Chapter 37
The door clicks open, and my heart thuds against my breastbone. I wait with bated breath as footsteps clang down the metal stairs.
“You okay there?” Dex’s voice echoes in the steel-lined stairwell, and he beckons me toward him. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”
“Bad news?” My eyes search the stairwell for Vadim’s tall frame, for the hum of tension I feel when he’s in a room with me, but I see only steel and blue florescent light. “Is he alive? Is he okay?”
Dex smiles at me as I follow him up the stairs, pulling the door shut before Nadia can charge after me. My heart is in my mouth as we step into the wood-paneled corridor and I see Vadim, his eyelashes casting shadows against his cheeks as he lies slumped against the wall.
Lowering myself to my knees, I touch his hair, his eyebrows. I feel the cool sheen of sweat on his skin, then lay my hand over his heart, reassuring myself with the steady beat.
“The good news is that we’re all okay and Vadim took the last man out before he did any real damage,” Dex says behind me.
I wrap my arms around Vadim, pressing a kiss to his pine-scented, sweat-soaked hair and tasting the salt on his skin. I shut my eyes and reassure myself I haven’t lost him. “And the bad news?”
“This place is compromised. We need to get on the road as soon as possible, and you’ll have to drive through the night if we want to get to a safe house. I’ll get the girls and you grab your stuff.”
Dex turns away, leaving me alone in the silent shadows of the corridor as I cradle Vadim’s head against my chest. Shivers run from the base of my neck to the tail of my spine as Vadim mumbles something in Russian against my cleavage.
Cupping his face in my hands, I lift it toward me. His eyes search my face, as if he can’t quite believe I’m here.
“We’re all fine,” I whisper. “I’m so glad you made it. For a minute there, when I saw you...God.” I look away and laugh before pressing a kiss to his forehead, the relief of finding him alive bubbling up into a kind of giddy hysteria.
I pull back and smile at him as my hands drop to his shoulders. I wait for a hint of the tenderness from this morning when he called me angel and zolotaya, but his face is shuttered as he takes my hands off his shoulders and sets them back on my knees.
“I thought we’d lost you,” I whisper.
He gets to his feet, wincing as he moves his arm, and looks down at me with a strangely blank expression. “It might be better for everyone if you had,” he says, turning his back on me and giving me a view of his broad shoulders as he stalks away from me.
I lean against the wall, pressing my fingers to the wooden panels and feeling the grain beneath my fingertips. I let my heartbeat slow before I follow Vadim.
He’s talking to Dex in a low voice outside the house. I can see the feet of a black-clad man poking out from underneath Dex’s car.
“Is he dead?” I say, pointing at the man’s boots. “Aren’t we going to call the police?”
“Not a good idea.” Vadim looks at Dex as he speaks, ignoring me like I’m not making the decisions, and despite myself, my eyes fall to the movement of his lips.
“And you didn’t answer my other question. Is that man down there alive?” I point at the boots on the ground, my voice edging higher as panic bleeds into my words.
Dex gestures for Vadim to go on as he shakes his head at me, and I put my hands on my hips and glare at both of them.
Vadim sounds weary as he turns to me. “You are welcome to call the police if you want a bunch of fools crawling over your property and this story all over the press before we’ve even worked out who attacked us.” He walks over to the figure on the ground and kicks gently at the man’s boots so that his feet roll back and forth. “This one is still alive, and if we want to know what’s going on, our best bet is to leave him for Sasha. He’ll get the story out of him.”
I turn to Dex and raise my brows in question.
He shrugs. “He’s right about the press, but that’s not a good enough reason not to call the police. It’s the other stuff that worries me.”
Vadim throws up his hands, muttering something in Russian before he turns to me. “Please, zolotaya, listen to me. I brought this mess to your door, and it’s my responsibility to make sure you’re safe. It looks like the Italians attacked us, and they own half the police. That’s why I don’t want to chance it.”
He walks over to me, taking my shoulders in his huge hands. Heat from his fingers brands my skin as his eyes burn into me.
“Please, listen to me,” he says. “We have to get out of here while there is still time.”
Two hours later,it’s dark and I’m tired. The interstate flashes by in a blur of gas stations and rest stops.
My back is stiff, my eyes are gritty, and the strained silence has made my neck ache. I tilt my head, listening to the click of my vertebrae as I roll my left shoulder in a full circle. It sounds unnaturally loud in my ears. The only other sound is the even rhythm of Vadim’s breathing as he slumps against the window.
Taking my attention off the road and the dark trees outside, I slant my eyes across to him. Even tired, with a bloodstained shirt and an injured arm, he’s beautiful. Brave. Willing to put himself in the line of fire for me.
But he’s been unreachable since we got in the car together.
I only offered to drive him because I wanted a chance to talk to him alone, but he shifted about his seat like a caged animal for an hour. When I asked him to tell me who those men were, he just snapped that I didn’t need to know. I can find out more from Nona or get Dex to investigate, but I wanted him to tell me. To open up again. Instead, he remains shut down and distant.
The air between us felt so charged with static that I’m still humming like I’ve drunk a gallon of coffee. Even though he’s passed out, a pulse of blood thumps between my legs as if my heart is thrumming in time with his because my whole body is aware of his next to me.
The gas light flickers red as Dex’s taillights signal for the gas station turnoff ahead. Nadia’s head pops into view as she waves from the back window. I lift my hand in reply, and her head bounces up and down.
The car jolts over a speed bump, and Vadim’s head knocks against the window as I slow down to look at him properly.
“Polina. No. Wake up. Please. Polina,” he mutters. His face twists in distress, and he keeps repeating the only two words that I understand: “no” and “please.”
