45. Maxim
MAXIM
The waiting room chairs were bolted to the floor in rows of four, orange plastic worn smooth by decades of people sitting exactly where I was sitting now, and I had counted every seam in the tile between my boots at least a dozen times by the time the clock over the nurses' station crawled past two in the morning.
Kirill sat beside me without speaking, blood still drying dark on his sleeve from a wound that wasn't his, and neither of us had said a real word to each other since the ambulance doors closed on Sofia's stretcher and left us both standing on wet asphalt with nothing left to do but follow.
I had been afraid before, plenty of times, standing in warehouses with guns pointed at my chest, but that fear had always come with something I could do about it, the cold, useful calm that kept a man alive long enough to end the threat instead of becoming one.
This fear was different. It had nowhere to go, no target, no weapon that could touch it, just hours stretching out ahead of me with absolutely nothing in my hands.
I thought of the night I found the sonogram, the worst night of my life until tonight decided to compete for the title.
That night I had at least known where she was, angry and grieving in the next room, close enough to reach if I'd let myself.
Tonight she was somewhere behind double doors I wasn't allowed through, and for the first time since I was a boy I understood what it meant to have absolutely no leverage over anything that mattered.
A nurse crossed the waiting room twice in the first hour, once for another family entirely, and both times my whole body came half out of the chair before I realized she wasn't calling my name.
Yuri had gone to check on the men we'd lost track of during the chaos, Pavel was somewhere coordinating a story for the police that wouldn't get anyone else arrested tonight, and it left just the two of us in that row of orange chairs, waiting on a version of news neither of us could control or hurry along no matter how much either of us wanted to.
"Sully made it," Kirill said eventually, apropos of nothing, like he'd been holding the fact in reserve for exactly the moment I needed something good to hear. "Leg's no worse than it was, cane and all. He's already complaining about the coffee here, which I'm choosing to take as a good sign."
"Good. Tell him I said so."
"Two of the newer men are in surgery down the hall. Nothing life threatening, but it'll be a long night for their families too." He rubbed a hand over his face, exhaustion finally showing through the adrenaline. "We were lucky, Maxim. However this played out, we were lucky."
"Luck had very little to do with tonight."
"She's strong," Kirill said finally, low, like he'd been rehearsing it the whole ride over. "Stronger than either of us gave her credit for, and we both know it."
"I know what she is, Kirill."
"Then hold onto that instead of whatever's eating you right now." He nodded toward my hands, and I realized I'd been turning the small velvet box over and over in my jacket pocket without noticing I'd reached for it. "You're not losing her tonight. I refuse to believe it."
"You don't get to refuse reality."
"Watch me."
A doctor pushed through the double doors before I could answer him, a woman in scrubs with tired eyes and the kind of calm that only came from years of delivering news people weren't ready to hear either way. I was on my feet before she'd said a single word.
"Family of Sofia Reyes?"
"Yes. Me." I heard how rough my own voice came out, barely recognizable to myself. "Please. Just tell me."
"She's stable." The doctor said it fast, clearly practiced at recognizing when a man had run out of patience for preamble.
"The bullet missed everything vital, clipped muscle and soft tissue on its way through her shoulder, nothing we couldn't repair.
She lost blood, more than we'd like, but she's responding well and she's going to recover fully.
It's a good thing whoever got her here moved as fast as they did. "
"I would have driven through the ocean if it came to that."
Something in my chest that had been clenched tight since the moment the terminal erupted loosened by exactly one degree, not enough to breathe freely yet, not with the second, harder question still sitting unasked in my throat.
"And the baby."
The doctor's expression softened, the professional distance cracking just slightly at the edges.
"The baby's heartbeat is still strong. We monitored throughout surgery. Both of them came through this better than anyone had a right to expect, given where that bullet landed."
I sat back down because my legs stopped being reliable the moment the sentence finished, Kirill's hand landing heavy and steady on my shoulder, and for the first time since the phone had gone dead in my ear I let myself really believe I wasn't going to lose either of them tonight.
"Can I see her?"
"She's still under from the surgery. It'll be a few hours before she's fully awake, but you're welcome to sit with her." The doctor allowed herself something close to a smile. "Room 412. Someone will come get you when she's stable enough to move."
I thanked her in a voice that didn't sound like mine, and Kirill squeezed my shoulder once before letting go, giving me exactly the amount of space I needed and not one second more.
"Go sit with her when they let you in. I'll handle everything out here.
" He said it like an order rather than a suggestion, the tone he used on men he expected to actually listen.
"Twenty years I've watched you handle every disaster this family's ever survived.
