Chapter 35
AXEL
The shot misses.
Leo drops, and the bullet sparks off the concrete behind him, and something in me goes completely quiet. Not calm. The opposite of calm. The kind of quiet that exists on the other side of every feeling, where the only thing left is what needs to happen next.
I hit him before he straightens.
Full weight, shoulder into his chest, both of us going down hard onto the concrete.
He's fast, always been fast, twisting underneath me and getting the knife up between us, and I catch his wrist before the blade finds anything vital and slam it against the ground once, twice, until his fingers open and the knife skitters away.
He headbutts me.
My vision splits white. He gets a knee under my ribs and shoves, rolling us, hands going immediately for my throat.
"You should have stayed in that prison." His voice is ragged, fingers tightening. "Everything was fine when you were gone."
I get my thumb into the pressure point below his ear. He rears back involuntary and I reverse us, get on top, and look down at the face of the boy I raised.
"I gave you everything," I snarl.
"You gave me nothing." He spits blood. "You gave me a name and a leash and called it love."
I drive my elbow into his jaw. His head snaps sideways.
"I gave you Elena's memory." Another hit. "I gave you more than two decades of my life." Another. "I gave you my name when you had nothing and nobody."
He stops swinging back somewhere around the fourth blow. Just takes them, head rolling, body going slack underneath me, and still I can hear Aurora screaming from across the building, and still the blood on my hands isn't only mine, and I don't stop until Viktor's hand closes hard on my shoulder.
"He's done," Viktor says. "Axel. He's done."
I look down.
Leo's face is unrecognizable, blood running freely from his nose and mouth, one eye swelling shut in real time. His chest pulls in shallow ragged intervals, each breath wet and uncertain.
"You were my son," I tell him.
He doesn't answer. Can't. His eyes find mine for one second, glassy and dimming, and then they close.
I stand up and leave him on the ground.
Anton Volkov is backed against the far warehouse wall, three of my men down in front of him, two of Luca's circling from the sides.
Still standing, still firing, burning through ammunition with the recklessness of a man who knows he has nothing left to conserve.
A gash across his forehead is painting half his face red, and he either doesn't feel it or stopped caring several minutes ago.
He sees me coming across the floor, and something shifts in his expression. Not fear. Recognition. The particular look of one man acknowledging another when the accounting is finally due.
"Santego." He snarls. "You should have stayed buried."
"You should have left my family alone."
He pulls the trigger, and the gun clicks empty.
The half second his eyes drop to the weapon is all I need.
I close the distance and take the gun from his hand and hit him with it across the temple. He goes hard into the wall, and I grab his collar before he can slide and hit him again, and he gets his hands up this time, trying to clinch, trying to buy space.
"It's over, Anton." I drive a knee into his ribs, feel something give. "Your men are down. Your deal with Leo is finished. It's over."
"Nothing is ever—" He swings, connects, splits my lip clean open. "—over."
I hit him four more times.
He stops swinging after the second. Stops moving after the fourth. When I finally release his collar, he doesn't slide down the wall. He drops straight down, face-first, and the sound he makes hitting the concrete is final in a way that needs no confirmation.
Sergei crouches beside him. Two fingers to the neck. He looks up at me and shakes his head once.
The silence that settles over the warehouse arrives in stages after that. Gunfire stopping, then shouting, then just breathing, and the distant sound of vehicles and the particular stillness of a space where something enormous has just ended.
I turn around.
Luca is already at Aurora's side, pressing his jacket to her thigh, speaking to her in low, rapid Italian. She's conscious, both hands gripping his forearm, her face the color of old ash.
I cross the distance in seconds and drop beside her, and the sight of the blood — her blood, soaking through Luca's jacket, spreading across the concrete under her — does something to my hands. They're not quite steady when I reach for her face.
"I'm okay," she says immediately. Her voice is thin, but her eyes are clear. "Axel. I'm okay."
"You're not okay."
"The baby is okay. I can tell. I'm okay."
I press my forehead to hers and stay there for exactly two seconds, feeling her breath against my face, counting it, making sure the next one comes.
"Hospital," Luca says behind me. Already standing, already moving, already the man I've known for forty years who acts first and falls apart later if at all. "Now."
The hospital waiting room has forty-seven ceiling tiles. I’m finally counting here too.
I never want to see this ceiling again.
Aurora told me that once, laughing about counting them when I was in surgery.
I understood it then in a distant intellectual way.
I understand it completely now, sitting in a plastic chair at two in the morning, having counted them four times, knowing the exact placement of every crack in every tile, because my hands need something to do and my brain needs somewhere to put itself that isn't the image of her on that concrete floor.
I stand up.
Sit down.
Stand up again.
"Axel." Luca's voice, from the chair beside me.
"Don't."
"Sit down."
"I can't sit down."
"You have three healing bullet wounds and torn stitches, and you've been standing and sitting and standing again for forty minutes.
" His hand closes around my arm, pulling me back into the chair with the particular force of a man who has been physically imposing his entire adult life and hasn't lost it. "Sit. Down."
I glare at him.
He keeps his hand on my arm. Doesn't say anything else. Just sits beside me in the fluorescent light of this waiting room and holds my arm like I'm something that might fly apart without an anchor, and I let him, because he might be right.
She said she was okay. She was conscious. She was talking.
But there was so much blood.
"She's strong," Luca says quietly. Not comfort exactly. Just fact, stated by a man who knows her. "She gets it from her mother."
"I know."
"She also gets most of the stubbornness from her mother. In case you were wondering where that came from."
Something moves through my chest that almost resembles a laugh. Almost. "And here I was, blaming you."
"I guess you can blame me just a little."
The doctor appears at the end of the corridor, and I'm on my feet before she's taken three steps toward us.
"She's fine." The words land before I've fully processed that the doctor is speaking. "Clean wound, no arterial involvement. The shoulder will need monitoring, but it's not serious. We're closing both wounds now." She looks between Luca and me. "The baby is perfectly fine. Heartbeat is strong."
The room does something strange.
I put my hand on the wall.
Luca's hand lands on my back, solid and steady, and I breathe in through my nose the way I told Aurora to breathe, once, twice, and the strange thing the room was doing gradually stops.
I spin towards the recovery room. I need to see for myself that she is all right.
She's sitting up when I walk in, pale but alert, with a bandage wrapped around her thigh and shoulder, holding a cup of something warm between both hands.
Her eyes lock onto mine as soon as the door opens, and the look on her face does what it always does to me — moves through me like weather, like something I can't defend against.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi." I cross to her, sit on the edge of the bed, and take her face in both hands. She leans into them.
"It's over?" she asks.
"It's over."
"Leo?"
I think about his eyes going dim on that warehouse floor. "Alive. Barely." I pause. "He's in a coma."
She's quiet, processing. Not grieving, exactly. Something more complicated than that.
"And the Volkovs?"
"Finished." The word settles between us with the weight of everything it took to make it true. "It's done, Aurora."
She exhales. Long and slow, like she's been holding it for months, like every accumulated breath of fear and waiting and looking over her shoulder is leaving her body at once.
Luca appears in the doorway.
He looks at his daughter for a long moment. Then he crosses the room, presses a kiss to the top of her head, and straightens. He looks at me over her, and something in his face that has been complicated since the day I walked out with Aurora shifts.
"Take care of my daughter," he says.
"Every day," I promise him.