26. Tasha
TASHA
My phone rang at the exact moment I'd finally stopped waiting for it to.
I'd fallen asleep sitting up against the headboard, the quilt still cool where I hadn't managed to get properly under it, and the ring dragged me up out of something heavy and black before I'd even located my own hand.
I answered without checking the screen, some animal part of me moving faster than thought.
"Grisha." His name came out of me like a held breath finally let go.
Nothing answered at first. Then his voice came through, thin and far away, distorted the way a voice gets when a phone is shaking too hard to hold steady. "Tasha." Something in the word had gone loose at the edges, unraveling. "I need you to send someone. I need."
The rest of it went nowhere I could follow, not quite silence, something with more weight to it than that, and then nothing at all. The call log confirmed what my whole body already understood before my mind caught up: the line had gone dead, and he hadn't been the one to end it.
I called him back four times inside a single minute. Nothing. I was up already, reaching for the jeans still crumpled on the floor from earlier that day, when the phone rang again in my hand and I answered before it finished its first ring.
"Tasha, it's Fedya." His voice had none of its usual grin in it, flat and fast in a tone I'd never once heard from him.
"Don't panic. He's alive, he's heading back to the compound right now, but he's hurt.
Stabbed. The doctor's already on his way in.
I need you to meet us at the infirmary behind the kitchens, not the main house.
Can you drive, or do you need someone sent for you? "
"I'm already moving." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which surprised me even as I said it.
"Fifteen minutes. Less if the roads are clear." A pause, and something in it Fedya clearly didn't want to say and said anyway, because I would have heard the shape of the silence otherwise. "He's going to be okay, Tasha. I need you to hear me say that before I hang up."
"Say it again."
"He's going to be okay. I mean it."
I don't remember the drive the way I remember most things, one moment after another in order.
I remember the gate standing open, Dmitri waving me through without checking anything.
I remember gravel under my tires sounding louder than it had any right to at that hour.
I remember running the last stretch on foot because the car felt too slow the second I was close enough to see the lit windows of a building I'd walked past a hundred times without ever once having a reason to go inside.
Sasha stood just outside the infirmary door when I reached it, still in the shirt he must have thrown on the second the call reached him too, none of his usual composed stillness anywhere on his face.
He didn't say a word. He just stepped aside to let me through, and the look he gave me on the way past, guilt and relief tangled together so tightly I couldn't have pulled them apart if I'd tried, told me plainly that he already understood this was as much his fault as anyone's.
The compound infirmary sat in a low wing behind the kitchens, plain door, no sign, the kind of anonymous entrance that told you exactly how much this family had already planned for nights like this one, long before I ever showed up asking questions about paintings.
Inside, the air hit me first, antiseptic sharp enough to sting behind my eyes, and underneath it something coppery and warm that turned my stomach over before I'd even found him with my eyes.
He was on the second bed in, propped half upright, an IV line taped into the back of one hand, his shirt gone entirely, a wide stretch of gauze bright white against his ribs where bruising had started blooming out from under the tape in shades of yellow and deepening purple.
His jaw had swollen along one side. A shallow cut at his hairline had been cleaned but not stitched.
Under the fluorescent light his whole face had gone the color of old paper, pale in a way I had never once seen on him, not even the night he told me about Elena.
A monitor beside the bed beeped steady and even, too loud in a room that otherwise seemed to be holding its breath, and I made myself look at the number on the screen for one full second instead of at him, because the number was the only thing keeping my knees under me.
"Tasha." His voice came out thinner than I'd ever heard it, but it came out, and that alone nearly took my legs out from under me for real.
I crossed the room before I'd decided to move and put my hand on his uninjured arm, the one without the IV in it, and it was not steady, not even a little, no matter how hard I tried to make it behave like the hand of a woman who had any of this under control.
"Superficial to the ribs, four stitches, nothing hit that shouldn't have been hit," the doctor said, snapping off a pair of gloves, an older man with reading glasses pushed into gray hair who spoke like he'd delivered this exact update in this exact room more than once before tonight.
"A mild concussion from a blow to the jaw.
Deep bruising over the same rib that took the blade, which will bother him considerably more than the stitches do for about a week.
He's stable. He's lucky. I'll leave the pain management to the nurse and be back at first light. "
"Thank you," I said, though the words came from somewhere very far away from where I actually stood.
The doctor let himself out, and the door clicked shut behind him with a sound too small for what it had just sealed the two of us into.
"You went alone," I said, once we were alone, not a question.
"Yes."
"Don't do that again."
"I won't," he said, and something in the way he said it, no argument anywhere inside it, no careful qualifier tucked in at the edge, told me he meant it more than he had ever meant anything else he'd said to me.
