Chapter 25
KATIE
The call breaks apart after the word explosion.
Boris says the casino name, followed by something about the lower level; static devours the next sentence. A siren rises behind him while men shout through the connection.
“Where is Artur?” I ask.
“We are moving him outside.”
“Is he hurt?”
The line goes silent.
My heart strikes painfully as the kitchen contracts around the phone in my hand. Toast burns in the open toaster, filling the room with a smell that turns my stomach while panic climbs beneath my ribs.
Moving him outside could mean he is walking, but it could also mean a covered stretcher carried beneath emergency lights while men choose gentler words for his wife.
I call back, but the network refuses the connection.
Niko enters at a run, already wearing his shoulder holster beneath an unfastened coat. “The exterior team is leaving.”
“Take me.”
“Mr. Dymov ordered you to remain here.”
“Mr. Dymov may be bleeding beneath a casino. Take me.”
“The site isn’t secure.”
“Neither am I.” My voice shakes despite every effort to hold it steady. “You can have me in the armored car with four guards, or you can explain why I stole something with keys.”
Niko looks toward my bare feet.
I put on shoes.
The drive into Atlanta lasts eighteen minutes, each one stretched against the pulse beating in my throat. Rain smears the city into red brake lights and dark glass as the lead vehicle forces a path through traffic. The guard beside me listens to fractured radio reports.
My hands won’t remain still, so I lace them over my stomach before separating them when the gesture feels like surrendering to panic. The seat belt presses across my chest while every breath tastes faintly of the mint Niko keeps in the console.
I think of the night Artur told me about Misha.
An explosion took his brother and left him with scars beneath his ribs, followed by a conviction that survival was a debt he could repay through control.
If another blast has taken him, my final words were come home safely, as if love becomes protection when phrased like an order.
The radio reports a compromised west foundation with multiple injuries, then confirms that the fire is contained and the principal remains ambulatory.
Principal ambulatory.
The phrase should calm me; instead, I picture Artur walking because he refuses to fall until nobody can see him.
Smoke hangs above Dymov Casino when we turn onto the service street, where fire engines hide half the west side and portable lamps turn the rain white.
Broken windows shine like wet teeth in the brick facade.
Emergency color rolls over shattered glass, ruined stone, and workers wrapped in silver blankets, transforming the casino’s secret luxury into a spectacle of ash and exposed wiring.
The building looks flayed open, every beautiful surface stripped back to what had been concealed underneath.
The air outside the car tastes of metal.
Niko catches my arm. “Stay in the clean zone.”
I nod because promising anything more would be dishonest.
Medics have established triage beneath the covered loading entrance, where one man sits with blood soaking gauze around his calf while another breathes oxygen through clear tubing as a woman cuts away his scorched sleeve, and rainwater carries gray dust toward the drains.
A young accounting clerk stands beside the wall in stocking feet.
Although blood dots her white blouse, none appears to be hers.
Over and over, she says the counting-room electrician went back for a hard drive.
A guard guides her toward a blanket, but her eyes remain fixed on the black opening where the service doors once stood.
The scene has no clean edges because alarms overlap with radios while wet ash sticks to my shoes. Somewhere inside the wreckage, ruptured pipes strike hot metal and raise short bursts of steam through the black opening.
I search every face.
Artur emerges through the smoke wearing a torn white shirt beneath his open coat, and dust has turned both nearly the same color. Blood runs from a cut near his hairline, tracing his temple before disappearing into the dark stubble along his cheek.
He is walking.
My lungs unlock so suddenly that the first breath hurts.
“Katie.”
I cross the restricted line.
A firefighter tells me to stop, but Artur raises one hand, and the objection dies before reaching its second word.
I reach him with enough force to strike both palms against his chest. One hand closes into a fist before I can prevent it; the blow lands over his sternum.
His mouth tightens with pain, small but unmistakable, reminding me of the old scars beneath his shirt until I hate myself for adding to them, even if fear has nowhere civilized to go.
“You frightened me.”
Artur doesn’t defend himself. “I know.”
I hit him once more, weaker than the first, then grab his coat and hold on.
