Chapter 30
AURORA
The sound pulls me out of sleep before I understand what it is.
A crack. Sharp and distant. Then another.
I'm upright before my eyes fully open, heart already going, some animal part of my brain reading danger in the air before my conscious mind catches up.
The room is dark except for the dying fire.
Axel is already gone from beside me, standing at the window in nothing but his trousers, completely still.
"Axel—"
"Get dressed now."
I get dressed without arguing.
I'm pulling my sweater over my head when the world explodes.
The window shatters inward. I hit the floor on instinct, glass raining across the stone around me, and the sound that follows isn't one shot or two — it's a wall of gunfire from multiple directions at once, sustained and rolling and getting closer, and my brain just keeps saying no, no, this isn't, we were just, we were just lying there, we were just—
Axel is across the room, pulling me up by the arm, a gun in his free hand I didn't see him reach for.
"Stay behind me." His palm presses flat to my back, solid and warm. "Don't leave my side. Whatever happens."
I try to say okay.
Nothing comes out.
He opens the door two inches, stops, and listens with his whole body.
Then pushes through, and I follow him into the hallway.
The smell hits me first — acrid, chemical, and off — burning at the back of my throat — then the smoke, thin but spreading.
Two of Axel's men move quickly toward the staircase with weapons drawn.
One of them has blood running down his forearm in a dark ribbon, and he isn't slowing down.
I stare at it, and my brain just skips — like it sees the information but refuses to process it.
Viktor materializes from the far end of the corridor and crosses to us in seconds.
"South perimeter is breached." Low and fast. "Twelve, maybe fifteen men. They came through the blind side of the tree line."
"How?" Axel says.
Viktor's jaw tightens. "They knew where it was."
The words take a second to arrive.
Then they do.
They knew where the blind spot was. They knew this location. They knew which room we were in.
My breathing goes wrong. Too fast, too shallow, my lungs working hard and somehow pulling in nothing, my hand going to the wall without me deciding to put it there. The plaster is cold under my palm. I focus on that. Cold. Real. Still here.
Axel's grip on my wrist tightens, as if he felt it happen.
"Breathe," he says, without looking at me.
I'm trying, I think, I'm trying I'm trying I'm—
I breathe.
We move to the stairwell. Viktor ahead, one man at our rear. Halfway down the steps, the front door comes off its hinges.
The sound is enormous in the enclosed space.
I flinch so hard I bite my tongue and taste copper and then four men are inside — tactical gear, faces covered, moving with the horrible practiced efficiency of people who have rehearsed this — and the first one raises his weapon and I pull in air to scream and Axel shoves me sideways into the stone wall so hard my shoulder screams with it and opens fire.
The noise in that stairwell is catastrophic. I press flat against the stone with both arms over my head, and I am making a sound I've never made before, a continuous high pitch that I can't stop, and when I force myself to look through the smoke,
Axel moves with a proficiency I can't quite grasp. No hesitation, no wasted motions. Each move is like a complete sentence. He takes down two men before I even realize they’re there.
Viktor takes out a third. The fourth fires a shot, and then Sergei emerges from the darkness at the bottom of the stairs and takes that one out.
It only took them four seconds to take out four men.
Axel turns back to me, and his eyes do a fast sweep of my body.
"You're okay," he says.
I look at the men on the floor. One of them is still moving. One of them isn't, and the angle of him is all wrong, and bile surges up my throat so fast I have to press my fist to my mouth.
"Aurora." Axel's hand on my face, turning it away. "Look at me."
I look at him.
"In through your nose." His thumb presses under my jaw. "Do it."
I breathe in. It comes out as a sob.
"Again."
Again.
"Good girl." His eyes hold mine for one more second, steady and absolute. "We're going outside. Stay with me."
We go outside, and it's so much worse.
The cold hits me, and my brain tries to process what my eyes are showing it and simply cannot.
Vehicles burning at the perimeter, the flames massive and orange, and throwing lurching shadows across the grass.
Men running in every direction. Muzzle flashes strobe through the smoke in sharp white bursts.
Something explodes to the left — a vehicle, maybe, I don't know, the shockwave hits my chest, and I stagger, and Axel's arm comes around me and keeps me moving even though every single cell in my body is screaming at me to stop, to get down, to disappear into the ground.
This isn't happening. We were watching the northern lights six hours ago. His hand was on my stomach, and we were watching the northern lights, and this isn't—
There's a man on the grass ten feet away who isn't moving.
I know him. I've seen him at the estate a dozen times. He always nodded at me in the corridor, this small respectful dip of his chin like I was someone worth acknowledging.
He isn't moving.
The sound that comes out of me is inhuman. I clap both hands over my mouth, and Axel says eyes forward in a voice that cuts through everything, and I look forward, and I keep moving because stopping means dying, and some small functioning part of me understands that.
Axel fights as we move.
Not retreating and occasionally shooting.
Actually fighting, moving through the chaos with Viktor flanking him, engaging attackers who come at us from the sides with a brutality that is both terrifying and the only reason I'm still breathing.
