Chapter 24Vasily
Vasily
I am going to fucking kill him.
It’s all I can think the moment Ana says Dima’s name. I need to kill him and protect her and everything is backwards and upside down because how the hell did he sneak up on me when I just wanted to bury myself in her.
I just need her.
And I don’t understand how any of this happened, but it’s Dima’s fault.
I lunge for him, no other weapons at hand. The asshole has the audacity to laugh as we both go down, and then we’re wrestling on the floor, trying to pin each other as we fight for that scalpel.
I swore I’d kill him slowly, but I have to protect Ana. If a scalpel to the carotid artery is the only way to protect her, it’s what I’ll have to do.
Dima’s not as strong as I am, but I’m still half out of it from whatever’s been pumped into me. He manages to get me on my back with a forearm across my collar bone, but my fingers graze the handle of the scalpel.
“Stop!” Ana shrieks as she rushes for us. I nearly tell her to stay away, but instead of attacking him, she knocks the scalpel out of my grasp. She only grabs him after that, but the tug she gives the jacket of his track suit seems more exasperated than fruitful. “Dima, get off him. He’s sick.”
“I’m not sick,” I growl, expecting my voice to be tight from the hold Dima’s got me, but actually, he’s laid his arm right to avoid my windpipe. And when he lets up enough that I have the space to shove him away, he puts his hands up in surrender.
“Every time I save your lives, you try to kill me like an asshole,” he gripes.
I get back up on my feet, refusing to think about how I’m having a showdown with my villain and I’m in a hospital gown.
I lean against the door frame, aiming for something more casual than the tremors that go through my body every time I move too quickly.
“Save me? What— Ana, get over here!” I hiss as he reaches for her.
“Oh, you can get right out of here with that attitude,” she says, hugging him back.
I’m suddenly feeling very stabby again, and that feeling intensifies when Dima touches her forehead. “I heard you got a bad bump there, Lace. You okay?”
She nods and smiles at him, actually smiles in a way she’s never smiled at me, like she’s never known such joy before and Dima is a goddamn miracle— and where did that scalpel go— and says, “I remember you. I remember Florida. ”
The weight of that hits me in stages, plates getting added to the barbell in increments.
She remembers Dima.
She remembers Dima, not me.
She remembers Dima, not me, and those memories have her glowing.
“He’s your first memory?” I screech in the wrong octave.
I swear she actually hides against him, like I’m the enemy. “Well, no thanks to you, you jerk! God, Dima, I’m so happy you’re here. And you’re okay. What happened to you?”
Blood rises to my face as Dima rubs her back. Ana’s back. My wife’s back. “Someone better explain to me what’s going on!”
They both glare at me. “I will if you stop being an ass,” Dima warns me, and I make a mental note that whatever happens here, I need to clock him good for that.
“And I’m doing my best to piece it all together, so you need to chill when I tell you that I’m not going to have all the answers.
This would have been a whole fucking lot easier if you answered your goddamn phone. ”
“Me?” I spit out, stomping toward him. “I’ve called you every goddamn day for—”
Ana hops between us. “You stop that right now, Vasily Baranov.”
I glower at Dima, but I’m able to get a hold of Ana and tuck her into me, and that’s enough to calm me.
“Dima’s been helping me,” she promises. “Helping us. I swear. There’s stuff you don’t know. Stuff I don’t remember. So let’s hear him out.”
“And actually hear me,” Dima huffs. “What is going on with your phone? You’re the only one not answering me. If you’ve been trying to reach me, too, it’s gotta be something on your end. ”
I don’t want to admit it, not when everything else is pointing at Dima so I don’t know how relevant it even is. But I obviously can’t deny it either.
Dima accepts my silence for what it is. “And when I didn’t hear anything from you, I reached out to Kostya. He said he’d talk to you about your phone.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Kostya never talked to me.”
“Yeah, I take it you didn’t tell him to let me know Lacey and Artom had been secured but—”
“Ana,” I correct.
“It’s fine,” she tells me.
“It’s not. It sounds like a whore.”
She laughs. “That sounds more like you. But that’s what everyone calls me.”
“I’m not calling you that.”
“I’m not asking you to. I like it when you call me Ana.”
I know she just says it to capitulate to me, considering how things went last time everyone but me was calling her Lacey, but she also tips her head up in expectation of a kiss, so it works.
