Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mirabel
I find her in the garden.
The late afternoon is cool—one of those evenings where the clouds are low and bruised, and the air smells of damp earth. But I barely notice the beauty of the day, because the news I have to share is wrenching my heart.
Debra’s sitting on the stone bench by the fountain, legs folded beneath her, her attention fixed on something in the hedgerow. A bird, maybe. Or nothing at all. Sometimes she goes somewhere I can’t follow, and I’ve learned not to chase her there.
She looks up when she hears me. There’s that alertness she carries now, the way her chin lifts, the way she examines my face before I’ve even opened my mouth. She’s learned to read people the way animals read danger. She knows something’s going on before I sit down.
“What’s wrong?” she says.
I sit beside her. The stone is cold through my leggings. My bump presses against the waistband, reminding me of everything I’m building while something else is crumbling.
“I need to talk to you about Dad.”
Her shoulders draw in. Not a flinch—not exactly—but the echo of one.
That half-reflex she’s been learning to interrupt in sessions with Dr. Harrison.
I watch her catch it. Watch her straighten.
She’s so much stronger than she was a month ago, and it still terrifies me how easily the ground shifts beneath her.
“Okay,” she says. Careful.
God, I don’t want to do this.
For weeks, I’ve been curating the truth, not wanting to upset her.
Dad’s sick, yes, but he’s fighting. He’s responding to treatment.
There are good days. We’ll visit when you’re ready, when you’re both ready, and it’ll be this beautiful reunion, and he’ll cry, and you’ll cry, and it’ll fix everything that’s been broken.
A fairy tale built on half-truths and omissions.
Dad’s stabilized since his last bad turn, that’s true.
But he’s nowhere near the man she remembers.
Too thin, alarmingly frail, and often unable to stay awake for long, I’ve been afraid of what seeing him might do to Debra.
And vice versa. Would his heart take it if he learned what she’s been through?
Would he blame himself, the way I blame myself, for not trying harder to find her?
“You know I told you he hasn’t been well?” I start.
Her eyes don’t leave my face. “Yeah.”
“Well...” I swallow. “His cancer took a turn for the worse.”
Her mouth drops open. “How bad?” she asks, eyes welling.
“Until recently, he’s been getting better. Responding to treatment.” I press my palms together. My rings bite into my fingers. “But his doctor just called me. Dad’s back in the hospital. ICU.”
“ICU?” Her voice sharpens. “How many times has he been in?”
“He’s been in and out for almost a year.
Almost since before I started working for Arkady.
” I swallow. “The cancer metastasized to his lymph nodes a while ago. They tried aggressive chemo, targeted radiation. Some of it helped. Some of it didn’t.
But yesterday they said his kidneys have started struggling, and now…
” I trail off because my throat is closing around the words and I can’t—
“Now what?” Debra’s voice is steady. Steadier than mine. That survivor instinct she’s honed.
“We don’t know how much time he has left.”
I say it.
Out loud, into the garden air, and it becomes real in a way it wasn’t before. In my head, it was a doctor’s prognosis, clinical words on a chart. But now, it becomes a countdown. I don’t know if he’s going to pull through.
Debra doesn’t move. Then her face crumples—not slowly, not gradually, but all at once, like a wall giving way.
“No.” The word comes out thin, punched. She folds forward, arms wrapping around her own ribs. “Mira, no—”
“I’m sorry, Deb.” Tears burn hot down my cheeks. “I should have told you sooner. I should’ve told you the first day, but you were—”
“I was what? Too broken?” The edge in her voice isn’t anger. It’s grief wearing anger’s mask. “You thought I couldn’t take it?”
“I thought if I kept paying for his treatment, things were manageable. That I was handling it.” My voice cracks on the word handling, because what a joke. What a pathetic, self-serving lie I’ve been telling myself.
The tears are coming properly now—both of us. Debra reaches for my hand, and I grab hers like we’re thirteen again, sitting in the back of Uncle Eddie’s car after Mom’s funeral, holding on because the world had just proven it could take anything from us whenever it wanted.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I was trying to protect you, and I ended up just—keeping you in the dark. Like everyone else has done.”
The comparison sits between us. Like Gavriil, who locked her away. Like Arkady, who hid her from me. And now me. Her own twin.
“You should have told me.” She squeezes my hand hard enough that my knuckles ache. “I had a right to know.”
“I know.”
“Even when I was at my worst. Even when I couldn’t leave the room without—” She stops. Regroups. “I needed to know, Mira.”
“I know,” I say again. Because there’s nothing else. No defense that holds up.
We sit there, processing it all. I cry into her shoulder, and she cries into mine, and it’s messy and awful and somehow the most honest we’ve been with each other since she came back to me.
“When can we see him?” she finally asks.
“As soon as—”
“Now.” She’s standing. “We’ve wasted too much time already. These might be the last days I have with him.”
“Okay. You’re right.” I nod, wishing I hadn’t taken this decision from her. “We see him now.”
So, I text Arkady.
His reply comes almost instantly: Volodya will drive. Armed security already in place at the hospital.
