Chapter 26
ELLIE
I tell myself, every morning, that I’m going to ask him.
The plan is clear: when I see him next, I’m going to say, casually, as if it doesn’t matter, Why do you leave without waking me?
Simple question. Reasonable thing to want to know. I’ve been sleeping in his room for two weeks because he asked me to, and every morning I wake to an empty bed and the shape of him still on the pillow.
The thing is, I’ve always been a light sleeper. The fact that I’m sleeping through Rolan Belov leaving a bed is either evidence that he moves outside the normal rules of physics or that I’m sleeping more deeply than I have in years.
We’ve developed almost a routine in the past weeks.
I wake up alone and go to the sunroom. Anya and I spend mornings doing lessons.
She’s accelerating through the new math materials at a rate that is making me reconsider my entire understanding of what someone her age can do.
Afternoons are spent doing whatever the day calls for.
Art. Reading. The occasional foray into the garden.
When evening comes, Rolan comes with it, and the rest of the night is spent exploring each other’s bodies before falling asleep.
Tuesday afternoon, Anya and I have finished her lesson for the day. She sits at her desk with her sketchbook, and I’m near the door, talking to her about tomorrow’s schedule, when the entire house rattles.
No… moves .
A deep concussive thud comes up through the floor and the walls simultaneously, a heavy vibration. An event that your body understands before your brain has caught up.
Anya is across the room, and her arms are around my legs before I’ve finished registering what happened.
“Ellie,” she whispers.
“Hey.” I put my hands on her shoulders. My heart is thundering against my ribs, but I keep my face carefully blank. “It’s okay. I’m right here.”
“What was that?”
“I don’t know yet, but we’re going to go sit down and wait for someone to come tell us. Okay?”
She nods, still holding my legs.
I move us to the corner of the room, away from the window and door. I keep my arm around her and count in my head to keep calm despite the panic spreading through my veins.
I get to two hundred and eighty-seven before a knock comes.
Mikhail. His eyes sweep the room, find us both, and some of the tension adjusts.
“Are you girls alright?”
“We’re fine.” I stand. “What’s happening?”
He hesitates. “The estate is under attack. We need to move you to the safe room.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain later. Right now, we need to go.” He looks at Anya and softens fractionally. “Can you be brave for me, mala? ”
Her eyes shift between us. “Yes.”
Mikhail moves us through corridors I’ve never taken and stairways I didn’t know existed. A door behind another door.
Down. And then further down.
The room at the bottom is nothing like what the word safe room suggested. I look at it. Then at Mikhail.
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” I tell Anya. “I’ll be right there.”
She looks at me once more, then goes down, and I turn to Mikhail.
“Where is Rolan?”
“Handling the situation.”
“And what is the situation?”
“I can’t say anything else right now.”
“Mikhail.” I keep my voice low. Even. “Please.”
His face darkens.
“He’s managing the perimeter. He knows what he’s doing, Elizabeth. He’s been doing it for—” He stops and adjusts. “He’ll be fine.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he always is. Stay here. Don’t open the door. Someone will come for you when it’s clear.”
He pulls the door closed, and the lock engages.
The room itself is nice. The lighting is warm rather than institutional. There’s water, food, and a first aid kit. A small shelf of books is here to pass the time, and there’s a real sofa rather than the cot I was expecting.
None of this is making me feel better.
Anya is pressed against my side, her knees pulled up, Mr. Whiskers retrieved from her room during the transit down here and now held against her chest. She’s crying.
Gunfire erupts above us.
It’s muffled, as if it were miles away and not a few feet above our heads .
I try to keep my face calm. The clock on the wall says we’ve been down here for thirty minutes, but it feels like three hours.
I think about Landon.
Could he have done this? He has men. Maybe not enough to stage an assault on a place this big, but could he have found more? Could he have found enough?
If it’s Landon, this is all my fault.
The thought settles into my chest with a sharp weight. Every person in this house is in danger. I ran from him, and Rolan?—
“Ellie.”
Anya’s voice pushes me out of my thoughts.
I look down at her. She’s staring up at me with her father’s eyes, pale, steady, and frightened.
“I want Papa,” she says.
“I know, sweetie.” I pull her closer. “He’s taking care of things. That’s what he does.”
“But what if?—”
“He’s going to be fine.” My eyes ache with the need for tears to fall, but I hold them in. “He knows this house. He knows his people. He’s going to be fine, and he’s going to come through that door and be upset if we don’t stay put.”
Anya is quiet for a moment, weighing my words.
“Are you scared?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “But being scared is okay. Being scared just means something matters.”
She thinks for a moment. “Papa is scared sometimes, too?”
“I think so,” I say. “In his own way.”
She nods and presses her face back against my arm.
The clock creeps to thirty-five minutes.
Forty.
