Chapter 13 Hailey
HAILEY
This is all my fault. Time seems to warp and bend. Seconds pass by like years, while the minutes flash by in the blink of an eye.
Each frantic, passing moment, Rafail bleeds red, soaking my white dress. They tried to shoot me. A car pulled up. Nobody got out. A man in sunglasses stretched his arm out the window and shot at me, but Rafail pushed me aside and took the bullet.
“Will he live?” I shout at Ludmila. He has to live.
She pushes her hands down over mine to put pressure on Rafail’s wound.
We careen around a corner. Kneeling on the folded-down back seat of the black SUV, I press hard against his shoulder.
Clearly, this isn’t Ludmila’s first time dealing with a gunshot.
We never got to finish our ceremony, all because I needed a moment to think.
We pull to a halt before an unassuming low-slung building that could pass for an autobody shop, marked with an incongruously shiny Urgent Medical Care sign.
“Seriously? We’re going to urgent care for a gunshot wound? We need an emergency room!” I shout at his guards. They ignore my hysterics and carry him, one under the arms and the other by the ankles, into the waiting room.
“Is bratva hospital,” Ludmila informs me in halting English. “For mafia.”
I follow in my blood-soaked wedding dress, my heels clicking on the tile floors. I’m only a little bit surprised to find Rafail ushered into a fully equipped surgical room staffed by people in scrubs.
“Are you his wife?” one asks me, barely glancing at my ruined dress.
“Yes,” I answer firmly. “You have to save him.”
“We’ll do our best,” she says.
Fine. I never made it to the altar because I had an attack of nerves. I’m here now. Doesn’t that count? I’m his wife in every way that matters.
Except this one. Legally, we aren’t married. Rafail was particularly concerned about that point. Only a man who breaks the law so often that he needs to know it inside and out would think to insist upon following it to the letter, lest he risk my safety.
I never questioned whether Dmitri loved my mom. He was born into the bratva just like Rafail was. Just like our children will be. Rafail learned from his father’s mistakes, though he made others, with me.
I’ve made mistakes, too.
I should have stayed. I should have been braver. I let my fears of ending up the way my mother did, single and pregnant, get the better of me. I was afraid to dream big, and kept myself small.
“I love you,” I whisper to unconscious Rafail. A machine beeps. A bag of blood on a pole flows into his vein. “Come back to me. We’re not finished yet.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Madam, you have to leave now. He is going into surgery.”
I watch, desolate, as they wheel him away.
Rafail
I don’t want to wake up.
Don’t want to live.
Not without my printsesa.
But she is here. She is with me. She left, but she is here now. I don’t want to leave this place where her hand is so soft on mine. So real. So warm.
“Rafe. Come back to me,” her voice says.
I would walk through fire to get to her. Despite the pain, I reach for Hailey. Find her cheek warm and wet with tears.
My eyes open, and she is the only thing I see.