Chapter 59
Maksim
Istare at my hands.
Because they are covered in her.
Blood black-red in the lines of my skin. Packed beneath my nails. Dry on my wrists. On my knuckles. In the cracks around my cuticles. I turn the water on and shove my hands under so hard I bang bone on porcelain.
Hot water.
Soap. Scrub.
Again.
Harder.
The water runs pink, then red, then pink again. I scrub until my skin burns.
Still there.
I dig my nails under the crescents, scrape, claw, rip at myself like I can tear her blood out of me.
Still there.
I look up.
Big mistake.
The mirror.
My face looks wrong. Dead already. Blood on my jaw. In the hollow of my throat. Eyes like somebody put a bullet through my skull and forgot to let me drop.
And all I see—all I fucking see—is her head hanging back in my arms.
Her mouth open. Her body too still.
Her eyes—
“Fuck!”
My fist goes through the mirror.
Glass bursts under my knuckles. A crack shoots across it. My hand comes back shredded and I hit it again anyway. Again. Again. Again. Until there’s no face left looking at me. Just broken pieces. Jagged teeth of glass still clinging to the frame.
I breathe hard through my nose.
It does nothing. Nothing helps.
I grip the sink with both hands and yank.
It groans. I yank harder. Bolts scream behind the wall.
Porcelain shifts.
Not enough.
I plant my boot against the base and rip the whole thing down.
It tears loose with a violent crack. Pipes snap. Water erupts all over me, icy and hard, spraying my chest, my face, the walls. The basin drops crooked, slams against the tile, and shatters.
I stare at it.
Then kick the pieces across the room.
“Fuck!”
My voice bounces off tile and comes back meaner.
I grab the cabinet next. Rip it open so hard the hinge snaps. Bottles, gloves, gauze, useless fucking hospital shit scatter everywhere.
Useless.
All of it useless.
I storm back into the room. There’s a chair by the bed.
I throw it at the wall.
It splinters.
The bedside table goes over next. One shove and it crashes onto its side, drawers flying open. Plastic pitcher. Paper cups. Charts. Bullshit. I rake my arm across the counter and send all of it to the floor.
My chest is tight.
Too tight.
I can’t get a full breath in.
Good.
I don’t want one.
Because what the fuck am I breathing for if she isn’t?
That thought hits and something in me goes rabid.
I grab the bedrail and shove the whole hospital bed sideways. Wheels scream across tile. It slams into the wall hard enough to leave a dent. I hit the monitor with my forearm and send it crashing down. Plastic breaks. Screen shatters. Wires tear loose.
Still not enough.
I want the whole room in pieces. I want this hospital on the ground.
I want every doctor who touched her dragged back in here and told to put her the fuck back together.
I want her breathing.
I want her eyes on me.
I want her mouth opening to say something sharp and nasty and alive.
I want—
My throat closes.
A noise rips out of me. Not a word. Something lower. Worse.
I snatch the IV pole and swing it into the wall. Once. Twice. Again. Drywall caves in. Metal bends in my hands.
Good.
Break.
Break.
Break.
Because if I stop, I see her.
I see her limp.
I feel how little she fought at the end.
I feel her blood slipping warm over my hands while I told her to stay with me like that means anything. Like I have ever been able to keep anything that mattered.
Everything I touch ends up ruined.
Everything.
The pole slips from my hand and clatters to the floor.
I’m breathing like I ran a mile with a knife in my lung. Water from the broken sink is spreading over the tile from the bathroom, carrying blood in thin pink rivers around shards of glass and busted plastic.
My hands hurt.
Didn’t notice.
Don’t care.
I stare at both palms, head down, shoulders heaving, and stare at the blood dripping off my fingers.
Hers.
Mine.
Don’t know anymore. The door opens behind me.
“Maksim.”
Vaska. Of course he broke in.
I don’t answer.
He takes one look at the room and goes still. Broken mirror. Broken sink. Flooded floor. Bed shoved halfway into the wall. Monitor smashed. Glass everywhere.
“You need to stop.”
I laugh.
It sounds sick. Empty.
I turn my head just enough to look at him.
“Why?”
One word. Flat. Because I mean it.
Why stop?
Why breathe?
Why not tear the whole fucking city apart brick by brick if she’s dead anyway?
Vaska steps inside and shuts the door behind him. Careful. Controlled. Like, I’m one wrong word to exploding He isn’t wrong.
“We cannot have security in here.”
I stare at him for a second.
Then at the room. Then back at him.
My lip curls.
“Then they should save her faster.”
My voice comes out low. Quiet. The kind that makes men back up.
Vaska doesn’t.
“She is with the doctors.”
“She was with me.”
That one tears out before I can stop it. The room goes dead after that. Because there it is. Not the rage. Not the violence.
The truth under it.
She was with me. And now she isn’t.
I look away from him before he can see too much, but it’s too late for that. Too late for anything.
I drag a bloody hand over my mouth.
“She can’t—” My voice breaks, and I turn it into fury before it can become anything else. “She doesn’t get to fucking die.”
Vaska says nothing.
Smart.
Because if he says the wrong thing, I’ll put him through the wall too, and we both know it.
I look down at my hands again. Red in every line. In every groove. Stuck in me.
Like her.
Etched in. Too deep to cut out. A bitter smile pulls at my mouth, wrong and sharp and wrecked.