Already in place. Which means he probably deployed men the moment I asked, maybe the second I hung up.
That’s Arkady Laurov. Always three moves ahead, always building fortifications around the people he loves before they know they need them.
I think of his hands last night, the way he’d pressed his mouth to my temple after we’d made love, held me there in the dark like he was memorizing the shape of my skull.
The tenderness of it. And then this morning—armed security, tactical drivers, a man who shows his love in bulletproof glass and concealed weapons.
Thank you, I type back.
No argument. Not today.
Debra is waiting in the foyer when I come downstairs. She’s dressed carefully—blue cardigan, the soft one Yanis brought her. Her hair is brushed. She’s even put on a little mascara, the first time I’ve seen her wear makeup since she came back.
She looks like herself. Or a version of herself she’s building from scratch, assembling what she can remember and discarding what Gavriil tried to make her.
“You look lovely,” I tell her.
She grips the hem of her sleeve, twisting the fabric between her fingers.
“I don’t know what to say to him,” she admits.
“We’ll figure it out in the car.”
Volodya meets us at the front entrance, quiet and efficient.
He opens the rear door of the black SUV without small talk, which I appreciate.
There’s no version of this morning that needs pleasantries.
But I notice the bulge beneath his jacket—left side, shoulder holster—and the way his eyes sweep the driveway before he shuts our door.
Like we’re cargo to be secured, not women visiting their father.
I slide in first, then Debra. She moves close to the window, tipping her head to watch the grounds disappear behind us as the car pulls down the long gravel drive.
Neither of us speaks until Ashwater Heights is out of sight. The silence isn’t uncomfortable, exactly. It’s loaded. Full of all the things we haven’t planned yet.
“We need to figure out what we tell him about you,” I finally say. “About where you’ve been.”
Debra’s hand goes back to her sleeve, gripping the hem, twisting. “He’s going to ask.”
“Of course he’s going to ask.”
“I can’t tell him the truth. Not the real truth.” Her voice is flat. Not emotionless—controlled. Like she’s holding the feelings at arm’s length so she can function. “If he finds out what happened to me… What Gavriil—” She shakes her head. “I can’t talk about that with him, Mira.”
“So we keep it vague,” I say. “You were taken. You were held against your will. You’ve been freed, you’re safe, and you’re getting help.”
“That’s still a lot.”
“It’s the bones of it without the…” I search for the word. “Without the horror.”
Debra turns from the window. Gives me that long, measuring look she used to deploy when we were kids sharing a bedroom and I was trying to convince her I hadn’t eaten the last biscuit.
We’ve left the countryside, and now the car rolls through traffic. Outside, the city carries on—buses, pedestrians, a cyclist weaving between lanes. Normal life happening around us while we rehearse how to deliver a miracle without it becoming a catastrophe.
“Dad’s going to cry,” Debra says quietly.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to cry.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re already crying.”
I swipe at my cheek, surprised. She’s right. Tears sliding down without my permission, my body responding before my mind catches up.
“Bloody hormones,” I mutter.
Debra reaches across the seat and takes my hand. Her grip is lighter now—less desperate. More deliberate. She’s choosing to hold on, not clinging out of panic, and the difference is everything.
“We walk in together,” she says. “We sit on either side of his bed. And we let him see that his girls are home.”
I nod. My throat is too thick to speak.
Volodya navigates the last few streets toward St. Mary’s.
The hospital rises ahead of us—gray concrete and fluorescent promise, the building I’ve come to know far too intimately these last few months.
I’ve memorized the cracks in the car park walls.
The vending machine on the third floor that eats coins but gives nothing back. The squeak of the oncology ward door.
“One more thing,” I say as the car slows.
Debra looks at me.
“If he starts fading—if the machines beep or the nurses come in—we don’t panic. We stay calm. We hold his hands. We let him know we’re there.” My lungs feel lined with grit, every inhale costing something. “And if this is the last time, then we make it count.”
Debra’s eyes are bright. Wet. Fierce.
“We’ll make it count,” she says.
Volodya pulls into the car park. Through the windshield, I catch a glimpse of a man in plainclothes leaning against a pillar near the entrance.
Casual. Reading a newspaper. But his posture is too straight, and his shoes are wrong for a civilian—polished, functional, the kind men wear when they might need to run.
Arkady’s men. Close enough to intervene, far enough not to disturb. Just like he promised.
But there are more of them than I expected. Another by the stairwell. A woman near the ticket machine who isn’t buying a ticket. For a simple hospital visit, Arkady’s deployed what looks like a small army.
I open the door. Cold air rushes in, carrying antiseptic and exhaust and something sweet from the café on the ground floor. My daughter kicks, hard, as if she knows where we are.
“Ready?” I ask Debra.
She steps out of the car. Pulls the sleeves of her cardigan down over her wrists—a protective gesture, covering skin she doesn’t want the world to see—and lifts her chin.
“Ready.”
We walk toward the entrance side by side. Mirror images. Dad’s girls, coming home.