Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Two days pass, and I lie in bed, and the light crosses the ceiling and hits my eyes.
Annika sits beside me with the bowls going cold.
She begs me to eat one spoonful or one for her.
I can’t. There’s a hole where the part of me that eats and stands and wants things used to be, and I keep reaching for the bottom of it, and there isn’t one.
“Yana. Please. Just a little.”
I turn my face to the window.
Kirill comes in. His hand goes to Annika’s shoulder.
“It’s all right. Leave her.”
He kisses her. She looks back at me, eyes wet, and she goes.
He sits. “How are you holding up?”
“My brother.” It doesn’t sound like my voice. “If he’s gone — his body — I left him, Kirill; I left him in the rain; I have to go back; I have to —”
“I promised I’d find your brother. I don’t break promises to you.”
I look at him. The questions come, and they don’t connect. Did Christov die, or didn’t he? Why is he in a chair talking about finding someone?
“Mondi,” I say. “Where is he? My brother?”
That body- it wasn’t my brother? Was it? But I am scared to ask.
I clear my throat and ask. “How is Giovanni?”
He looks at me. “Didn’t you shoot him?”
I look away. I hate Giovanni. I do. And the memory of the trigger won’t sit right with me because pulling it hurt worse than the bullet would have.
“He’s fine,” Kirill says.
I swallow. He takes my good hand.
“Annika and the little one fly to Australia tomorrow. You go with them.”
“Kirill, I—”
“It’s an order. You’re not working. It’s a vacation. You go, and you rest.”
“My brother —”
“I’ll handle it. I promise you. But you go with Annika first.”
I look at the blanket. I don’t know anything. My eyes go around the room like there’s an answer written on a wall somewhere.
“Trust me,” he says. “This once.”
My head splits with pain. I nod instead of speaking. I have nothing else left to hold but trust, so I lie back as he stands.
After another day, they let me go.
Annika helps me put on clean clothes that aren’t mine, and we drive straight to the airport.
Annika holds my arm the whole way. Dimitri walks ahead, chattering about an ice castle, a moat, and a dragon with three heads as we wait for our flight.
Beside us are two of Kirill’s men in plain clothes.
Annika’s phone rings, and she lifts Dimitri onto her hip.
“Wait here, okay? Don’t move.” She gives a nod to the guard. “Have your eyes on her.”
I couldn’t run if I wanted to. I bow my head into my hands. The ache won’t ease. It just sits there.
“Sestra.”
Sister.
My head bobs up to see a young man running toward me. He drops down, and his arms come around me, and he holds on like he’ll fall if he doesn’t.
“Sestryonka… eto pravda ty.”
Sister. It’s really you.
I feel rigid as I look at his face. It’s familiar, and it isn’t. It used to be smaller, rounder, soft. It isn’t soft anymore.
“Who are you?”
“It’s me, Christov.”
A tear runs down his face.
I pull back. “What — What —”
What cruel prank is this?
Annika comes back with Dimitri, her face wet. “It’s him, Yana. It’s him.”
I look around the gate. The walls. The other people. “No. No, I — I saw — I held him. I —”
He pulls his shirt open at the collar. The birthmark. The small dark shape below the collarbone. But I saw it. On the body. In the rain. I saw it.
“Run,” he says. “Don’t stop. I’ll find you; that’s what you told me.”
He takes my hands and squeezes them, twice, the way he did when we were small, and the dark was full of men.
“Christov?”
“Yana, my blood.”
I break down, and he hauls me into him, and I sob into his shoulder, and he holds the back of my head, and Annika’s hand is on my back, and I’m shaking so hard I can’t breathe right. He is alive. And over his shoulder, someone is walking toward us with a limp.
I look up.
It’s Lucia. “Lucia.” I can’t get the whole word out. “You’re — you’re alive —”
Her face is red and streaming with tears as she nods. Christov gets me to my feet. I cross to her on legs that aren’t mine, and I lift my hand, and I touch her arm, shoulder, cheek. I have to feel her; I have to know she’s there.
“I’m alive,” she says.
I pull her into me and hold her, and nothing makes sense, none of it. Is this a dream? Is this the thing the mind does at the end? But I can smell the soap on her;. I can taste my own tears, and if it’s a dream, I will not wake up; I refuse; leave me here.