The noise above hasn’t stopped, but it has changed. Less constant, more intermittent, which could be good news… or a terrible, horrific turn of events .
We are safe here. Everything is going to be fine , I repeat to myself over and over.
But other thoughts slice through.
What if that door opens, and it isn’t one of our men? What if Rolan is gone? What if ? —
Anya shifts against me. “Will it stop soon?”
“Yes,” I lie, holding her tighter.
The clock marks fifty minutes, mocking me.
The gunfire stops.
It doesn’t gradually slow to a quiet. It stops as if a light switch has been turned off. The silence that follows is a different kind of loud.
Anya squeezes my arm.
We both heard it. We’re both listening to the quiet, reading it, trying to determine what it means.
Then footsteps. Above us first, then closer, then on the stairs outside the door. Anya moves, and I move faster, pulling her behind the sofa — both of us crouched low, my arm across her chest, my eyes on the door.
“Miss Elizabeth?”
The voice is familiar. One of the guards, Savin, the one with the short hair.
“Miss Elizabeth, is everything alright in there?”
Anya goes tense against my arm. “Papa?—”
“Wait.” I hold her. “Wait one second.”
“Miss Elizabeth?”
“We’re here,” I call back. “We’re both here.”
The lock disengages.
Anya doesn’t wait. The moment the door opens, she’s moving, past my arm, past Savin in the doorway, and up the stairs .
“Anya!”
I’m already running. Fear be damned. I pass Savin, taking the stairs two at a time, following her to the floors above. She’s fast, too fast.
She reaches the main floor before I do.
I come through the door behind her and stop.
The foyer is — I don’t have the right word. My brain attempts several and discards them in sequence. Destroyed is too clean. Aftermath is too abstract. What I’m looking at is apocalyptic.
There are bodies.
Fifteen, maybe twenty, in my immediate sightline. I stop counting.
There’s blood on the marble floor, on the walls, a dark spray across the bottom of the staircase banister that my eyes skate over and away from.
The smell hits next. Coppery and chemical, smoke or powder, a combination that I’ve only read about.
From across the room I hear a shout in a language I don’t speak.
Then a single sharp crack.
I don’t let myself look toward it. I find Anya three feet ahead of me, frozen. I reach her in two steps. My hands go over her ears. I pull her face against my chest and turn her body so that her back is to the carnage.
She doesn’t resist. She presses into me, grabs two fistfuls of my sweater, and holds on.
From somewhere to my right, the wet noise of repeated impact. Rhythmic. A man I don’t know is being beaten against the wall, his face unrecognizable, blood pouring out of every orifice.
I look at the floor in front of me, and I breathe, holding Anya and waiting for my legs to remember how to move .
“We need to go back.” Savin has caught up. He doesn’t touch me. “Miss Elizabeth. We need to go back downstairs.”
I know he’s right. I want to go, but my legs won’t listen.
Anya shakes against me. Or maybe that’s me. I can’t locate the boundary between us right now.
Movement stirs in my peripheral vision. From the far corridor, coming through the archway near the east wall.
Rolan.
His shirt is torn at the shoulder, the fabric dark and stained red. There’s blood on his hands, blood on his face, and his eyes are burning with a brightness that isn’t warmth but pure cold.
He looks primal.
He takes in the room, spotting me and Anya. His gaze drops to Anya’s face pressed against my chest, and for a split second, his face contorts with emotion, then quickly hardens.
“Back to the safe room.”
I stare at him. I still can’t move.
He crosses the room and stops in front of us. His eyes never leave mine.
“ NOW! ” he shouts.
Anya flinches against me.
Tears escape my eyes. I try to reach for air but find none. Anya is crying too. I can feel the trembling of her small body.
Rolan is standing in front of us, covered in blood and God knows what else.
My legs finally decide to work. I keep Anya’s face turned away. I steer us back toward the corridor, back toward the stairs, past Savin, who flattens himself against the wall to let us through. I don’t look at the floor or the walls. I stare at the twelve feet in front of us until we’re back.
The safe room door closes behind us.
The lock engages.
I sit on the floor with Anya in my lap, my arms wrapped tightly around her. Her face presses against my neck, and I listen to her cry herself back toward a semblance of calm.
As she quiets, there are no more distractions. I slump into myself and stare at the wall, cycling through it all.
The attack. The bodies. The blood.
Rolan.
I’ve been sleeping in his bed for two weeks.
I’ve been eating breakfast across from him, making his daughter hot chocolate, and letting him touch me all this time.
I’ve been telling myself a story about who he is — complicated and dangerous, yes, but contained and manageable also.
A man with rules, even if the rules are his own.
The man I saw walk through that archway was not that man.
Or he was that man. He was that man, and I hadn’t seen him clearly yet.
There’s no ignoring it now. This isn’t some job shrouded in mystery and secrets. This is a hell all in its own.
And Rolan might be the devil himself.