Chapter 18
IVY
The second the car door slams shut behind me, something inside me snaps.
I lunge for the handle, twisting hard until my fingers ache, then slam the heel of my hand against the frame and the glass until my body stings. Heat rushes up my arms, my whole body shaking with the effort.
It doesn’t budge. The lock is firmly in place, a child-safety switch triggered to trap me inside the back of the cab.
“Open the fucking door!” My voice comes out ragged and high, tearing out of my throat.
I whip toward the opposite side and kick, legs braced against the opposite door. When that doesn’t work, I slam my shoulder into the panel behind me again and again, hoping sheer force of will might make it give.
Nothing happens.
On the other side of the metal cage-like partition separating us, Andrey slides into the driver’s seat.
He doesn’t even glance at me while he starts the engine.
The partition’s narrow slots make it impossible to reach through, impossible to grab him by the collar or the hair and demand he let me out.
I could hurl myself at it with all of my body weight and still not touch him.
His hands stay steady on the wheel, eyes pinned to the road as he pulls us out of the alleyway.
I slam my fists against the window until my knuckles throb. “Let me out! We have to go back! They’re going to kill him! Andrey, please!”
He doesn’t answer at first. Only a quick flicker of his gaze in the rearview mirror betrays that he’s even listening to me.
Then he looks back at the road, taking the next corner with deliberate care.
Buildings streak by in smeared beiges and pedestrians don’t even glance up at the tinted windows of a car carrying me away.
I press my forehead to the glass, the chill of it shocking against my overheated skin. My breath clouds the window instantly, fogging my reflection until I can’t even see my own face staring back. Just a blurred outline, lost in a haze of panic and helplessness.
I don’t know how long I stay like that, seconds or minutes, but it’s long enough to feel the ache in my chest bloom into a hollow and endless dread.
By the time the car jerks into the cracked parking lot behind the safehouse, all the fight has drained from my limbs.
My throat is raw from screaming, my fists ache.
I muster one last desperate attempt to slam my shoulder against the door with a dull, bruising thud that reverberates through my bones, but it’s no use.
The engine cuts off with a dull rumble.
Andrey steps out without a word, slamming the driver’s side door hard enough to make the entire frame rattle. Gravel crunches beneath his boots as he circles to my side. The door unlocks with a click, but before I can react, his hand closes around my upper arm in a bruising grip to pull me out.
“Let me go, take me back! They’re going to kill him! I—he’s—please! Don’t you give a shit about him?” I shout, my heels skidding across the pavement as I dig them in, struggling against his hold.
“Stop it, Ivy,” he snaps.
He doesn’t let go, not even when I twist in his grasp.
Not until he’s dragged me through the side entrance of the safehouse and up the stairs to the third floor.
He shoves me across the threshold with enough force to make me stumble.
I trip over the edge of the rug in the entryway and collapse into the couch, my shoulder hitting the armrest as I fall sideways in a heap.
The cushions absorb the impact but the humiliation burns all the same.
My eyes sting with tears that haven’t yet fallen. The room spins slightly, though whether that’s from panic or vertigo, I can’t tell.
Andrey is already on the far side of the room, moving with single-minded focus.
He leans over Matvey who’s hunched behind his wall of monitors, fingers flying across his keyboard.
The screens flicker with live CCTV footage.
The angles change every few seconds, scanning through the exterior and interior of the restaurant like security sentinels.
I choke on a sob and stagger to my feet, drawn forward by a gravitational pull I can’t fight. My fingers clench around the arm of the couch as I lean forward, desperate to see what they’re looking at.
One of the camera angles, taken from a diagonal high corner, shows the inside of the restaurant.
The tables are overturned, glass shattered everywhere, chairs flung across the floor like an invisible hurricane ripped through the space.
In the center of it all stands Maksim, his silhouette rigid and braced in front of a man holding onto a smaller figure.
Leo.
The sight knocks the wind from my lungs. I stumble forward, hands braced against the edge of Matvey’s makeshift desk, unable to breathe, unable to do anything but stare as the feed shifts again to another angle, a closer one.
Mikhail’s face fills the frame, twisted into something monstrous and pleased. His arm is bent, his hand held firm and steady around the black steel butt of a gun. It’s drawn up and pressed flush to the side of my son’s head.
No, no, no, no.
A shot rings out, loud and final.
A broken sound tears itself from my throat, something guttural and animal and not entirely human.
My knees give out beneath me. I hit the floor with a thud, but I barely register the pain.
It feels like I’m underwater, like my limbs are being dragged into the deep and I can’t get any part of me to move to pull myself up to the surface.
A set of hands grabs me, hauling me up onto a chair nearby. Andrey squats in front of me. His mouth moves, but I hear no sounds coming out of it. The blood is rushing too fast in my ears to hear anything other than the pounding of my own broken heart.
