30. Maxim
MAXIM
Sokolov will die for this.
Not tonight, not in rage, not sloppily. I will take my time. The moment he begs for mercy is the moment his agony will truly begin.
The ambulance lights blind me. They reveal my son in detailed clarity. Details I never wanted to see. All that blood is supposed to stay on the inside. So is the ruined flesh beneath his skin.
High on the left chest just below the shoulder, the EMT acts quickly, packing the wound and calling out information to the driver. Between these calls, he describes what I already observe. “Bullet clipped the top of the lung, I think. He’s got blood where blood shouldn’t be.”
Then he places the mask over Klaus’s mouth. “He’s coughing blood. We need to move, and you need to let me work, sir, so talk to him if you’re going to talk, but stay out of the way.”
So, I back away as much as I can in the ambulance, take my son’s hand, and I talk to him.
His fingers are cold and barely grasp mine. No more strength in him. His eyes meet mine over the mask, searching frantically.
I’ve only words to give. So, I offer him the ones that truly matter. “You did right tonight, Niklaus. Do you hear me? You fucked up many things in the past.”
His fingers twitch in mine. I continue. “But tonight, when a gun was pointed at Thea, you stepped in front of it. You placed yourself between a killer and your family. That was the most important decision of your life, and you made the right call.”
He tries to speak and cannot, and blood weeps at the corner of his mouth.
I tighten my grip and softly say, “No. Save it. Just listen. You’ve spent your whole life questioning whether you were truly a Vernigora. I was the one who planted that doubt in you, and I’ve hated myself for that ever since.”
I lean closer, so the mask and the noise cannot take a word of it. “So I’m telling you now that you are a Vernigora. You are my son, and you fucked up, and you made it right, and I will never forget it.”
His smile is dreadful, twisted by pain. Crimson agony. Yet, it’s the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in twenty years. In that instant, the distance I’ve spent two decades creating vanishes.
His hand gently squeezes mine, the slightest pressure he can make. His lips move beneath the mask, and while I don’t hear the word, I can see its shape on his lips. Dad.
Then his eyes roll back, and my heart attempts to stop in sync with his.
“He’s out, not gone,” the EMT states firmly, glancing at the monitors. “He’s unconscious, not dead. Now move back and let me keep him alive.”
Unconscious, not dead.
I hold those words in my mind as the ambulance rushes toward the city lights. They take him from me at the door.
The handoff is a barely controlled violence.
A group in scrubs quickly snatches the stretcher, moving rapidly while communicating through a language of numbers and drugs.
As I try to follow, one of them places a flat hand on my chest, warning, “You can’t come back here. OR’s that way and you can’t be in it.”
She’s right. More than that, I prefer to stay out of it. The best thing I can do right now is to step back and let capable, impartial professionals operate. Even if it kills me to let him go.
The brightly lit corridor is cold. I stand there with my hands at my sides, empty and still.
There’s a strange peace to find in hospitals.
The buzz of rushing doctors and nurses becomes a humming background noise like monks chanting.
Beeping machines and gasping respirators join the chorus.
And then there’s the visitors, helpless and frustrated.
Tonight, I join their ranks.
I can’t say exactly how long I stand there. Long enough for the blood on my sleeve to dry. I then seek out the others. A man who cannot aid his son can at least stand with his people.
The OR waiting room is bleak under fluorescent lights, though better lighting wouldn’t alter the outcomes, so the appearance might not matter in the long run. I don’t... I don’t see Thea. My household is spread out on the ugly blue patterned chairs. Two of my men. Lev at the window.
Then Thea turns around near the other bank of windows, and relief washes over me. She’s on her feet the moment she sees me, but then she stops, both of us unsure of what to do or how to fix this. Despite that, I go to her, grasp her shoulders, and look at her.
She has washed her hands thoroughly, scrubbing them until they are raw and pink up to the wrist. It’s the one thing she could control tonight, and she exerted that control, even if it was to her own detriment.
Her clothes are ruined. Saturated and stiffening from Pasha’s dried blood. Dark rust across her body. A horror she has forgotten she’s wearing. The sight of it frays something in me that not even the entire ambulance could.
“Pasha’s in surgery,” she says before I can ask. Her voice is hoarse and strained. “He coded again in the bay. They managed to revive him. It’s serious, Max. They may not be saying it, but I can read the room—it’s very bad.”
“I—”
“Klaus?”
“Surgery. EMT says he thought the bullet nicked a lung.”
Thea nods, and she doesn’t cry. There’s a kind of past-crying thing that rooms like this one exist for.
I pull her in, blood and all. She presses her forehead to my sternum and takes a breath, and for a brief moment, we’re two individuals supporting each other upright, just like anyone else in this room.
I doubt most of the people here are preparing for a counterattack. Over her head, I take stock of my people. “Galina?”
“She’s got someone fixing her lip in the ER.”
I will construct a wing for any house she selects. If Thea agrees, I will name a child after her. I know I can never fully repay that woman, and she would be offended if I attempted to do so. I’m going to try anyway.
Lev’s eyes are lethal. They hold no trace of grief or fear, only a steely black certainty. This is the gaze of the man he was before becoming my sovetnik. The doctor who lost his license because he decided who lived and who died on his table. When he became an executioner instead of a doctor.
That’s the man looking at me and waiting, because he will not move on a thing this size without my go-ahead. The father in me wants revenge. Personally. The pakhan in me knows I must answer blood for blood.
I hold Thea against my chest with one arm as I glance at Lev across the bleak room and nod.
Lev inclines his head a half degree. He pushes off the window and walks out into the corridor. Sokolov does not know he lost this morning. He’s about to find out.