Putting the car into park, I grip his shoulder and shake him awake. He jerks upright and looks at me.
“Polina?” he says, eyes wide with fear.
I lay my hand over his shirt. Dried blood has stiffened the cotton. I let my hand drift inside his collar and find his skin clammy to the touch.
“It’s me. Kesera,” I say, and he screws his eyes shut, his face contorting in a grimace before he opens them and looks past me.
“I can drive,” he says, going for the door handle as I open mine. The night air hits me with a whiff of gasoline and the scent of damp pine needles.
“Why don’t you fill up the gas?” I reach under the seat to open the gas tank, gripping the keys tightly in my hand and sucking in a deep breath. I’m torn between wanting to scream at him to give me answers or beg him to give me another hit of tenderness. I settle for banality. “I’ll buy you some painkillers,” I call over my shoulder as I walk into the gas station.
Day-Glo plastic packets of salt, sugar, and hydrogenated fat blare at me as I edge my way along the aisles in search of painkillers. On stiff legs, I turn past the cooler and grab a couple of bottles of water as a pair of teenagers stumbles into me, giggling with their heads together.
The boy can’t be more than eighteen, still too gangly for his body and oblivious to the woman in the ball cap who watches him with tired eyes as he paws his girlfriend. The girl giggles and kisses him, knocking over a stand of candy. They laugh harder.
A sharp stab of longing pierces me, and I glance out the door at Vadim. He’s leaning against the car and talking to Dex, and I can read the tension in his shoulders at this distance.
Sighing, I turn my back on the kissing teens and pay for the water and the painkillers with cash. I let the door swing behind me as I make my way back to the car, where Vadim has climbed into the driver’s seat.
I sit down and snap my seatbelt without meeting his eyes. “Polina. That’s Sasha’s sister, isn’t it?”
“How did you know that?” He stares at me, eyes heavy with questions when I look up.
I hold the keys between us like an offering, but he doesn’t reach for them. He just watches me with wide blue eyes as the soft whoosh of cars passing in the night sounds in the darkness behind us.
“I remember everything,” I say, annunciating every word.
He lowers his head and looks at my hands. I reach to clasp his fingers around mine, the keys gripped in a knot between us.
“So do I,” he says gently.
We stay like that for a moment, the air between us filled with ten years of missed opportunities, sleepless nights, and awkward dates that didn’t end in anything. I can hear the sound of his inhales and exhales and practically taste the mint of his kisses. He leans toward me, but a knock on the window stops him.
Vadim lowers the window, and Dex leans in. “Another forty minutes and we’ll stop for the night. There’s a place near here where we can break the journey.” He glances at Vadim’s stained shirt. “You good to drive?”
“I’m fine.” Vadim raises the window and turns to me with his hand out for the keys. I reach down and pass him a pack of Tylenol, but he just shakes his head. “I said I was fine.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re just peachy. But you’ll recover faster if you reduce the swelling.” I tip two tablets into my hand and pass them over with the bottle of water.
He watches me for a moment and then comes to a decision before reluctantly plucking the tablets from my palm. His throat moves as he swallows them, and I wish he was mine to touch.
He reaches toward me. “Keys,” he mutters.
“So, Polina?” I hold out the keys. “How did she die?”
He takes them from my hand, starting the car and looking more comfortable now that he has a task to accomplish. “I told you that?”
Laughing under my breath, I watch the dashboard. “I thought you remembered everything. You mentioned her.”
“I remember you. The important stuff.” He keeps his eyes on the road, switching on the wipers as a light rain dusts the windshield. “I don’t talk about Polina much.”
“I could tell it was painful. It’s why I didn’t ask more questions. So...” I let the unspoken question hang in the air between us.
“She overdosed. I found her body.”
“God, I’m so sorry.”
Dex’s brake lights glow red in the darkness ahead of us. There’s not much traffic on the road, and it’s so quiet that I can hear Vadim thinking.
“I couldn’t save her. She was the last person I ever loved.”
My mouth screws up like I’ve bitten into something sour. The astringent taste of Vadim admitting he loved another woman when he’s stayed out of my life is both acrid and sharp. I nod and wipe the condensation that has built on the window so I can look out into nothingness.
“I should have been able to do something. To pull her back. To make her feel again,” he says to the night as I keep my eyes fixed on the dark road ahead of us.
“How old were you?”
“I was nineteen. She was sixteen.” He sighs, like the memory hurts to speak.
“You were just a kid,” I say.
“Old enough to go to jail.”
“Not old enough to hold someone else’s pain for them. I’m not sure if anyone is ever old enough to do that.” I look over at Vadim, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the road, our headlights casting a narrow circle in front of us.
“How would you know? You’ve never lost anyone like that.”
I throw his words right back at him. “How would you know who I’ve lost? Life doesn’t stop when people die.”
“You know nothing about my life,” he bites out, blind to what I’ve been through. To my losses. To the pain of having grown up without my mother. To the way I picked myself up and kept going when my father and grandmother were killed in a car accident.
Why did I ever long for someone who is so shut down?
Turning my head back to the fogged glass, I draw a heart with my finger. I fill Nadia’s initials into the point at the bottom and scrawl mine above them.
K.M.S.
+
N.S.
You know nothing about my life, I think so loudly I wonder if he can hear me over the hum of the engine.
Dex’s SUV turns in at a motel ahead. The building has seen better days, and the M in the sign has blinked out. The OTEL proclaims its existence against the darkening sky. There are six trucks parked between the hotel and a bar next door, but it’s quiet, and we sit in tense silence as Dex walks to my side of the car.
“Okay, lovebirds. I’m going to put you together in a family room,” he says with a grin.