"Tell me," I said, when he didn't offer it on his own, already starting to disappear at the edges under whatever they'd given him for the pain. "All of it. Not the version you think I can carry. The real one."
"Kessler admitted it." His words had started running together, the anesthesia pulling at him even as he fought to stay present through it.
"Elena's shipment, the piece that ended up in his gallery, all of it.
He as good as told me his people were on that truck eight years ago.
Then he told me you'd been asking too many questions, and made it very clear what that could cost you if you kept asking them. "
My whole body went cold in a way the antiseptic air alone couldn't account for. "He threatened me."
"He called it candor." His hand found mine where it rested on his arm, weak but certain, fingers curling around my own like he needed the anchor of it more than I did.
"I left. I didn't push it further, because I didn't have backup and I didn't have a plan, only a name I'd wanted for eight years and no patience left to wait for the smart way to use it.
His man was waiting in the garage. I should have expected that.
I didn't, and it cost me four stitches and a concussion, and I'm telling you every part of it because I promised you I'd stop deciding what you get to carry. "
I sat with that a long moment, his hand loose and warming in mine, the monitor keeping its steady, indifferent rhythm beside us, and felt something that had been circling all night finally land somewhere solid in my chest. I had spent the whole drive over rehearsing every version of what I would say if I got here and he was gone, and none of the words had come, because there weren't any that fit a loss that size.
Now that he wasn't gone, now that his hand was warm and stubborn in mine and his voice, thin as it was, was still unmistakably his, I understood something with a clarity that frightened me more than the stitches did.
I would have gone after Kessler myself tonight, with nothing but my own two hands, if the alternative had been walking into this room and finding him not breathing.
That should have scared me. It did scare me.
It also showed me exactly how far down I'd already fallen for this man, and there was no climbing back out of it now, not tonight, probably not ever.
"I'm not doing this without you again," he said, his eyes losing their last argument with whatever was pulling him under. "Whatever comes next. I don't care how it looks. I'm not doing it alone."
"Good," I said. "Because I wasn't going to let you."
He smiled at that, small and real, the kind I'd learned to watch for the way other people watch for weather breaking, and then the anesthesia finally won the fight it had been having with him since I walked in.
His hand went slack in mine, his breathing settling into something slow and even that matched the monitor instead of fighting it.
I sat there a long while after he'd gone under, watching the rise and fall of his chest, the bruising darkening along his ribs, the small mercy of a monitor that kept confirming, over and over, in numbers I didn't fully understand but trusted anyway, that he was still here.
Somewhere outside the window the sky had started going the particular gray that comes right before actual light, the whole compound holding itself still around one lit room the way it must have held itself still around other private emergencies over the years, quietly, without any of it ever making the papers.
I thought about my mother's voice on the phone the night before, six years of a promise finally cracking open.
I will dig it out this week. I thought about a hidden compartment and a strip of film neither of us could read, and a man who had just proven himself capable of threatening a woman he had never met over nothing more than her own curiosity.
And I thought about Grisha, three nights running, disappearing into a locked drawer of his own grief and coming out the other side with a decision he hadn't let me vote on, because some part of him had decided that loving me meant carrying the danger alone so I never had to touch it.
I understood him now in a way I hadn't fully let myself before, sitting in this chair with antiseptic still sharp in my throat and his hand heavy and trusting in mine.
I understood exactly how a person could love someone so much that protecting them stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like the only decent thing left to do.
I was about to become exactly the kind of person I'd spent a whole night furious at him for being.
I didn't call my mother right then. I didn't wake him to ask permission I already knew he wasn't in any state to give, and some quieter, more honest part of me admitted I wasn't sure I would have asked even if he had been.
In the morning, while he slept off four stitches and a concussion under Baba Olya's fierce, hovering care, I was going to call my mother and tell her I couldn't wait on a promise measured in days anymore, that whatever it took to get that trunk into my hands, I needed her to move faster than grief usually let her move.
I would tell Grisha eventually. I told myself that firmly, the way you tell yourself anything you're not entirely sure is true. Just not yet. Not until I had something solid enough to hand him that the risk would be behind me instead of sitting in front of both of us.
It was, I recognized even as I made the decision, precisely the same lie he had told himself in a room full of floor plans, dressed up in a different set of good intentions.
I let myself have it anyway. Some kinds of hypocrisy, I was learning, you commit to with your eyes wide open.
Sitting still while the people I loved bled for me had already proven itself unbearable, in a way no promise could talk me out of twice in one night.
I stayed until the sky outside went fully pale, my hand still resting over his, memorizing the steady beep of the monitor like it was a language I needed to learn by heart.
When a nurse finally pulled me gently toward the door with the reminder that he needed rest and so did I, I knew exactly what I was going to say to my mother once the sun was fully up.