One gets close enough that I see his eyes above his mask — pale, focused, pointed directly at me — and Axel is between us before I finish the thought, and the man goes down, and we keep moving.
We're going to make it. We're almost at the car. Fifteen feet. We're going to make it.
The first shot hits Axel in the arm.
A grunt. A slight stagger. Then he's moving again, gun switching hands, and I grab his sleeve, and he shakes me off gently and takes down the shooter and another who comes from the right, and I'm screaming his name, or maybe just screaming, I genuinely cannot tell.
He's okay. It's his arm. He's still moving. He's okay.
Ten feet.
The second shot hits his shoulder.
He goes down to one knee.
"AXEL—"
Viktor hauls him up. Axel gets his feet under him and surges upright, and the look on his face is pure furious refusal, nothing else, like his body suggested something, and he rejected it completely.
"I'm fine," he snarls.
"You're bleeding—"
"Get her to the car."
Viktor reaches for my arm, and I twist away. "I'm not leaving—"
"Aurora." The word comes out like a fist. "Car. Now."
I take two steps toward it.
The third shot comes from the trees. Elevated. Aimed with patience and precision like someone who has been waiting, specifically waiting, for exactly this moment.
It hits Axel in the side, and he goes down.
His shoulder hits the grass, his arm buckles, and the sound he makes hollows me out completely.
I don't decide to move. I'm just there, on my knees beside him in the wet grass, and my hands find his side where the blood is coming dark and fast and wrong, so much of it, soaking through his shirt and through my fingers and I am hyperventilating, I can hear myself doing it, each breath in faster than the last and none of them doing anything useful.
There's so much blood. Why is there so much blood? This is too much. This is—
"Axel." My voice sounds like it belongs to someone falling. "Axel, look at me. Look at me right now."
His eyes find mine. Still there. Still him. But his face is the wrong color, and his breathing has changed to something shallow and careful, as if each breath costs him a calculation.
"Get—" He tries to push himself up.
"Don't move." I press both palms harder to his side, and he makes a sound through his teeth, and I hate myself, I hate this, I hate every single person who did this. "Don't you dare move."
"There are still men—"
"VIKTOR." My voice tears out of me, enormous and ragged. "VIKTOR, HE'S DOWN—"
Viktor is already there. Sergei behind him, radio crackling, and I hear gunfire slowing somewhere behind us, shorter bursts, further apart, but I can't look up, I can't look at anything except Axel's face because if I look away for even one second, I am genuinely terrified of what will happen.
He's going to be fine. He's been shot before. He told me. He's been through worse than this and he's still here. He's still here right now, he's looking at me, he's—
The hand he'd moved toward me drops back to the grass.
"Axel." I lean over him, my face close to his. My tears are falling onto his cheek, and I can't stop them. I'm not even trying. "Stay with me. Please. Please just stay with me."
"Medic is four minutes out." Viktor's voice is controlled in the deliberate way of someone suppressing something.
"Four minutes—" The words fracture. "Viktor that's too long, look at him, that is too long—"
"Four minutes, Aurora. Talk to him."
I turn back to Axel. His eyes are at half-mast now, the sharp focus in them going soft at the edges, and something in my chest tears clean open.
"No." I take his face in both my hands, blood and all, pressing my palms to his jaw.
"No. You listen to me. We just did the northern lights.
We just—you told me you love me and I told you, and we just did that, and you don't get to check out now, do you understand me?
" My voice is wrecked, barely holding shape, dissolving at every edge.
"The baby hasn't met you. You haven't met the baby.
You promised me you'd be there, you said—"
I stop.
I can't.
I press my forehead to his and breathe, just breathe, feeling his shallow breath against my face, counting it, making sure the next one comes.
"I'm so angry at you," I whisper. "I need you to know that. I am so angry. You are not allowed to do this to me." Another breath. His. Mine. "Hold on. Okay? Just hold on. Four minutes. That's nothing. You've survived everything. This is nothing."
His lips move.
I lean closer.
"...stubborn," he breathes. Barely sound. Just shape.
A laugh cracks out of me that sounds nothing like a laugh. "Yes. The most stubborn person you've ever met. And you're going to be so annoyed about it for so long. Years, Axel. Years. So you need to stay."
His eyes close.
"No—" I grab his hand, squeeze hard. "No, no, no, open your eyes. Open your eyes right now. Axel."
He doesn't open them.
His chest is still moving. Shallow. Steady. Still moving.
But his eyes are closed and his hand is heavy in mine and I am screaming his name and I don't know when I started screaming it, just that I can't stop, and Viktor has both hands pressed to Axel's side and is talking fast and low into the radio, and somewhere beyond the burning vehicles the gunfire has gone fully silent, and none of it matters.
None of it exists.
There is only his face. The slow, terrible rise and fall of his chest. The blood on my hands, arms, and soaking through the knees of my trousers, drying cold on my cheeks where I've been pressing my hands to my face.
Please, I think, at nothing, at everything, at whoever might be listening in whatever darkness exists beyond the smoke and the dying flames. Please. Please. Please.
I count his breaths.
I count every single one.