Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Giovanni
Yana is on the bed, unconscious, her hand bandaged thick, her face slack against the pillow.
I’m in the chair beside her even though I shouldn’t be in a chair at all.
They pulled two bullets out of my side and my leg a few hours ago, and I’m sitting upright in a hospital gown with my jaw set, looking at her like sheer will can make her wake up.
“You should be lying down,” Kirill tells me. “They cut metal out of you this morning.”
I don’t look away from her.
“She’ll never forgive me,” I say.
“Don’t remind me.” He crosses his arms. “I sent her to you whole. This is how you give her back. You’re lucky you caught her hand. The shot meant for her head went into the wall.”
I swallow. He lets the anger simmer, then he lets it go, because there’s no use in it now.
“She’ll understand.” His voice softens. “Eventually. She’s not unreasonable. Stubborn. But not unreasonable.”
I push myself up out of the chair, take the crutches leaning against the wall, and get them under my arms.
“Keep your end, Pakhan,” I say.
“I’m a man of my word, Don.”
I look at her again.
“You don’t have to do this,” he tells me. “I can arrange to get you out of the country too. You fight from somewhere safe. You recover first.”
I laugh, softly. “You know how it goes. The ones who run never get spared. Maybe this is how it ends for me.”
“You’re weak. You can barely stand. Recover, then fight.”
“You care, Pakhan.” I grin. “I’m touched. Perhaps we should be best friends.”
He grits his teeth.
“I’m no coward,” I say. “Just keep your end.”
I look at Yana one more time. “Keep them safe,” I plead. “Please.”
I mean Yana and my sister, and he knows it.
He nods, and I limp out, slowly, the crutches scraping the floor. I feel him watching me go.
Behind me, the door opens again, and I hear his wife come in, going straight to the bed.
“Good lord. What happened to her?”
“She got tangled up with a madman,” Kirill says.
“Oh, no.” Her voice breaks. “I knew I shouldn’t have let her go, Kirill. I knew it.” She’s crying. “I knew it.”
“She’s all right. It’s just bruises and a sprained hand. She’s all right.”
The voices follow me down the corridor and I keep moving, the crutches finding their rhythm against the floor, every step pulling at the holes in my side.
Loyal to a fault, that one. I put two bullets in her and she still ran to me before she ran from me.
She still tried to die alongside me. And I let her believe the worst of it so she’d live.
Then I hear it through the open door behind me.
Yana’s voice.
“My brother. My brother, where is he? Where’s my brother?”
I stop.
“Annika.” She’s crying, and I can hear her fighting to get up, fighting the bandage, the line in her arm. “Annika, I left him. I have to go back to him, I have to go to him, I left him there —”
She sobs, and I hear Annika join her.
I stand on the crutches a little way down the hall, looking back at the door I can’t walk back through. She’s crying for the brother I told her was dead when he is alive in a safe house. I can’t tell her. Just then, Kirill steps out into the corridor. He sees me there. He knows I heard all of it.
I look at him, I turn, and I hobble away down the corridor without a word.
Behind me, faint, I hear him exhale. “What a madman,” he mutters, and he goes back inside to his wife and the girl in the bed.