I turn to Annika. She holds out a phone.
“It’s Kirill,” she says. I take the phone with shaky hands, and feeling it makes me realize I am not dreaming.
“What’s happening?” I say into it. “Tell me what’s going on?”
“The Don made me swear not to tell you anything until you’d landed. But I’m not his friend, it turns out. My loyalty’s with you. Annika has a file.”
I turn, and Annika holds it out.
I open it.
“He signed his foreign holdings into your name,” Kirill says. “It’s a legitimate business worth millions. You’re named on all of them. Full access to the accounts.”
“What?”
“He also got you clean passports. New names. You, Lucia, and Christov.”
I can’t make a sound.
“There’s a letter. It says it better than I can.
But the short version is that he bought your freedom: yours and the boy’s.
I’d have given you Christov regardless — that was always my promise — but Mondi set you up for life.
You can walk out of this country and never look back.
His one condition is that you keep his sister safe and sign half of it to her when you land in Australia. ”
“Kirill, what is happening, please?”
“He wanted you in the air before any of this reached you. I’m telling you on the ground, so the choice is yours. Go, or stay.”
The letter is folded between the documents. My hands are shaking so badly I tear the edge of the envelope.
Lupa,
By the time you read this, you should be far away and safe. I’m sorry I trapped you in this long game. It was the only way to put my enemies’ eyes on me and keep them off you and Lucia. I hate myself for dragging you down into it.
I don’t deserve your mercy. But I trust you with the one thing that matters to me. You gave Lucia a chance to live when I was too blind to see what was killing her. I know you hate me. I’m giving her to you anyway.
By now, you’ve seen your brother. Kirill and I got him free together. Forgive me for making you play my demented games.
Have a good life, Lupa. I love you. I think I have for a while. It just wasn’t written for us.
A tear hits the paper, and the ink runs.
I look up at Lucia. “What is happening? I saw you — they said you were dead.”
I turn to Christov. “You too, I—.”
The flight is called overhead.
Annika wipes her face; she is red from crying because I am crying. “Kirill says to tell you — choose carefully.”
And it all drops onto me at once. I shot him. If Christov was alive the whole time, if the body was staged, then I shot Giovanni for nothing. I put two bullets in him over a brother who was alive the entire time. He had a plan as I was screaming at him over a corpse that wasn’t real.
I look at Lucia. “Tell me — Tell me what happened.”
Her voice comes out in pieces. “Fabiano was going to get rid of you and me —”
She doesn’t have to say the rest. I see it. Giovanni staged her death, got her out. Did the same with a body for Christov, used it to drag Fabiano’s whole focus onto himself, pulled every blade in the city toward his own back so that Christov and I could walk into an airport and disappear.
The flight is called again.
I wipe my face hard with the heel of my hand. I turn to Annika.
“Take Christov and Lucia. I’m staying.”
Christov says. “I’m not leaving without you.”
“Me too,” Lucia says.
I take Lucia’s hands. “You’re not recovered. Do you want your brother spending whatever time he has left worrying about you instead of fighting?”
She breaks. “I wanted to stay with him. He wouldn’t let me. He begged me to go.”
I pull her in. “I’ll make sure he’s okay. I swear it to you.”
“Please.” Her whole body shudders against mine. “I can’t lose him. I can’t.”
I turn to my brother. He’s shaking his head before I open my mouth.
He says, “I’m not leaving you. I worked for the Italian cartel, Yana. I know exactly what he’s walking into. You are not going in there alone.”
I look at him, and there’s no moving him, none; it’s the same set to his jaw I had at twelve, so I nod.
Annika touches my arm. “Be careful. Both of you.”
She takes Lucia and Dimitri. Christov follows at my side.
And I run. My legs find something I thought was gone, and I run, and Christov runs with me, out through the terminal, past the gates, toward the doors.
Fabiano was going to attack Giovanni. Looking back, Fabiano had given me that gun to make me shoot him. How could I miss this? I weakened him, falling right into Fabiano’s trap. I got it all wrong.
Hold on, I think, shoving through the doors into the light. Hold on. I’m coming. Don’t you dare die before I get there.