’t shot, but… Is she—how bad—”
Igor’s face does something I have not seen it do before. He is a man of immense and practiced self-control. But not today. A tightening around the eyes, a shift at the jaw, the face of a man holding something that is heavier than his usual composure can fully account for.
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. He doesn’t have to.
“No. Please no.” My chest threatens to crumple from the inside.
“She didn’t survive the shooting,” Igor says, and his voice is even with an effort I can hear.
“She was hit twice before the vehicle was rammed. She maintained consciousness long enough to call for emergency services and to call Pavel. She—” He stops.
Starts again. “She was professional until the end. She always was.”
Suddenly, everything is wrong. This bed.
The sheets I hadn’t noticed. The monitors and their incessant beeping.
The light in the room is too white and too steady, and the equipment hums its low, indifferent hum, and I lie in the hospital bed with the bruising across my chest and my hands pressed flat against the blanket, and nothing is okay.
Tears well in my vision, and I don’t pretend otherwise.
Vet was black coffee and the deli on Forty-Third and the one-second almost-smile and the pink donut box and the way she said “da” when she was agreeing with something she found obvious.
She was the gun she aimed at Carrie Ann’s head on my wedding day, without hesitation, to protect me.
She was the things she told me over sandwiches—the wetwork, the operations, the careful sentences that covered a great deal of territory without mapping it explicitly—and the way she sat beside me in the exam room when Dr. Okafor said the word twins, and said “ah” in the tone of someone for whom one word was sufficient.
Vet was my friend. And she died because of me.
Igor hands me a box of tissues from the bedside table with the quiet practicality of a man who anticipated this need and ensured it was met before it arose.
I’m still crying when the door opens, and Pavel comes in.
I know it’s him before I look up, the way I have always known—the atmospheric change of a space when he enters it. But when I look up, what I see is not the man I have been learning for years.
This is someone I have not met before.
He is beyond rage. That’s the only way to describe it—rage would be something recognizable, something with heat and motion, something that resembles a human emotion in its ordinary register. What is in his face is past that.
He crosses to the bed, and he takes my face in both hands, and he looks at me for a long moment with those pale blue eyes that are not cold toward me, that are never cold toward me, and something passes through them that is the underside of everything he’s showing the room—something raw and enormous and barely contained.
“You’re awake,” he says, very quietly.
“I’m awake.” My voice is wrecked from crying and from everything else. “Pavel—”
“I’m going to destroy him.” He says it with the quiet of something that has been decided so thoroughly that saying it aloud is simply acknowledgment rather than declaration.
Igor shoos the doctor out of the door before Pavel speaks again.
“Fedor and everyone associated with him. Everyone who knew, everyone who participated, everyone who could have prevented it and did not. I will not stop until there is nothing left of any of them that could reach you.”
“Pavel—”
“I will not stop.” His hands are still gentle on my face, which is the contradiction of him that I have never fully resolved and am particularly unable to resolve right now. “I will not stop until you are safe. Permanently. Without qualification.”
Is this where it happens? When it happens?
Is this the time he becomes the thing that everyone who knows his name believes he already is?
The monster that Vet described in careful euphemisms over sandwiches, the thing that lives on the other side of the line he draws so carefully between what he is and what he does?
And if it is—if loving him leads here, to a hospital room and a dead friend and a husband with the face of a man who has decided that the world requires burning—does that destroy us both? Does it destroy our marriage?
It’s too much. Too much for me to handle right now. Too much for me to process. I can’t manage him while I’m grieving her.
“I know you knew her longer. I know she worked for you for years before she ever came to my desk. But, Pavel, she was my friend. She was—” My voice catches, and I let it, and then I continue.
“She was the person who sat next to me in the exam room when the doctor told me I was having twins, and she made my coffee exactly right every single morning, and she told me the truth when no one else did, and I just woke up from being knocked out to find out she’s gone.
So, I need you to do something for me right now. ”
He’s watching me with that raw, enormous attention.