Dima makes a gagging sound like a child. “Put some clothes on, man. I brought you a bag of stuff. And just so everyone’s clear here, I was acting under Kostya’s orders— which I thought were yours— when I picked up Alex and Kseniya.”
Ana tries to hand me a pair of briefs, but I’m moving toward Dima, unsure if I’m going to strangle him or hug him. “It was you?”
“Yeah. Wish I had the paper trail, but it was all phone calls. Kostya refused to text, which I get now because it sounds like he was trying to create a disaster. And I was already real fucking nervous about threats on Kseniya, so as soon as I shot you up with Narcan and got you here, I moved them out of town. Sedona.”
“Kseniya’s okay?”
“Pissed but hanging in there.” He’s grinning, but I don’t know why. This is a clusterfuck that he’s right in the thick of.
But I hug him. With Kseniya and Alex accounted for, I’m feeling a hundred pounds lighter.
Except it’s not over.
And I tell myself I’m good, but my brain, the slog of chemicals that have been pumped into me, they’re taking their toll.
“Let’s do that with pants on, yeah,” Dima says when I make the hug go too long because, admittedly, neither my brain nor my legs are plugged in properly.
“Shut up. I’m in a fucking morgue.”
“Oh, chill. You’re walking out. What’s there to complain about?
” But then he must realize that we are standing in the middle of the morgue, so he flags me to follow him across the hall, to a waiting room with chairs and sofas and no drawers of dead people.
I get dressed in the sweatpants and tee shirt he brought me as he says, “Someone tried to kill you. I pulled some serious strings to have you brought down here so everyone would believe you died. And I’m guessing you already know who tried to kill you. ”
I close my eyes. It’s impossible I got it wrong this entire time. It’s impossible I’ve been played this badly and fell for it.
I built an empire in six years. I rule over a network of blood-thirsty, power-hungry criminals. I’m admired and feared and untouchable.
I shake my head. “No, but... JD from San Antonio.”
“Who from where? ”
“The biker you picked up. He told me you picked him up.” And then I killed him, no further questions.
Dima shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you except I haven’t been in Texas in months. I don’t think I’ve ever been in San Antonio.” He gives me a sly, subtle smirk. “You sure no one else has been in San Antonio recently?”
My stomach roils. No one told me they were in San Antonio.
But I also wasn’t checking flight itineraries to be sure that everyone went where they said they were going.
“Was it really heroin?”
“Yeah, they did a toxicology screen. Doc said you got lucky. Since you shot it into your skin—”
“Subcutaneously.”
“Yep, that word. It took way longer for it to overload your system. You would have died if you shot it in your vein.”
But I didn’t, because I thought it was my migraine medicine. Because that’s what Kostya said it was, and I trust Kostya with my life.
“Kostya tried to kill me.”
It feels like a bombshell. It seems like some impossible, unfathomable thing. Kostya has a great life. He’s wealthy, he’s inconspicuous. He’s unburdened by the weight of power. He’s the lucky one.
“Are you surprised?” Dima snorts. “He’s always been mad he fell out of succession.”
I’m ready to fight back, but even Ana, who barely knows Kostya, nods in agreement.
The more Dima talks, the more pieces come together. But despite Ana curling up next to me on the shitty beige sofa in the basement of the hospital across the hall from the morgue while Dima does his best to get comfortable on the chewed-gum pink melamine chair, she hangs on his every word.
She’s touching me, but she’s obsessed with Dima.
And he looks like the cat that got the canary every time she says something that’s clearly a callback to these memories that are coming back to her.
My temper is too short, my mood is too sour, and I can’t stop myself from snapping.
Dima’s just said again how happy he is that she’s safe, and she’s just started regaling him with what’s actually happened and how she’s just now starting to get her memory back, but she remembers the time he accidentally broke her TV trying to mount it on her bedroom wall, and I blurt out, “So, you two been fucking the last six years? You raising my son, too?”
Dima blanches, but Ana is outraged. She smacks my chest hard and says, “Don’t be a yobany priduruk.”
I raise an eyebrow at Dima. “You teaching her foul language, too?”
He raises his hands in surrender.
Ana says, “I got that from Artom, actually.”
The look Dima shoots her calms me some. As long as he’s concerned about Ana throwing him under the bus— because I have no doubt that this means Dima taught my 5-year-old son how to say ‘fucking moron’ in Russian— I have the upper hand on him.
“I would never sleep with your girl,” he promises me vehemently. “You told me to keep an eye on her, and I did.”
“I didn’t tell you to be besties with her! ”