Zoya #2
Mila screams behind me, and I feel her little hands clutch the back of my sweater as if she can anchor both of us by sheer will. Nadia is crying and shouting something about a branch, about help, about not falling, but her words blur into the rain.
Ruslan’s shoulder clears the ledge. Then one arm.
Then, with one final brutal push, he gets enough of his weight over the edge for me to drag him onto the wet grass.
He rolls onto his back and lies there panting, soaked through, covered in mud and blood, his face turned toward the rain like even breathing is a fight.
I fall over him, both hands on his face, because I need to feel him warm under my palms.
“You absolute bastard,” I sob. “You absolute impossible bastard.”
His eyes open slowly. Even like this, half-conscious and bleeding into the grass, he looks at me with that same unbearable focus, like if the whole world burns down, he will still find me in the smoke.
“Morning,” he rasps.
A broken laugh escapes me before I can stop it, and I press my forehead to his chest because I can’t bear to look at him and can’t bear to look away.
Then my eyes shift past him, down the side of the quarry. Below the ledge, far enough down that I don’t understand how Ruslan survived the fall at all, a body lies twisted on the rocks.
Lenkov? I don’t know the man. Maybe it’s the same one that took info from Karina, maybe it’s not. Ruslan has too many enemies.
Ruslan follows my gaze and closes his eyes for a second. “He’s dead,” he says.
I look back at him, at his chest rising and falling, at the blood soaking through his clothes, at his hand lifting with painful effort until it rests against the back of my head.
Behind me, Mila sobs, “Papa came back.”
Ruslan turns his face toward her, rain sliding over his cheeks, and his voice is barely more than breath when he answers. “I told you to run.”
“I did,” Mila cries.
His fingers tighten weakly in my hair. “Good girl,” he murmurs. “You did good.”
I keep both hands on his face because I’m afraid that if I stop touching him, he will become something my mind invented out of shock and rain and grief.
His skin is cold under my palms, but not death-cold. There is heat beneath it. There is breath. There is pain. There is Ruslan, ruined and bleeding and staring up at me as if he has climbed back from hell only because he had unfinished business with my face.
“Mila is safe,” I tell him, though my voice breaks around every word. “She ran exactly like you told her. She found me.”
“I saw,” he says, and even those two words cost him.
His eyes move slowly from me to Mila, then to Nadia, who’s standing a few feet back with both hands over her mouth, crying so quietly it hurts more than if she were screaming.
Mila cries harder at that, because she knows he’s trying to make her less afraid.
I bend over him, one hand sliding to his chest, feeling the rough rise and fall of it under my fingers.
There’s blood everywhere, too much of it, soaking through fabric, mixing with rain, running in thin lines over his ribs and down into the mud.
His leg is worse than before, and there’s a tear across his side that makes my stomach turn.
“We need help,” I say, more to myself than to him.
His hand catches my wrist before I can move. Not hard. He doesn’t have enough strength for hard.
Still, I stop.
“Zoya,” he says.
“Don’t,” I say immediately, because I know that tone.
I know men who sound like that in movies when they’re about to say something noble and stupid and final.
“Don’t talk like this is goodbye. I swear to God, Ruslan, if you start giving me instructions for after you die, I will push you back over this ledge myself. ”
A tiny breath leaves him. It might be pain. It might be a laugh. With him, it’s hard to tell.
“I was going to say,” he says slowly, “don’t call my men.”
I stare at him through rain and tears. “That’s what you wanted to say?”
“Yes.”
“You’re bleeding into the grass, and that’s your priority?”
“My men are the problem.”
I press my lips together because he’s right, and because I hate that he’s right, and because there is something horribly normal about him still giving orders while half-conscious beside a quarry.
“Fine,” I say. “No men.”
His fingers loosen around my wrist, but he doesn’t let go completely. His eyes stay on mine with that heavy, focused intensity that has always made lying to him feel useless.
“I heard you,” he says.
My breath catches.
For a moment I don’t understand.
Then I do, and the rain seems to go quiet around us.