“I need you to get your shit together and be here for me.”
He’s suddenly very still, looking at me, and I hold his gaze because looking away is not available to me right now. I need him to understand what I need from him this very moment.
“My love, the only thing that keeps you safe is the total annihilation of everyone who intends you harm. That is not rhetoric. That is the mechanics of the world we are in.”
“I know that world. I’ve been in it long enough—”
“Then you know I cannot sit beside you and hold your hand while Fedor draws breath.” He leans forward and presses his lips to my forehead, and they stay there for a moment longer than I want them to.
“I love you more than anything I have ever loved in my life. More than I knew it was possible to love something. And that is precisely why I cannot stay.”
Then he straightens, and he looks at me for one more moment with those pale eyes, and he leaves.
I have lost two anchors in ten minutes. First Vet, now Pavel. I sit with that in a room which is quiet except for the hums and beeps of the equipment and the distant institutional sounds of the hospital conducting its ordinary business, as if this is just another day.
Igor is still there.
I had almost forgotten that he didn’t leave when Pavel arrived, that he was still in the chair beside the bed, his hands folded, his face bearing its careful composure, his eyes on my face with the steady attention of a man who has decided his job is not finished.
“He’s going to do it.” It’s not a question.
“He’s going to try,” Igor says, which is the most honest version of yes available.
“Can you stop him from getting himself killed?”
He’s quiet for a moment, and in the quiet I see him making a choice—the choice between the diplomatic version and the true one.
“I will try. I will not promise to succeed, because I try not to lie to you.” A pause.
“He’s not entirely wrong about the mechanics.
The threat must be addressed. But the scale he’s contemplating—”
“Will get him killed.”
He sighs. “Open war among the bratva pakhans of New York would not be surgical. It would be total. It would draw attention that none of us can afford, produce casualties on every side, and destabilize arrangements that currently keep a great deal of violence contained.” He looks at me steadily.
“It would get people killed. A lot of people. Possibly including the people he’s trying to protect. ”
It is true and terrible simultaneously. “Including me.”
“Yes.”
I press my hand to my abdomen again, the instinctive checking-in that has already become reflexive since the ultrasound.
Two heartbeats that know nothing of any of this, that are doing the quiet, industrious work of becoming people, entirely unaware that the world they are becoming people into is currently on fire.
“Tell him,” I say. “Tell him what you just told me.”
“I will try.”
“Igor. Make him hear it. Whatever you have to do. Make sure Vet did not die for nothing.”
He nods once, straightens his jacket with the automatic precision of someone for whom presentation is professional discipline, and looks at me for a moment with something in his face that is not quite the sovetnik and not quite the man but something in between. “Rest. The children need it.”
If he were anyone else, I’d snap at him for telling me what I already know. But he’s Igor. He says the thing I already know because he’s reinforcing it. It’s his way of saying he cares.
Then he goes, and I’m alone in the white light of the hospital room with the equipment humming and Vet gone and my husband somewhere starting a war and my babies doing their quiet patient work inside me. All of it is underlined in fear.
I lie in bed, gazing at the ceiling, feeling everything—the grief for Vet, vivid and ongoing.
The fear of what Pavel is becoming in his furious state.
The helpless frustration of being unable to do anything from a hospital bed—aware of it all.
I don’t attempt to organize these feelings into something manageable because they are not. Pretending otherwise would be a lie.
I’ve had my fill of comfortable lies for a long time.
Mangoes. Vet and I were talking about mangoes when I heard a popping sound. Her hand went to her shoulder immediately, as she sharply turned the car. Blood seeped between her fingers, staining her shirt as she swerved around something in the road. But all I could see was the red.
That memory flash sends my grief reeling through me all over again. I press my hand flat against the blanket, and I breathe, carefully, around the bruising.
It will take a very long time, but I am going to be alright.
I say it to the white ceiling, to the humming equipment, to the two small presences that know nothing and need everything.
We are going to be alright.