Chapter 29 Mina
MINA
Outside blurs into streetlights. Roman sits beside me with his bandaged forearm on his thigh and his other hand open, palm up. I stare at the white edge of the gauze I placed. He is calm. The calm disturbs me because a part of me wanted him to shake the way I am shaking inside.
We leave the alley behind the club and join the river of traffic. One SUV takes the lead. Another hangs back. A voice murmurs in the radio and then goes quiet. The city moves around us, full of people who are unaware of how a life can change in one breath.
He killed his son. When the moment came there was no tremor in his face. Something in me wants to be relieved by that. Something in me wants to run from it. But that part of me gets smaller by the moment.
He shifts and that small motion steadies the air in the car. He does not speak until I do.
“I can hardly believe you did it.” I sound like I am standing far from my mouth. “You look so calm.”
“It felt right. It felt like justice.”
He’s right about that. There are fourteen bodies on that island that will never be tucked in. The number is a weight that keeps changing because it’s incomplete until we have his total body count. That won’t happen until we find out about the retreat.
I breathe until the breath is mine again.
He turns his palm, and I slide my hand into it. Heat blooms where our fingers meet. His thumb strokes once across my knuckles and stops. If I were the kind of woman who could sleep in a storm, I would do it now. But there are words turning over inside me, sharp side up.
“Do you hate me?” I whisper.
The question rips something in my chest. I am scared of the answer because I know what I was ready to do.
I was willing to put a blade where his heart beats.
I was willing to trade one life for three and carry that act like a stone in my pocket.
He murdered his son for me and mine. He has plenty of reasons to hate me.
Roman does not make me wait. He pulls me across the space between us. His arm wraps around my shoulders without touching his wound. He presses his mouth to my hair and holds me there. “I could never hate you,” he says. “Not in this life. Not in the next. I love you more than I thought possible.”
The idea of a next life with him cracks me open.
I place my hand over his bandage and feel the heat there, the pulse under it, his body’s stubborn refusal to quit.
He killed for me. He killed for our sons.
I was willing to kill for them too, and the only reason I did not is because he did it for me.
My voice shatters to a whisper. “I hesitated. When the moment came, and I knew what I had to do to save our sons, I hesitated.”
“You hesitated long enough for me to see him in the knife’s reflection. That hesitation saved us.”
“I hesitated because I wanted the last thing you saw to be me in love with you. I wanted that to be the memory if I took you away from the world.”
He tightens his hold and then loosens it so I can breathe. A red light washes the windshield and blinks to green. The driver keeps us smooth and unremarkable. Roman tilts my chin so he can see my eyes.
“Are you angry with me,” he asks, “for hesitating before the kill shot? For offering prison instead of death? Can you forgive me?”
There is tenderness in the way he asks for forgiveness, as if mercy is the flaw.
“There is nothing to forgive. If it were my son, I could not do what you did. No matter what he had done. The instinct to protect your child is primal. It crushes thought. I am shocked you were able to do it at all. I was bracing to step in. I thought I might have to finish it if you could not.”
He closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, they are darker. “I know you would have. But I never wanted that for you. Killing someone, even someone as wretched as Vitaly, it stains your soul.”
I know that. Not from experience, but I’ve known enough people in his shoes to know that. “I would have done it for our family.”
He presses a kiss to my forehead. “My hope is that you never have to.”
We ride in a pocket of quiet. The city slides by in lit windows and empty benches and a woman walking a tiny dog as if the night minds its own business.
I lean into him and listen to the steady music of his breath.
My mind tries to make a list of everything that needs to happen next.
Find my mother and the boys. Find out what happened at the retreat.
Wash the blood from his cuff. Throw away the dress that now belongs to a ghost of me.
Random thoughts come out of my mouth. “I keep thinking of your face. When you aimed without turning. You looked at me as if I were the only sight that mattered.”
“You were. You are.” He lifts my hand and kisses each knuckle.
His mouth is warm. The gesture makes my throat ache.
I stare at our hands and see a ring that is too new for us to have this much history attached to it.
I drag the pad of my thumb over the metal and think of vows that did not predict this night and still cover it.
“I was afraid you would hate me.” I can’t seem to shut up. “For asking the walls to rise. For wanting to hide with you in that box. For wanting to deny him his show.”
“He never deserved a show,” Roman says. “He never deserved anything at all.”
The driver takes a turn that leads to a bridge. Water below is black and sparkles under the city lights. The reflection makes me think of that blade again, that narrow piece of truth. I squeeze his hand.
He threads our fingers together again. His pulse beats against mine. The radio clicks once. The voice in it says all clear. He nods toward the windshield as if the night needed permission to continue. “I keep thinking of your mother.”
