24. Ruslan
RUSLAN
We fuck until the light changes.
Not in one frantic stretch, but in waves—slow when her body needs it, rough when she climbs into my lap again like she’s spent too many years denying herself and has finally stopped pretending restraint is a virtue.
I keep her on top when my leg starts to pull, then on her side with one thigh over mine, then bent over the couch while I hold her hips and take her carefully but deep.
She comes apart more than once, breathless and angry with how much she wants it, and every time she thinks she’s had enough, she looks at me again and changes her mind.
I suck her breasts until the skin is flushed and marked, bury my face between them when she rides my cock, and listen to the little broken sounds she tries and fails to swallow.
She leads more than she lets herself admit. I let her. I follow when she wants to be used, when all she wants is release and the relief of not being responsible for everyone in the room.
By the time we stop, the apartment is dim and warm and quiet in that dangerous way domestic places can be quiet.
Zoya is flushed, sore, and still trying to act like what happened between us was only sex, as if she didn’t shake in my arms after the last time and as if I didn’t lie there with my face in her hair trying not to think about how easily I could stay.
She checks the time, curses under her breath, and says she has to pick up the girls.
I tell her I’ll be fine alone for twenty minutes.
She doesn’t believe me, but she goes anyway because mothers don’t get to stop the clock for orgasms or old wounds or the men who crawl back into their lives after inconveniently being shot.
The door closes behind her, and the apartment changes at once.
I sit up slowly on the couch, leg protesting, and listen.
The girls’ drawings are still on the fridge. One of Mila’s hair clips is on the table. Zoya’s coffee cup is in the sink. Everything looks ordinary enough to fool a man who doesn’t know what tension feels like.
Then I hear the lock move.
Not the front one. The back service door near the kitchen.
Very soft, but I’ve been trained to hear even a miniscule movement. That makes all the difference in keeping one’s life.
I’m off the couch before the second sound. Pain slashes through my leg, but I’m already moving, already crossing the room on instinct. I grab the heavy ceramic lamp from the side table just as the door swings inward.
First man through the gap. Mask. Gun up.
I throw the lamp at his face. It smashes against his body.
He fires blind. The shot rips into the ceiling.
I hit him before the shards finish falling, slam my shoulder into his chest, drive him backward into the narrow kitchen entry, and wrench his gun hand into the wall until I hear the crack in his wrist. He screams. I rip the pistol free and smash the butt into his mouth.
Second man comes beelining from the side. Too fast to aim. He lunges with a knife instead, low and vicious, trying to open my stomach. I twist sideways, catch his wrist, and ram the first man into him.
All three of us crash into the counter. Plates explode on the floor. The knife skids away. The first man is still half-conscious, flailing uselessly. I shove him down and fire once into the second man’s shoulder. He spins, hits the fridge, stays up.
He charges me. I meet him with the gun in one hand and the counter edge at my back, take the hit, then drive my forehead into his nose. Bone gives. Blood pours.
He grabs my wounded leg by accident as he falls, and the pain is so bright it blacks the room out for half a second. I roar, bring the gun down across his temple, then again, then once more until he stops moving.
Third man is the careful one. He never rushed the doorway. He stayed outside the kitchen line, waiting for the mess, waiting for me to commit.
A shot tears through the wall beside my head.
I drop behind the table, chairs skidding under me, splinters spraying across my face. He fires again. Wood jumps. A bowl shatters. Mila’s stupid pink cup flips and rolls across the floor.
He’s trying to pin me.
The third man fires again, and the shot tears through the side of the couch where my head was a second ago.
I hit the floor hard and roll behind the kitchen island, dragging my bad leg with me.
Pain slices up my thigh so brutally I nearly black out, but there’s no time for it.
The first two men are still moving. One is groaning on the tiles, trying to get his breath back after I smashed him into the wall.
The other is up on one knee near the fridge, reaching for the gun he dropped.
I kick a chair at him.
I grab the nearest thing my hand finds—Mila’s plastic toy bin—and hurl it across the kitchen.
It bursts open in the air, blocks and crayons and toy animals exploding across the floor.
The third man flinches, just enough. I shove the island with all my weight.
It screeches across the tiles and slams into him at knee level.
He stumbles.