“Is he… he…” Oh, God. I can’t even finish the sentence.
“He’s dead!” Matvey claps.
I flinch, my hands flying to cover my ears, but the words have already wormed their way inside my brain. My sorrow bores down on me, the pressure so heavy that it nearly snaps my body in half. I wail and fold forward, curling in on myself as I rock forward in the chair.
Hands are shaking me again. Muffled voices cut through the noise, distant and warped like they’re coming from the bottom of the ocean.
Matvey’s voice slowly pierces through the noise, sharp and frantic. “—say anything? What the hell happened?”
“Zatknis,” Andrey barks at him. His grip suddenly tightens on my arms as he jolts me again. “Ivy. Hey. It’s alright, they’re okay.”
How can he say that? How can he possibly know that?
I heard the gunshot. There could be no mistaking that sound for anything but exactly what it was.
I think I might be sick.
My vision swims with fresh tears as I curl in on myself again, shoulders heaving, my entire body rocking forward and back in a motion I can’t stop, like my brain is trying to comfort itself in the only way it remembers how.
I’d do anything to rewind time. I’d do anything to go back ten minutes and fight Maksim when he had forced me out the back door of that restaurant, stop him from forcing me to walk away from my baby. Anything to have never put us in this position to begin with.
“Ivy,” Andrey growls, shaking me firmly this time. “Maksim and Leo are alive. Snap out of it.”
My breath hiccups in my throat, jagged and unsteady, and I lift my eyes through the blur of tears. I don’t want to believe him. I can’t believe him. If I let myself hope—even for a second—and I’m wrong…
If he’s wrong… I’ll break in a way I can’t put back together.
Still, some part of me reaches for the screen, the part that’s desperate to want to believe in a fantasy.
Matvey is already reacting, his chair knocking back as he yanks one of the smaller monitors free from the bracket, ripping cords loose with a loud snap. His fingers fly across the keyboard to redirect the feed, panic rising in his voice.
“Look,” he says, urgent now, glassy-eyed behind his lenses as he spins the monitor toward me and slams it down on the desk. “See? They’re okay. Look, Ivy. Look. I’m sorry, I didn’t… they’re both alive.”
I blink the tears away, just enough to focus on the zoomed in feed, the image sharper than before.
And there they are.
Leo is on the floor, a few feet from where Mikhail’s body is crumpled like discarded garbage.
Maksim is kneeling beside him, both arms around Leo, his face buried in his son’s hair.
His body shakes as he holds onto our son, his eyes squeezed tight.
Leo’s tiny hands are fisted into Maksim’s jacket, clinging to him as his shoulders gently shake.
There’s no sound, but there doesn’t need to be.
Every inch of me trembles like my body can’t figure out whether to collapse in on itself or fly. My hands shake, and the inside of my cheeks sting from biting down too hard, but none of it matters now. Not with this image burned into the screen in front of me.
Not with the worst-case scenario rewritten right before my eyes.
For the first time in what feels like forever, something in my chest that had been fractured and held together with little more than hope and desperation finally feels whole again.
I press my palm flat to the screen like I could reach through it, touch them. Pull them both into my arms and never let go.
“They’re alive,” I whisper, voice trembling with awe and disbelief. “Oh God. They’re alive…”
Next to me, Andrey lets out a slow breath. “Yes. They are. They should be coming back here soon.”
After what feels like an eternity of hushed instructions, waiting for confirmation of Mikhail’s death, and safe transport being coordinated for Maksim and Leo to leave the area, I’m finally reunited with my son.
The front door slams open.
The moment I hear voices, I run out of the living room. When I see them both, I nearly collapse all over again. Leo’s cheeks are flushed from tears, his hair a mess, but once those eyes lock onto mine, he runs.
“Mama!”
My knees nearly buckle as I rush forward, dropping to the floor just in time to catch him as he throws himself into my arms with all the force his little body can manage.
I clutch him to my chest like a lifeline.
My arms wrap around him tight, too tight, but he doesn’t complain.
He just clings harder, burrowing his face into my neck, sobbing so hard he hiccups.
“You’re okay,” I whisper over and over, rocking him back and forth. “You’re okay, baby. You’re okay. I’ve got you now. I’ve got you.”
“I was so scared… He had a gun, Mama, he–he said—” He hiccups.
“Shh, it’s over,” I murmur, pressing kisses to the top of his head, every inch of his face I can reach. “It’s over. You’re safe. He can’t hurt you anymore.”
I don’t even realize I’m crying again until my tears are soaking into his shirt.
Behind us, Maksim stands silent in the doorway, watching. His knuckles are white, jaw tight, but his eyes are soft in a way I’ve never seen before. He doesn't speak or move, just watches the two of us, his chest rising and falling like he’s struggling to hold something in.
Whatever it is, I don’t wait for him to get it out.
“Maksim. Take us home to my parents. I want to go home.”