Chapter 18
Paige
Vanya pulls into a driveway like it’s his own and turns off the ignition. We sit in the darkness that lives between midnight and dawn, the quiet broken only by the tick of the cooling engine.
The house is as real as Vanya’s flirtatious researcher facade.
There’s vinyl siding in pale beige and shutters painted forest green.
Flower beds along the walkway still hold late-season mums in rust and gold.
But you can tell a lawn service takes care of these things, that no one lives here.
Leaves gather on the front stoop, and no other vehicle’s parked in the driveway.
This is the kind of place a retired couple comes back to a few times a year between RV adventures.
Not a spot where an archivist who’s just watched men die goes to sleep it off.
My hands sit locked together in my lap, my fingers numb. I gaze at them like they belong to someone else.
At least this time, I don’t have blood on my hands.
“This is where we’re staying tonight.” Vanya nods at the residence, his own hands still on the wheel.
I don’t move because I can’t get the coppery tang out of my nose. The stench only worsened on the ride here…wherever here is. Flipping my palms over, I inspect my nails. Still nothing.
No red stains my skin.
This time.
He gets out, circles to my side, and opens the door. “Come on, Paige.”
My legs work on autopilot, carrying me up the walkway, past the cheerful mums, and to the front door.
Vanya punches in a code to unlock it.
Fancy. Too fancy for a place like this.
Exhaustion creeps over my brain. I don’t want to think about what it means that this is clearly not a kind old couple’s summer home.
The interior smells like dust and lemon furniture polish applied too long ago to matter.
“Too long ago” seems to be the design theme.
I spy a floral couch with wooden arms. The beige carpet’s worn thin in pathways. Faded wallpaper with a faint border of ribbon-necked geese hugs the walls. A brass floor lamp sits in the corner, and lace doilies cover nearly every flat surface.
An RV-loving grandma clearly decorated this place before she vanished, preserving the past like a museum exhibit.
Vanya switches on the corner lamp, which throws weak yellow light across the room but does little to illuminate the kitsch.
“There are three bedrooms.” He strides down the hall, not even bothering to glance back at me. “Take the one on the left. Get some rest.”
Dismissed. In other words, Go to bed, little girl.
He doesn’t check in or explain where we are or how long we’re staying. Instead, he disappears into the bathroom, still carrying two of his bags.
I should speak up. “Thank you for saving my life.” Or, “I’m sorry you got hurt.” Just to let him know I appreciate everything he did for me in that parking lot.
The words stay lodged in my throat, wedged behind the ball of panic and shock I’ve swallowed down since those men ran me off the road.
He probably doesn’t want to hear my thanks, anyway.
I open the first door I find on the left.
A double bed with a floral comforter waits in the center of the room, surrounded by ribbon-wearing geese, a chipped dresser with brass pulls, and Venetian blinds closed over the window. The scent of mothballs and old lavender sachet nearly chases away the inescapable reek of blood.
A step up from last night’s motel, but still not the quality I’d bet Vanya’s accustomed to.
I set my purse and bag of clothing on the dresser as I sink onto the bed. The shirt I borrowed from the Banya Club stinks of gunpowder. I want to take it off, but I don’t have anything else to wear.
At least I have my purse, which contains my wallet, a spare pen, and tissues.
No phone, either because Vanya took it or I forgot it in my car along with my keys.
I have no idea. My memory is still a little fuzzy after my recent near-death experiences.
After opening the pocket on the side of my purse, a sigh loosens the tension in my chest. Muscles I didn’t realize were tight relax.
Unfolding the stiff, aged paper, I stare down at my mother’s face.
A striped maxi dress billows around her as she holds her fingers up in a peace sign. Dark hair blows in the wind. She poses in front of a palm tree, the ocean blurred behind her. Her eyes, as blue as mine, crinkle with her smile.
My dad snapped this picture the day we landed on Isla de Huesos.
The day before life as I knew it ended.
It’s been migrating from wallet to wallet, bag to bag, ever since. Evidence of a woman I failed. No, of the family I failed. If not for me, my mom would still be alive, and my father never would’ve blamed me for her death.
Gunshots ring out in my memory. Not just from tonight, but also from all those years ago.
Every time I hear the noise, I’m fourteen again and back on that island, watching the first boy I kissed scream as bullets shredded his body.
In my mind, the events often vary a little. Sometimes, he runs forever before being gunned down. Other times, he’s close enough for blood to splatter my face.
Always different. Always the same.
The kiss, the fleeing, the gunshots.
The stench of blood and gunpowder choking me.
Tonight proved worse than any of those twisted memories.
Tonight, I knew the man charging headlong into danger. Cared about him, even though he’s a liar, a criminal, and using me to get a book his Pakhan wants for some inexplicable reason.
“If I go down, get in that car and drive. Understand?”
The words echo in my head. Whenever I blink, I see Vanya dashing into the woods and getting shot down.
Not that nameless boy from an island vacation.
Vanya. Dying. Because I wanted to flout the laws.
Watching him glide out from behind that wall, his gun raised as he faced down four armed mercenaries… My heart stopped.
I can’t lose him.
The unwelcome truth of that thought alarms me.
I need him alive. Not just because he’s my only protection from whoever sent those men, though the rational part of me realizes that’s true.
But the rest of me—the part I’ve kept locked away—has decided he matters.
Alone, listening to the gunshots that have never entirely stopped going off in my head, I curl onto my side and pull the floral comforter over my shoulders.
Paige
I wake to darkness.
For several seconds, I don’t know where I am. Then reality floods back in.
The shooting. Vanya. The drive. Vanya.
Now that I’ve rested and my unconscious mind has sorted through the past thirty-six hours, I’ve concluded that Vanya bringing me to a Bratva safe house makes sense.