That’s all I need.
I lunge for the front hall, half running, half falling, every step on the injured leg like being stabbed again. Behind me, one of them shouts, “Don’t let him out!”
Too late.
I hit the wall by the coat hooks, grab Zoya’s keys off the little tray, then yank the girls’ backpacks and jackets down with one sweep of my arm. The service door is no longer safe. They came through it. There could be more outside.
The front door. I slam the bolt back.
A hand grabs my coat from behind.
The first man. Back on his feet.
He jerks me backward. I twist, ram my elbow into his ribs, then drive him into the umbrella stand hard enough to send it crashing over. He still doesn’t let go.
So I grab the front door and throw my full weight through it.
The door flies open. Cold air hits my face.
The man loses his footing on the threshold, and I tear free. I stumble into the corridor and nearly go down. Inside the apartment, the second man reaches the doorway. The third is coming fast behind him.
I slam the door shut and throw the lock.
The handle jerks violently at once.
One hit. Two.
Wood shudders under the force.
I limp down the hallway, not waiting to see if it holds. My leg is buckling now, blood running down into my sock, each step uglier than the last. I hit the stairwell door with my shoulder and go through it sideways, grabbing the rail before I fall.
Above me, someone is shouting.
Below me, a neighbor’s television hums through the walls, absurdly normal.
The apartment is blown. Finished. Zoya can’t come back to it, not with the girls, not tonight.
I force myself down the stairs, one hand locked on the railing, the other holding the keys so tightly they cut into my palm. Halfway to the next landing, the apartment door upstairs bursts open.
They got through.
I don’t look back. I keep going.
By the time I reach Little Birch, my leg is half useless.
I make it there on stubbornness more than anything else.
The walk from the main road isn’t long, but today it feels endless.
Every step pulls at the wound, and by the time I reach the corner near the school gate, sweat is running down my back under my shirt.
I stop by the low wall beside the footpath and force myself to breathe normally.
The school day is ending. Children spill out through the front gate in clusters, some dragging bags, some running ahead, some already crying because they don’t want to leave.
Teachers stand near the entrance smiling too hard, trying to keep order.
Parents wait at the curb, half-distracted by phones and half-distracted by their own children.
I stay near the low wall beside the footpath and scan the crowd.
Then I see them.
Mila first, because Mila is impossible not to see. She comes out half skipping, talking before she’s even fully through the gate.
Nadia is beside her, neater, calmer, carrying her own things properly and already looking annoyed by whatever Mila is saying.
Zoya is behind them. She has both lunch boxes in one hand, her keys in the other, and that same tired, focused look she gets when she’s already thinking about the next three things she has to do before dinner.
For one second, just seeing them all alive and normal is enough.
Then I remember the apartment.
I push away from the wall and start toward them. My bad leg folds under me halfway across the pickup lane. I catch myself, but the stumble throws me farther out than I mean to go, right into the path of Zoya’s car as she starts to pull away from the curb.
The brakes scream. The car jerks to a stop so close I feel the heat from the hood.
For one second, nobody moves.
Then the driver’s door flies open. Zoya gets out, white with shock. She slams the door behind her and comes straight at me. “Are you trying to kill yourself in front of my car?” she snaps.
I brace one hand on the hood because my leg is now shaking badly enough that I need the support. “I was trying to stop you.”
“That’s not how normal people do it.”
“I’m not a normal person.”
“I’ve noticed.”
In the back seat, Mila appears at the window. “Mama, is he hobbling around?”
Nadia leans across beside her. “That seems obvious.”
Zoya doesn’t even turn around. “Stay in the car.”
Then she looks back at me properly and sees the blood on my trouser leg.
Her face changes.
“There were men in the apartment.”
She stares at me. For a second, the whole street feels too loud around us. Children laughing nearby. A teacher calling goodbye. A car door shutting somewhere behind me.
Then she says, very quietly, “What do you mean, there were men in the apartment?”
“They came in after you left.”
Her face goes pale, then hard. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I came here faster.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I have.”
She takes one step closer. “You left my apartment with armed men inside it and thought the best plan was to limp to my daughters’ school?”
“Yes.”
She laughs once, sharp and disbelieving. “You are unbelievable.”