34. Alexei
Alexei
I don’t bother getting out of the car when we reach the Bellini villa.
I wait long enough to see Ofelia enveloped in Lourdes’s tearful embrace, surrounded by a phalanx of security, before taking the wheel of the car.
The last thing I see before pulling out and heading down the winding road at breakneck speed is Ofelia’s pale face and wide, haunted eyes.
She doesn’t try to stop me from leaving.
I think we both know it’s long past that.
Beyond a few low-voiced directions, Jack doesn’t bother trying to speak to me on the way back to the city, just makes some calls in Italian, the purpose of which, I gather from my limited knowledge of the language, is to inform the hospital to expect us—and the police to stay out of our way.
I really don’t give a fuck about either.
I’ll get what information I need to know about Lars, regardless of what any doctor says about family only, and if any cop wants to interfere, I’ll kill him.
With my bare hands, if necessary.
The glass doors open, and I stride through the reception, barely registering anything other than the directions the terrified nurse stammers out. We take a series of confusing turns to a second building, then an elevator up several floors.
Even I can understand the sign reading Terapia Intensiva on the wall when we step out.
Intensive Care.
Barely breathing, I stalk through the doors that open silently in front of us and find Benny sitting alone on a plastic seat, his head in his hands. He looks up, then leaps to his feet when I enter.
“Thank Christ,” he says bleakly. “They won’t let me see him, and they won’t tell me anything.”
I go to the receptionist window, pulling Jack with me. “Tell them,” I say coldly.
He talks quickly in Italian, then turns back to Benny and me. “He’s in surgery now—”
“Get the surgeon out here.”
“I’m not sure that—”
“Get him. Now. Or I’m going in there myself.”
Jack shakes his head slowly, but he turns back to the window and starts talking. A few minutes later, the surgeon comes through the doors, glaring at us as he tears off his mask and launching into a voluble torrent of Italian.
“Lars was shot through one eye,” Jack translates.
“They’ve stabilized him, but the bullet has lodged in his brain.
Removing it is beyond the skills of the acting surgeon.
” He listens for a moment, then turns around again.
“There’s a neurosurgeon in Rome, a Dr. Moretti, who specializes in this kind of thing, but they can’t contact her because she’s in surgery—”
“Give me your phone.” I cut him off, and Jack, taking one look at my face, hands it over. “Ask him for the name of the hospital and the person in charge.” He does so, and I get to work.
By my third phone call, and with the help of Jack’s translating, the surgeon’s glare has faded and he’s talking fast, trying to help.
Ten minutes later, I hand the phone back. “Dr. Moretti is on her way,” I say, and the surgeon’s face slumps in relief without any need of translation. He turns to Jack. “Two hours at the most,” I say, before he can ask.
The surgeon looks at me like I’m God.
Which I intend to use.
“We want to see Lars,” I say to Jack. “Tell him.”
He relays my message, and the surgeon’s face falls in a way that strikes abject fear into my heart.
“No,” Jack says quietly. “You can’t, Lex. He’s already on the table, and—”
The surgeon says something that makes Jack’s face go white.
“You can’t,” he says shortly to me. “No, Lex.” He reads the murderous intentions behind my flat expression with surprising ease.
“Trust me, fuck you,” he says grimly. “You don’t want to see him like this, and allowing you in there would only put him in danger of infection.
The best thing you can do for Lars is to let these people do their fucking job. ”
For a white-hot moment of rage I calculate what it would take to kill him. Then I wrench myself back to sanity.
It all happens in a split second, and I doubt anyone but Jack noticed, but the fact that I came that close to simply losing all control shakes even my composure.
I turn away from him as the surgeon stammers out his thanks, my entire body trembling, trying to think of something, anything, other than what made the surgeon’s face change the way it did.
He doesn’t think Lars is going to make it through this. I know it, can see it on his face, just like I can see in horrifying detail how Lars must look at this very moment.
Don’t. Christ, don’t, or you’ll lose it, right here in front of everyone.
“What about Stevanovsky?” I snap, trying to swallow my nausea.
“Already out of surgery.” Jack eyes me warily. “They’ve taken a bullet out of his arm and are treating burns down the other side of his body. How he stayed conscious is a mystery, let alone keeping Lars afloat as long as he did.”
But he’s still fucking alive.
I’m almost glad Mickey isn’t anywhere close by. Right now I don’t trust myself not to kill him.