Let somebody else handle this one for a few hours. "
"I don't know how to just sit somewhere and wait, Kirill."
"You're about to learn. Go."
"I have more news, whenever you're ready to hear it."
"Tell me now. I need something else to think about or I'm going to lose my mind in this chair."
"Callahan's under arrest." Kirill said it with the quiet satisfaction of a man delivering exactly the kind of news he'd waited years to deliver.
"Federal agents pulled him off that open channel within the hour, financial trail Sofia and her friend built doing half their work for them.
He's not talking his way out of a recording of his own voice handing Doyle the terminal. "
"And Doyle."
"Doyle didn't survive the raid." Kirill's voice went flat, professional, the tone he used for facts that didn't need dressing up. "Caught in the crossfire near the container yard in the last few minutes, before backup even fully arrived. I won't pretend I'm sorry about it."
"Neither will I."
"The war's over, Maxim. Whatever comes next, it isn't that."
"What about Nina? Sofia's friend, the one who helped her build the case."
"Cooperating fully with the agents who took over from Callahan.
From what I heard, she's the reason half of this held together long enough to matter.
" Kirill allowed himself a small, tired smile.
"She also threatened to have somebody's badge for keeping her in a hallway instead of letting her see Sofia. I liked her immediately."
"That sounds like her."
I sat with that for a long moment, turning it over the way I'd been turning the ring box, trying to feel the relief I knew I was supposed to feel and finding it tangled up with everything else sitting heavy in my chest.
"I should feel more than this."
"You will. Give it time. Tonight you're allowed to just feel like a man whose family is still breathing." Kirill's voice gentled, something rare in it. "That's enough for one night, Maxim. Nobody's grading you on the rest of it yet."
The nurse came for me an hour later, leading me down a hallway that smelled like antiseptic and old coffee, past rooms with muted televisions and quiet machines, to a door marked 412 where Sofia lay small and pale against white sheets, an IV taped to the back of one hand, her shoulder wrapped thick beneath a hospital gown that had never once been designed with a pregnant woman in mind.
I pulled a chair to the side of her bed and sat, taking her free hand in both of mine, careful of the IV line, and for a long time I just watched her breathe, counting each rise and fall like proof I could keep collecting if I paid close enough attention.
The room was quiet in a way the terminal had never once managed to be, just the soft rhythm of a monitor somewhere behind her pillow and the occasional squeak of shoes passing in the hallway outside.
I found myself grateful for the silence, grateful for anything ordinary after a night that had asked far more of both of us than either of us had left to give.
Her father's watch sat on the tray beside the bed. Someone had removed it and set it there with more care than its cracked crystal probably deserved, still ticking despite everything.
I found myself watching the second hand the same way I'd watched her chest, needing something in the room to keep moving to prove the rest of the world hadn't stopped with it.
I reached into my jacket pocket and found the sonogram exactly where it had lived for three days straight, the paper gone soft and creased from being carried everywhere I went since the night I found it, through grief and vodka and a firefight that by any reasonable measure neither of us should have survived.
I unfolded it carefully and held it where I could see it, the small curved shape at its center steady and unchanged, indifferent to everything that had happened around it.
"You're both still here," I said quietly, to no one who could hear me yet, or maybe to both of them at once. "Whatever else I have to figure out, you're both still here, and I'm not letting either of you go again."
I don't know how long I sat like that, her hand in mine, the sonogram in the other, the watch ticking its steady, stubborn rhythm on the tray beside us, long enough for the sky outside her window to shift from black toward the gray edge of morning, long enough for a nurse to check her vitals twice without waking her, long enough for me to run out of every version of the apology I still owed her and start over from the beginning more than once in my own head.
Then her fingers finally twitched against my palm, and her eyes began to move beneath closed lids.
"Sofia." I leaned forward, my heart climbing somewhere up into my throat. "Sofia, can you hear me?"
Her eyes opened slowly, unfocused at first, adjusting to the light, and I watched her expression move through confusion, then memory, then something that looked almost like fear before it finally settled on me and softened into something I hadn't dared hope to see again after that call.
"Maxim." Her voice came out cracked and dry, barely more than a shape of my name. "You're here."
"Where else would I be?"
Her gaze drifted down to my hands, to her hand held in one and the small folded photograph held steady in the other, and something in her face shifted again, tears gathering fast at the corners of eyes still heavy from surgery.
"You kept it," she whispered.
"I never stopped," I said, and it wasn't clear anymore, even to me, whether I meant the photograph, or her, or both, because somewhere in the last three days the answer to that question had stopped being two separate things at all.