The clock on the nightstand reads two forty-seven. I’ve been asleep for two hours or so.
Now I’m wide awake, my heart pounding and my skin prickling with a sense of wrongness. A muffled, pained grunt reaches me from the hallway.
My heart freezes. Did they find us? Is Vanya once again fighting for his life? Or for mine?
Before I can panic, the echoing scrape of metal seeps into the room.
I slide out of bed, pad toward the door I never closed last night, and peer into the dark hall.
A thin strip of light seeps out from beneath a door just to my left.
I follow it and press my ear to the wood.
A sharp inhale, followed by another grunt.
I knock. “Vanya?”
“Go back to bed, Paige.”
What could be going on? I know what guys do in the bathroom in the middle of the night, but that was most definitely not a happy grunt. I frown. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
He’s lying.
I can hear the truth the same way I can hear the pain he’s trying to swallow. Prepared for another nightmare I can’t unsee, I open the door to the tiny bathroom with outdated pink tile and a shower curtain covered in doves. The harsh fluorescent overhead light showcases every terrible detail.
Vanya sits on the closed toilet lid in just his pants, a large roll-out first aid kit spread across the sink. His upper left side is a mess.
A long red mark runs from just above his clavicle across to his left shoulder. It starts as a burn, then deepens to a gouge in a terrifyingly short line.
A bullet grazed him, inches above his heart.
The world wobbles, gravity whirling beneath my feet. I clutch the edge of the door.
Sticky blood trails down from his chest to his waistband. He’s trying to press the gauze in his left hand against the wound while also holding a needle and thread in his right, but the angle’s all wrong.
A bruise blooms along Vanya’s lower back, just above his right kidney. Dark purple, edged with black lines that show just how deep it goes.
My stomach drops, then heaves, filling my throat with bile. “Shit. That doesn’t look good.”
He continues to fumble with the thread, his teeth clenched tight. “I said I’m fine.”
“You can’t even see the cut you’re trying to stitch.” I push away from the door. “And you’re still bleeding all over the floor.”
“It’s not my floor.” He shrugs and winces as the wound weeps.
I swallow down the urge to gag as he attempts to angle his body away, hiding the worst of the blood. The action only highlights the kidney bruise.
Which does nothing to make me feel better. “Let me see.”
“Paige…” He doesn’t want me here.
Too bad. He dragged me into this mess. Now he has to deal with me.
I kneel beside him. “Let me, Vanya.” Examining the injury up close, I can tell it’s even worse than I first thought.
“Stitches won’t work on a gash like this.
You need butterfly sutures to gradually pull the skin together.
Less scarring. And you need pressure, not ice, for that bruise.
Ice can damage the kidney. Pressure will brace it. ”
He studies me with flat eyes. “What are you, a walking encyclopedia?”
I reach for the first aid kit and sort through the contents. It’s unbelievably well stocked, and not with basic things you buy off the shelf. “Something like that. I catalogued a donation of battlefield medical journals last spring.”
He grunts again.
“Here.” I grab the antiseptic, twist off the cap, and pour it directly onto both the burn and the gouge wound.
He hisses out a breath but doesn’t pull away. “Fuck, you’re not gentle.”
“And you’re not special.” I dab with the gauze. “I treat all my criminals like this.”
“‘Your’ criminal, huh? Sounds like you’re trying to claim me already. I’d be down for that.” He releases a gruff laugh. “Glad to know you aren’t giving me preferential treatment. Wouldn’t want you going soft on me.”
My hands shake as I resume wiping gauze over the injury. “Being gentle would hurt more anyway. Burns have to be touched as little as possible.” I apply butterfly closures one by one, pulling angry, jagged edges of skin together.
Vanya still tries to watch, his hot breath blowing down on my forehead. “You’re not as scared as you should be.”
“Oh, I’m terrified.” I continue dabbing at the burn, checking for anything that might have stuck and needs debridement. Hopefully, I can do that without puking.
He doesn’t flinch as I slather petroleum jelly over the entire wound to ensure it won’t dry out. “Could’ve fooled me.”
I grab the roll of medical tape and cut strips to reinforce the closures. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re not what you project to the world, Paige. All those rules you force yourself to live by. You wouldn’t have to do that if you were really the perfect little archivist who never thinks of stepping out of line.”
I don’t look up at him as I work. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you’ve got secrets.” His voice is tight, probably from pain.
I pause for a few seconds. He couldn’t possibly know. No way. “No shit. Everyone has secrets.” Then I remember he dug so far into my past, he read my grad school paper on medieval illumination techniques.
He could know anything about me.
“Not like yours.” He hunches forward, close enough that I can feel his breath on my cheek. “I think part of you likes this.”
How in the world could he believe I like witnessing his pain? Does he consider me a monster? My fingers clench around a roll of bandages, my heart squeezed behind my ribs. “What?”
“This.” He gestures vaguely with one hand. “The danger. The thrill. Not knowing what’s going to happen next.”
Oh. Well, that’s slightly better, I guess. Except I do know what happens next.
The people closest to me end up dead.
Vanya’s already hurt, and we only met a week ago.
“That’s insane. Who would want this? I just want to go home.” That way, I’ll never have to see him truly hurt. Or worse, a corpse.
His thumb strokes the inside of my wrist, right over my pulse. “Go, then. Run back to your quiet life. See if the silence doesn’t kill you now.”
The words squash the anger rising in me.
I’ve spent half my life burying the girl who craved danger. Who kissed strange boys and followed them into the dark. The girl who got her mother killed.
I walk back to the bedroom on legs that barely support me.
I hate him.
Because he’s wrong, and because he’s right.
The silence won’t kill me, but when I’m alone, the gunshots from my memories torment me. That’s the truth that wears down my will to live.
My past actions already caused the death of someone I love. I can’t risk that happening again.