Chapter 27 #2
He looks back at me. For a moment, I almost see the man from the hospital again. The dry humor, the tired eyes, the doctor who told me to breathe when my body was tearing itself open.
Then that version of him disappears.
He comes closer, and I tense so hard the incision pulls and a sick wave of pain moves through me. I can’t stop my flinch. He sees it and, horribly, adjusts his grip before he touches me, as if some instinct in him still knows where not to press.
“It’s almost time,” he says.
“For what?”
He doesn’t answer, just leans down, hooks an arm around me, and lifts me out of the chair. My body screams in protest. I gasp, clutching at nothing because my hands are still tied together, and the room tilts around me.
“Put me down.”
He does, but not gently. He sets me on my feet and keeps one hand locked around my upper arm while I sway, dizzy and shaking. My legs barely hold me.
“Maksim, don’t do this.”
He starts dragging me toward the door.
I stumble after him because I have no choice. Every step sends pain through my body, hot and frightening. My hospital gown clings to my skin under the coat. My wrists are still bound behind my back, and the awkward pull of it makes my shoulders burn.
He opens the door. The hallway outside is narrow and dim, the floor cracked concrete, the walls stained with old damp. A strip of daylight shows at the far end where a metal door sits half open.
And then I see Ethan. He’s slumped against the wall just outside the room, unconscious, his head tipped to one side, one arm limp across his lap. There’s blood at the corner of his mouth, dried dark against his skin.
I stop breathing. “Ethan?”
He doesn’t move.
Panic takes me properly then, cold and violent. “What the hell is going on?”
Maksim pulls me forward. “Keep walking.”
“No.” I dig my heels in, uselessly, because he’s stronger and I’m barely standing. “What did you do to him?”
“He’ll live.”
That’s not an answer. That’s a sentence people use when they have already decided survival is enough.
I start shivering. I can’t stop it. My whole body is trembling now, from fear or blood loss or shock or all of it at once. I can feel myself coming apart.
“Please,” I say. “Please don’t do this. My daughter needs me. I need to go back to her.”
For the first time, Maksim’s face twists. “Don’t,” he says.
“Please.”
His grip tightens, then loosens just as quickly when I gasp.
He looks at my bound wrists and seems to make a decision. To my surprise, he pulls a knife from his pocket and cuts the restraint. My hands come free.
For half a second I can only stare at them, numb and red, the skin rubbed raw.
Then I look past him.
Outside the open door, his car is parked close to the entrance, engine running, driver’s side door open. Beyond it, there’s a broken stretch of yard, a wall, a gate that looks rusted but not locked.
A chance.
Maybe not a good one. Maybe not even real.
But it is something.
Maksim grabs my arm again. “Move.”
I move.
Not where he wants.
I swing with everything I have, using the full weight of my body and all the fear in it. My fist catches him hard near the side of his face, clumsy but enough. He howls, shocked more than hurt, and stumbles back.
I run.
Two steps. That’s all I get.
His hand catches my coat from behind and yanks me back so hard pain rips through my abdomen. I cry out, twisting away, scratching at his wrist, my nails catching skin.
He hits me. The blow snaps my head sideways. For a second there’s only light. White, bursting light and the taste of blood in my mouth.
We both lose balance. Maksim grabs for me as he falls, and I go down with him, my body hitting the concrete badly, my head striking the floor with a dull, sickening crack.
Everything blanks.
The world doesn’t go dark. It goes distant.
Sound stretches. The air feels thick. My vision blurs at the edges while I lie on the floor, unable to make my arms move the way I want them to.
Then I hear Maksim’s voice. “Thank God you’re here.”
The words come from somewhere above me.
I blink hard.
My head pounds. My cheek burns. My stomach feels like it has been cut open all over again. I push myself up on one elbow, dizzy and shaking, and look toward the doorway.
Viktor is standing only a few feet away.
For one impossible second, relief floods me so completely I almost sob.
He’s here. He found me.
But then I see his face.
There’s no relief in it. No softness. No immediate movement toward me. He stands in the open doorway, still as stone, eyes moving from Ethan unconscious against the wall, to Maksim bleeding from the mouth, to me on the floor with my hand pressed to my abdomen and blood on my lip.
Maksim wipes at his face and staggers upright.
“The nurses at the hospital alerted me that Sienna had gone missing,” he says, breathless, almost frantic. “So I had the CCTV checked.”
My ears ring.
No.
No, no, no.
“Maksim,” I whisper.
He doesn’t even look at me. “Imagine my surprise,” he continues, voice breaking in all the right places, “when I saw her leaving on her own.”
Viktor’s eyes cut to me.
I try to speak, but nothing comes out. My tongue feels too heavy. My head is spinning too badly.
Maksim steps closer to Viktor, one hand pressed dramatically to his side as if I’ve done terrible damage to him. “I tracked her here,” he says. “It’s all her plan, Viktor. Hers and Ethan’s.”
The room seems to tilt.
Ethan is still unconscious. I can barely sit up. Maksim is lying, and he’s doing it with the calm confidence of a man who has practiced saving lives long enough to know exactly how panic sounds.
“They were planning to lure you here and kill you,” he says. “She wants you dead.”
I stare at Viktor.
Please, I think.
Please know me.
But my mouth won’t make the words. My whole body is too full of shock, pain, and the horrible realization that Maksim has built this moment carefully. Ethan on the floor. Me outside my restraints. Him bleeding. Viktor arriving just in time to see the wrong picture.
Maksim turns his head toward me at last, and there’s triumph buried under the fear he’s pretending to feel. “She tried to hurt me,” he says.
I shake my head, but it’s weak. Useless.
“She said she was going to let you believe the baby was yours,” Maksim continues, “long enough to get everything transferred into her and Ethan’s name.”
My eyes burn, but no tears come. I think I’ve used them all. I think there is nothing left in me now except pain and a thin, exhausted thread of disbelief.
Viktor doesn’t move.
Maksim takes another step toward him. “I know you believe in justice,” he says, his voice lowering. “So be quick, before she gets away.”
The silence after that is unbearable.
I sit on the dirty floor, half collapsed beside the man who kidnapped me, my body shaking too hard to hide it, and look at Viktor through the blur of my own failing strength.
I have no fight left to protest.
Just one broken whisper.
“Viktor.”