I look at his face, at the blood at the corner of his mouth, at the exhaustion pulling at his eyes, and all the things I cried into the rain come back to me at once.
“I thought you were dead,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“You were not supposed to hear that.”
“I know.” His thumb moves once against my wrist, weak but deliberate. “I’m sorry.”
I lower my forehead almost to his, careful not to put any weight on him, careful not to touch the places where he’s torn open. “You idiot,” I whisper. “You climbed back up just to apologize?”
“No,” he says.
I close my eyes.
His voice drops lower, and I have to lean in to hear it over the rain. “And because I didn’t tell you either.”
My chest hurts so badly I can barely breathe.
He looks at me as if every word has to be dragged out of him by force, not because he doesn’t mean it, but because he has spent his whole life treating tenderness like a loaded weapon.
“I loved you six years ago,” he says. “I handled it badly. I thought sending you away kept you alive. I thought not looking back made it clean.” His mouth twists faintly, like he hates the word the second it leaves him. “It didn’t.”
My tears fall onto his face, and I try to wipe them away, but the rain makes everything wet anyway.
“Ruslan,” I say.
“I loved the woman in the messages before I knew it was you,” he continues, voice hoarse, eyes never leaving mine. “Then I found out and understood I had been missing you twice. Once in my life, once in my own phone.”
A sob climbs up my throat, but I force myself to keep listening because he’s bleeding and pale and speaking like each sentence might be the last one his body lets him finish.
“And I love them,” he says, eyes moving briefly toward the girls. “I don’t know how to be their father yet. I don’t know how to be safe enough for them. But I love them.”
Mila lets out a broken little cry behind me.
Nadia whispers, “Mama.”
I reach one hand back without looking, and both girls grab it together.
Ruslan watches that, and something in his face changes. It’s not softness exactly. It’s worse. It’s a man seeing the thing he almost lost and knowing there is no way to pretend he can live without it anymore.
I look back at him. “I loved you too,” I say, and this time the words don’t come out as grief.
They come out shaking, terrified, alive.
“I loved you when I left. I loved you while I was pregnant. I loved you when I was furious at you. I loved you every time the girls did something that looked like you and I wanted to scream because you were everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”
His eyes close for a second.
When they open again, they’re wet, though maybe it’s only the rain. With Ruslan, I will let him have that lie if he wants it.
“I should have told you,” I say.
“I should have made it possible.”
That stops me.
He doesn’t excuse himself. He doesn’t ask me to forgive the years away. He doesn’t make it soft or noble or easy. He just says the truest thing between us and leaves it there in the rain.
I bend closer, my hands framing his face. “You came for Mila,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“You came knowing it was a trap.”
“Yes.”
“You idiot.”
“Yes.”
The answer is so immediate, so tired, so painfully him, that a laugh breaks through my crying.
His gaze drops to my mouth.
The world is falling apart around us. There are dead men below the quarry, armed traitors somewhere in the trees, one daughter trembling against my back, another crying into my sleeve, and Ruslan is bleeding badly enough that every second matters.
Still, when I lean down, he lifts his head the smallest amount to meet me.
The kiss is not graceful. It can’t be.
His mouth is cold from the rain, and there’s blood at the corner of it, and I’m crying too hard to breathe properly.
I kiss him carefully at first, afraid of hurting him, but his hand rises to the back of my neck with what little strength he has left and holds me there like he has no intention of letting death, betrayal, or common sense interrupt him again.
When I pull back, his eyes are closed and his breathing is worse, but there is a faint steadiness in his hand where it rests against my neck.
“Don’t die after that,” I tell him.
His eyes open halfway. “Bossy.”
“You have no idea.”
“I have some idea.”
I laugh again, and it turns into a sob before I can stop it.
Then sense returns in one violent rush. He’s losing blood. The rain is getting heavier. The girls are freezing. The men who did this are not all dead, and I have no idea how far they’ve gone.
I pull my phone out with shaking hands, nearly dropping it twice because the screen is slick with rain and my fingers won’t obey me. And then, I dial 911.