Chapter 31
AXEL
The first thing I'm aware of is the smell.
Clean. Antiseptic. The particular sterile nothing of a medical room that I've woken up in enough times to recognize before I open my eyes.
The second thing is the pain.
It lives in my left side, deep and hot and specific, the kind that tells you exactly where you got hit and exactly how badly before you've done a single thing to aggravate it.
I breathe through it slowly, taking inventory.
Hands. Feet. The ceiling comes into focus above me, white and flat and unfamiliar.
I turn my head.
Aurora is asleep in the chair beside the bed, folded into it sideways with her knees pulled to her chest, one hand tucked under her cheek.
She's still in the clothes from last night — the cream sweater, dark trousers — and there are rust-colored stains on her knees that take me a moment to identify.
My blood.
She fell asleep in a chair covered in my blood rather than leave the room.
Something moves through my chest that has nothing to do with the wound.
I watch her breathe. The small rise and fall of her.
The way her lashes rest against her cheek, the furrow between her brows that's there even in sleep, like some part of her is still braced for something.
She looks exhausted in the specific way of someone who fought very hard to stay awake and lost the battle only recently.
I reach out.
My arm is heavier than it should be, the IV line tugging at the back of my hand, but I get there — fingertips touching her knee, light as I can make it.
Her eyes open immediately.
She looks at my hand on her knee. Then at my face.
"Hi," she says. Her voice is wrecked, scraped raw.
"Hi."
Her face does something complicated and enormous, everything she's been holding compressed into one expression, and then she's out of the chair, careful, her hands on my face so gently I barely feel them.
"You scared me," she breathes. "You scared me so badly."
"I know." I turn my face slightly into her palm. "I'm here, I’m sorry."
"You lost consciousness." Her thumb traces my jaw.
"You were — they wouldn't let me stay in the room when they were working on you, and I had to sit outside, and I couldn't—" She stops.
Pulls in a breath. "I counted the ceiling tiles.
Did you know there are forty-seven ceiling tiles in that waiting room? "
"I didn't know that." I try to smile and end up wincing.
"Forty-seven." Her eyes are bright, dangerously so. "I counted them four times to make sure."
I reach up and cover her hand with mine, holding it against my face. She turns her palm, laces her fingers through mine, and grips. Hard, like she's anchoring something.
"How are you? The baby? I ask.
"Fine. We're both fine." The brightness in her eyes spills over, one tear tracking quickly down her cheek that she ignores entirely. "Doctor checked. Everything's fine."
The thing compressed in my chest loosens by degrees.
"Sit down," I tell her. "You look like you've been awake for thirty hours."
"Twenty-two." She sits on the edge of the bed instead of the chair, close enough that her hip presses against my arm. "And I'm not moving to that chair, so don't suggest it."
Viktor appears in the doorway. He takes in Aurora on the bed, my hand still holding hers, and has the rare good sense to say nothing about it.
"You look terrible," he says to me instead.
"Thank you, Viktor." I roll my eyes.
"Blood loss will do that." He comes in, closes the door behind him, pulls the chair Aurora abandoned to the opposite side of the bed, and sits. He looks like he hasn't slept either. The lines around his eyes are deeper than usual. "How much do you want to know right now?"
"Everything."
He glances at Aurora.
"Everything," she says, before I can.
Viktor looks at her for a moment. Then nods.
"The attack was the Volkovs," he says. "We confirmed it from the men we took alive.
Coordinated, well-funded, better equipped than anything they've moved against us before.
" He pauses, and something in the pause has weight to it.
"They had inside help. Detailed inside help.
Floor plans, security rotations, your location, the blind spots in the perimeter. Everything."
I already know what's coming. Some part of me has known since we found out that none of the forty people who had access was the traitor.
"Leo," I whisper, hoping I was wrong.
Viktor doesn't flinch. Just holds my eyes. "Yes."
I stare at the ceiling, and I let the truth sit there, and I feel it do what it does — moving through me slow and thorough, the way deep cold moves through a body, getting into the places you can't insulate.
I raised that boy. Fed him. Put him in good schools, kept his name clean, gave him my own name when he had nothing.
Watched him grow up. Watched him become something I didn't recognize and told myself it was fixable.