The worst of it is that I know that urge makes no sense. It isn’t Mickey’s fault Lars is lying on a table with half his head blown off and a less than even chance of survival.
If anything, Mickey is the reason Lars has any chance at all.
If you’re looking for someone to blame, motherfucker, I hear Lars’s dry voice in my mind, take a long look in the mirror.
The room spins around me, and suddenly I have the same horrible sense I did the other night on the yacht, of the world receding from view.
Spotting the sign for a bathroom, I make a beeline for it, the cubicle door swinging closed behind me just before I sink to my knees, retching until there’s nothing left to lose.
I stagger out to the sink and grip the hard enamel edge, my whole body trembling as I gulp water from the tap. Putting my head under the tap, I rinse my face clean, desperately trying to get my shit together.
I’ve never lost it like this.
Not even back when I was a kid and the Orlovs forced me to do unspeakable things with a knife.
Never felt my insides break apart like this, as if there’s no earth beneath my feet and nothing left inside to keep me upright. All I can do is imagine the many different ways a sniper’s bullet would destroy a man’s head.
After so many years spent killing people, I can imagine quite a lot.
And the thought of such destruction being wrought on the smiling face that has been my comfort and solace through the darkest nights of my life is a horror beyond anything I’ve ever felt.
The only thing that has ever come close was when Ofelia went missing.
And that was your fault too, motherfucker, Lars’s voice chides me again.
The room spins again. Breathing deeply, I press my eye shut, then open it, staring at the sunken socket on the other side of my face.
Hey motherfucker, if I make it out of this, we’ll be all matching and shit . . .
Some bizarre part of me wonders if hearing Lars’s voice in my head means that somewhere, somehow, he’s still alive.
The door opens, and I flip my eye patch back down, keeping my face lowered. The last thing I want is to make conversation with a stranger.
It takes a beat before I realize the intruder is Benny, standing behind me, face gaunt as he watches me in the mirror. “Is he going to die?”
I shake my head abruptly and straighten up, reaching for the paper towel. “I don’t know.”
Going to the sink beside me, he splashes water on his face, then grips the porcelain edge, water dripping down his cheeks.
“When are Ofelia and Lourdes coming?” When I don’t answer, he turns around and stares at me, his eyes narrowing.
“Oh, I see,” he says slowly. “It didn’t occur to you that they should be here.
You know, since Mickey is Ofelia’s brother and Lourdes’s boyfriend. ”
I glare at him in the mirror. “Fuck off, Benny.”
“Sure.” He looks at me bleakly. “Fuck you, too.” Pushing past me, he goes back into the waiting area. After a time, I follow him.
Jack is in the corridor, deep in a phone conversation. He shakes his head when I catch his eye, indicating that there’s no news.
I’m not sure what kind of news I’m expecting, exactly. But the idea of standing around in a waiting room for God knows how many hours with nothing to do but envision the injury to Lars’s head is nightmarish at best.
Benny is slumped in a chair on the opposite side of the waiting room. Leaning forward, he clasps his hands between his knees and stares at the floor.
I stare at the wall, willing my brain into the neutral state I mastered during my years with the Orlovs.
It’s a place where nothing really touches me, where I just focus on the smallest thing—a chunk of plaster, a speck of dust, the curve of a window—then study it in microscopic detail.
There is nothing more destabilizing than the scenarios our own minds can conjure, so I learned to discipline myself to block them out.
Except I never realized that Lars was always with me in that neutral space, whispering inside my head.
His slightly mocking voice, commenting on the window frame color: Was that painter on acid, dude?
Offering a dry aside when Vilnus Orlov was in the middle of one of his insane rants about my family: Oh, this fucker needs an ecstasy pill and a blowjob.
Whether with me in person or simply a presence in my head, Lars has been my escape, my shelter, and my comfort for almost as long as I can remember. The thought that he might be gone is unfathomable, like being suspended midair over a crevasse of grief that has no visible end.
“You know about guns.” Benny’s rough voice cuts through my thoughts. “How many people survive a bullet through the eye?” He speaks without looking at me, just staring at the floor.
“It depends what kind of round it was.” Weirdly, it’s a fucking relief to speak aloud the nightmare scenarios running through my mind. “The velocity and trajectory of the bullet. Mostly it depends on whether or not it lodged in his brain.”
“Jack Bellini told me these guys were highly trained. Probably ex-Navy SEALs or whatever they’re called.”
I nod. “Likely.”