“So do I. Where do you think she is?”
“Vitaly, for all his finesse, was a creature of habit in certain respects. This is not the first time he took a hostage, and I suspect we will find her in his warehouse. Which is why we’re heading there now.”
A hint of relief crashes into me. Not enough to make me feel better—that won’t happen until my babies are in my arms and I see she’s okay. But for now, it’s enough to keep me breathing.
“I thought you said we were headed home.”
“That was for the benefit of anyone who might still be loyal to Vitaly.”
“You think you have a mole?”
His lips form a flat line. “He didn’t get close enough to our home for you to see him hold your mother without having a man or two on the inside. We will have to root them out to be sure, but that comes after our family is secured.”
We pass the last exit before the bridge ends. The edge of town hosts industrial buildings where people don’t ask questions. They simply handle their business without noticing too much.
I’m not sure if I want to know the answer to this question. “After tonight, can you still be with me?”
He looks at me as if I asked whether he plans to keep breathing. “I love you more than ever. You are a fierce mother and a devoted wife. You are the perfect woman for a pakhan. More importantly, you’re the perfect woman for me.”
The sentence goes through me like warm rain. I put my face to his shoulder and breathe there. “You made me this way.”
“You already were.”
We fall into the kind of silence that is not empty.
His thumb keeps time on my hand. The driver’s mirror shows the set of his jaw and the stillness that means the route is clear.
The SUV behind us keeps a polite distance.
The city settles into itself like a huge animal that has eaten and is ready to sleep.
“I am sorry I asked you to press the switch. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I know that.” He says it like a simple truth.
“I wanted to be the kind of woman who never hesitates.”
“Then you would be someone else, and I love the person you are.”
I look at his bandage again. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes,” he says. “But it tells me I am alive, so I’m fine with the pain.”
“That’s twisted.”
“That’s life.” There is a small smile, and I cannot bear how much I love him when he lets himself be light for one second.
We pull up to a warehouse I’ve never been to. Funny—I thought I knew all of Vitaly’s secret hiding places. The truth is, I never knew him at all.
In the time we were together, I never saw beneath his mask. He never let me in that close. But he called it love and I was desperate for that, so we misfunctioned together.
He told me so little about himself, just enough to keep me hanging on. Crumbs, really.
How much did I hate myself to settle for that? I’d be angry with my past self if I had the strength to be. But tonight, my strength goes elsewhere.
I didn’t have to be strong enough to kill Roman. I didn’t have to be strong enough to kill Vitaly if Roman couldn’t do it. But I was strong enough to do either, if I had to.
Now, I have to be strong enough to deal with the aftermath.
When we and the second SUV park, I start for the door, but Roman snatches my hand before I see him move. He grumbles, “You will wait in the car, do not argue with me.”
“She’s my mother, Roman.”
“And if there’s a dead man’s wire on the door, that won’t matter.”
I blink at that. “What?”
“Vitaly is—was—a lunatic. If he wanted to assure himself you’d be dead by the end of the night, he may have rigged the door.”
“So you’re going to go in and get blown up instead?”
He smiles. “No. I’m not.”
One of his men knocks on the door. “Ready, boss.”
“Give us a moment. I’ll signal you when it’s safe.
” He gets out and follows them to the nearest wall of the warehouse.
One of them carries a crate. I can’t make out what they’re doing, but I see someone shine a flashlight on the wall, and another pulls a tool from the crate.
Then, there are sparks at the end of that tool.
They trail the sparks in the shape of a rectangle.
They’re making a new door.
When that section of the wall falls in, flashlights disco around the inside of the warehouse. I don’t hear gunshots or see an explosion. Roman waves at me, so I race to him.
Cool night air fills my lungs, and I barrel through the hole they made. There, inside a room made of chain-link fencing, are my mother, our sons, and the guards that took them away.
They’re alive. They’re alive.
My eyes aren’t just showing me what I want to see. It’s really them.
The strength goes out of my knees when I’m close enough to see Yuri’s sleeping face and smell Xander’s head. The chain-link still separates us, but they’re breathing, and that’s all that matters. Hot liquid pours from my eyes as I fall to my knees and clutch the cold metal wire.
Mom drops to her knees on the other side, tears pouring down her cheeks. “I knew you’d come.”
One of Roman’s men cuts through the lock on the gate, and the door swings wide as the women escape their captivity.
Two of them carry my babies to me, and it’s all I can do not to squeeze the life right out of them.
I can’t stop kissing their heads until they fuss.
Can’t stop breathing them in either. Mom’s arm is on my shoulders, and I didn’t even see her move.
Roman kneels with me and plants kisses on their heads too. His eyes glisten with tears. “Let’s go home.”