All that time, he was doing this.
"How long?" My voice comes out level.
"The financial trail Aurora found goes back eight months. But we think he was talking to the Volkovs before that. Before your release." Viktor's hands rest on his knees, still. "He had it planned before you even came home."
Eight months. Before I was even out of prison.
He was always going to do this.
"Where is he now?"
"Gone." Viktor's jaw tightens. "We've been looking since the attack. He’s nowhere to be found. He had an exit plan ready."
Of course he did.
Aurora's hand tightens around mine. I don't look at her because if I look at her right now, I won't be able to hold my face the way I need to hold it.
The grief and the rage exist simultaneously, and I can't separate them, so I set them both aside. Later. There's a place for that later.
"He'll come again," I say.
"Yes."
"This wasn't the end. This was what happens when a plan fails halfway. He'll regroup, the Volkovs will regroup, and they'll come back with something worse." I push myself upright against the pillows, ignoring the pull of the wound. "Which means we move first."
"Axel—"
"I've been reactive." The words come out hard. "Every single time. They hit, I hold ground, I recover, I wait. That ends now." I look at Viktor. "We know who it is. We know who they're working with. That's enough to start."
Viktor nods slowly. "There's one more thing."
Something in his tone makes me look at him properly.
"Don Luca showed up during the attack," he says. "With twelve men. He came in on the east side while we were getting overrun and drove the Volkovs back." A pause. "Without him, we wouldn't have held."
The room goes quiet.
I look at the door, as if I could see through it to wherever he's waiting.
Aurora has gone very still beside me.
"H-He's here?" she says.
"Outside." Viktor looks at her gently, which is not an expression he deploys often. "He's been there since they stabilized Axel. Hasn't left."
I watch her face. The emotions move across it in sequence — shock, something fragile and hopeful, the particular caution of a person who has been hurt in a specific place and isn't sure yet if it's safe to use it again.
"Aurora," I say.
She looks at me.
"Go."
"I'm not leaving you—"
"I'm not going anywhere." I nod toward the door. "Go meet your father, I know you miss him."
She looks at me for a long moment, searching my face for something. Whatever she finds there, it's enough. She uncurls from the bed slowly, smooths her sweater, and stops with her hand on the door.
"I'll be right outside," she says. Like she needs me to know she's coming back.
"I know," I say.
She goes.
Viktor and I sit in silence for a moment.
"He drove four hours," Viktor says quietly. "Got the location from one of Luca's men who was already on site. Left immediately when he heard."
I think about Luca sitting in a car for four hours in the middle of the night. For the daughter he disowned months ago and clearly hasn't stopped thinking about for a single day of it.
Some things are more stubborn than pride. Turns out love is one of them.
"When I'm out of this bed," I say.
"Two days minimum—"
"When I'm out of this bed, we sit down. All of us." I look at Viktor. "We end this together."
"The Volkovs won't make it easy."
"No." I lean back against the pillows, feeling the weight of everything settling across my shoulders — the wound, the exhaustion, Leo's betrayal, the war that's been coming since before I got out of prison. All of it at once. All of it mine to carry. "Nothing worth finishing ever is."
Viktor stands. Moves toward the door, then stops.
"For what it's worth," he says, not turning around. "She didn't move from that waiting room once. Four hours. She sat there and counted those ceiling tiles and talked to the baby and to you." His voice is carefully neutral. "Thought you should know what you've got."
He leaves before I can respond.
I lie there in the quiet room and look at the ceiling.
Somewhere outside this door, Aurora is standing in front of her father for the first time since he told her she was a disgrace, and Luca is standing in front of the daughter he hasn't been able to stop loving no matter how hard he tried, and whatever happens in that hallway will determine something I can't control.
That's the hardest part. The things I can't control.
My hand moves to my side, to the bandaging there, and I press my palm flat the way I've been pressing it to Aurora's stomach. Feeling what's real. What's still here.
I'm going to end this, I think. It arrives the way my most certain thoughts always do — quietly, without drama, absolute.
Leo. The Volkovs. Every piece of this. I'm going to dismantle all of it and I am going to bring her something that looks like peace and she is going to raise this child without looking over her shoulder.
That's the only outcome that exists.
The door opens.