“Did we get Arsen?”
Vaska hesitates. “No.”
I take in a painful breath.
“That’s fine. If she dies, I’ll have a lifetime to hunt him like a dog.”
Those words are the cleanest thing I’ve felt since they took her from my arms.
***
The waiting room is too white.
Too clean. Too quiet. Too fucking sterile for a place where people sit around waiting to find out if the person they love is going to live or die.
I sit with my back to the wall, my wrist throbbing inside the cast, every pulse in the bone keeping time with the panic still trying to claw its way up my throat. Purple.
They wrapped the fucking thing in purple.
The first color I ever dyed her hair.
I see it too clearly. Her standing in my bathroom glaring at herself in the mirror like she wanted to be pissed off, fingers catching in the ends after I cut it.
Annoyed at the sink. Annoyed at me. Annoyed because I touched something of hers without asking.
But I remember the way she kept looking at herself after, trying not to look pleased.
Trying not to let me see that she liked it.
I saw it anyway.
I see everything now.
Vaska shoved a bag of clean clothes at me I don’t know how long ago. Told me to change. Told the doctor to look at my wrist. Said something about me being useless to her broken. Maybe he was right. Maybe he just wanted me to stop sitting there covered in her blood.
Her blood is gone now. That should help.
It doesn’t.
I look down at the clean shirt stretched over my chest and all I can think is that I had to take off the one she died in.
No.
I slam the thought down so hard it makes my head hurt. Not dead.
Not her.
The doors hiss open somewhere down the hall. Heels tap softly against the linoleum floor.
Heels.
Light. Slow. Familiar.
I lift my head. Vasilisa stands in the doorway. For a second, I just stare.
Maybe because I wasn’t expecting her. Maybe because everything in me is so stripped raw that even seeing someone familiar feels like a blow to the ribs.
She looks small and soft and steady all at once. She’s missing her shadow. Which means he sent her.
She walks over without a word and lowers herself into the chair beside me.
“She’s going to be okay, Mishka,” she says quietly. “Santo said I should come talk to you before you lose your mind in here.”
Mishka.
The name goes through me slow and deep, hitting somewhere old.
She hasn’t called me that in a long time.
Not since everything turned to shit. Not since the distance set in. Not since I started feeling her anger every time she looked at me.
I turn my head and look at her properly.
At the curve of her cheek. The softness in her eyes. The woman she is now layered over the little girl who used to chase after me on unsteady legs and demand piggyback rides until I gave in.
But it lands differently now because she’s not just my cousin. Not just the little shadow at my heels.
She’s my sister. Half-sister.
The word settles mangled and tender in my chest all at once. I don’t say it. I can’t tell her. Not here. Not now. But I feel it sitting between my ribs, changing the shape of her when I look at her.
I clear my throat. “Not mad at me anymore, Kisa?”
Her mouth softens. “No.”
No hesitation. No edge.
Just a simple no.
Something in me loosens.
Then her gaze drops to my cast. “Though I do think beating up a room was dramatic.”
I let out a rough sound that almost passes for a laugh. “It was that or the world.”
She hums like that’s reasonable.
For a moment, neither of us says anything. The silence doesn’t bite the way it used to. It just sits there, breathing with us.
Then my eyes drop to her stomach before I can stop them. Still not showing. But I know.
A strange irritation flickers through the numbness. “You didn’t tell me.”
Her brows pull together. “Tell you what?”
I look at her flatly.
She sighs, rolling her eyes. “I told everyone at Christmas.”
“I wasn’t at Christmas.”
“No,” she says, glancing at me from the corner of her eye. “You were not.”
“I was busy.”
That gets the tiniest smile out of her. Faint, but real.
“Yes,” she says softly. “Busy falling in love.”
I scoff, because what the fuck am I supposed to do with that? Sit here in a hospital waiting room with a broken wrist and sad eyes and talk about love like I’m an Amato?
But the word doesn’t slide off me the way it used to. I don’t tell her that.
She studies me for a second like she already knows anyway.
Then her voice turns gentler. “I thought I was angry for the right reasons.”
I say nothing.
She folds her hands in her lap and looks ahead at the blank wall across from us. “Maybe I was. Maybe I still have reasons. But this war has touched all of us, Mishka.” Her voice thins for a second, just enough for me to hear what sits under it. “And now it’s touched you like this.”
I swallow hard.
Her head comes to rest against my shoulder. The contact nearly breaks me.
“All I feel right now,” she whispers, “is love for you. And hope that she’ll be okay.”
I close my eyes.
For one second, I let it happen. Let the warmth of her lean into me. Let the old nickname sit between us. Let the fact that she came here mean whatever the fuck it means.
When I put my arm around her, I’m careful of the cast, careful of her, careful of everything I can still keep from breaking.
“Thank you, Kisa,” I say, my voice low and scraped raw.
My sister.
The thought hits harder this time, because it feels too real in this moment. Too real with her sitting here beside me like she used to belong at my side all along.
And maybe she did.
The door opens. I look up so fast my neck pulls.
A doctor steps into the waiting room, expression tight and unreadable.
His gaze finds me immediately.
“Maksim Korsakov?”
I’m on my feet before the name finishes leaving his mouth. The chair skids back hard against the tile.
Every beat in my body stops.
“Tell me.”