His arms close around me in an embrace that remains careful for half a second, perhaps because of the pregnancy, before I drag him against me and erase caution. Dust roughens his collar beneath my face, but his body is hot and solid, every breath proving that he survived.
“You smell terrible,” I say into his neck.
“The casino objected to my renovation.”
The laugh that escapes me collapses into a sob. Artur’s hand covers the back of my head while his mouth presses against my hair.
I pull away to inspect him, and his pupils look equal beneath the revolving light.
“How many fingers?” I hold up two.
“Seven.”
My stomach drops.
His mouth shifts. “Two.”
“That wasn’t funny.”
“Your face suggested otherwise.”
I touch the skin beside his temple. “Did you lose consciousness?”
“No.”
“Vomiting?”
“No.”
“Confusion?”
“I married you, but the condition predates the explosion.”
I examine his hands, finding scraped knuckles and concrete dust embedded along one cuff.
He flexes each finger when I ask, though his left shoulder sits stiffly beneath the coat, so I make him lift that arm too.
Artur tolerates the inspection with the patience of a dangerous animal indulging a child.
When his arm rises fully, another knot inside me releases.
I want to strike him again, but I settle for pressing my forehead against his chest until the violent beat beneath it steadies mine.
Boris approaches with a bandage across one cheek and dust filling the creases of his coat. Behind him, Ivan speaks to a medic while blood darkens the cloth around his hand.
“All personnel are accounted for,” Boris says. “Seven injured. Four require hospital treatment. No fatalities.”
My stomach settles for one breath before fresh nausea replaces the relief.
One of the medics offers Artur a chair, but he refuses until I point to it.
His look promises a later argument, though he sits long enough for her to check his blood pressure and listen to his lungs, with dust streaking his neck above the open collar.
Watching someone place a stethoscope against him feels obscenely intimate after imagining him dead.
Artur notices. His hand reaches my waist. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m already here.”
“The air remains contaminated.”
“Then answer my questions quickly.”
He recognizes the tone. “What questions?”
I look toward the ruined western wall, where a reinforced corridor remains visible behind hanging plastic, its steel frame intact while the rooms around it have collapsed.
“Who knew you were coming?”
“Senior security. Ivan. The bomb unit.”
“Who chose where you stood?”
Artur looks toward his uncle.
Ivan joins us before the silence can sharpen. The cloth has been replaced by a proper dressing. “The structural column outside the vault had failed. I moved Artur through the reinforced corridor.”
“Before the explosion?” I ask.
“Seconds before.”
“Why that corridor?”
His eyes pass toward Artur before returning to my face.
“It survived a foundation fire during Misha’s renovation,” Ivan says. “He made the contractor reinforce the old vault entrance after finding cracks in the ceiling.”
“So you knew it would hold.”
“I hoped.”
Rain strikes the metal awning above us, and Ivan’s expression carries no pride, only exhaustion sharpened by remembered grief.
“I wouldn’t allow another Dymov son to die in an explosion,” he says.
Artur’s face changes, and his hand closes around my waist as Ivan looks at the torn shoulder of Artur’s coat, both men remembering the brother who never walked out of his wreck.
Ivan saved him, a conclusion supported by every answer because he knew the building, recognized the danger, then moved Artur toward the only section that survived.
Boris calls for a site diagram, and I follow him to a folding table where damp papers lift in the wind.
“The visible wiring led here,” he explains, pointing to the destroyed counting room. “The team stopped in this area. Ivan redirected Artur through the vault passage when he saw damage above them.”
“Where was Ivan before Artur arrived?”
“With the structural crew near the service stairs.”
“Who entered the lower floor after evacuation?”
Boris’s gaze lifts. “You believe this connects to the photograph.”
“I believe explosions have geography.”
He gives me the personnel sheet.
Boris has already divided the back of the page into those inside before the device, those who entered with Artur, those outside during activation, and everyone sent to the hospital.
I add the family relationships his operations sheet doesn’t contain, giving fear a useful task without pretending I know blast work better than his team.
Boris gives me a second page containing emergency contacts, though several names have no relationship beside them.
I ask the employees who can still answer, then mark wife, husband, sister, father, or friend in the blank spaces, turning seven injured workers into seven kitchens where phones are about to ring before dawn.