Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Yana
His body covers me before the world ends.
I feel him before I understand it. His arms lock across my back and the back of my head, and he turns us, his chest against my face, his spine to the open air. And then the blast hits.
It comes through him into me. The pressure slams the breath out of my lungs, and the heat rolls over us, and I feel him jerk against me as something tears into his back.
The ground breaks under us. We are lifted, turning, grit and smoke and a roaring that swallows every other sound, and through all of it, his arms do not loosen.
He holds me in place. He keeps every part of me tucked behind him.
We come down hard. The roaring fades into a high ringing. Smoke hangs above us, lit from somewhere, and ash is drifting down through it. His weight is on top of me, his arms are still around me, and I feel him go limp.
“No.” I push at him. “No, no, Giovanni —”
I roll him off me and come up over him.
His back is a ruin. His shirt is gone in patches, the skin under it torn, and the old bullet wounds have opened, and they’re bleeding, dark and fast, soaking into what’s left of the fabric. His face is gray with smoke and ash.
“Giovanni.” I tap his cheek. “Giovanni, look at me —”
His eyes open barely. They find my face, and something in them softens.
“Lupa,” he murmurs. “Why are you here?”
Then his eyes roll back, and he goes under.
“Giovanni!” I press my hands to the worst of the bleeding. “Someone help! Help!”
A voice through the smoke. “Yana!”
“Here! I’m here, please—”
Kirill comes out of the haze with Christov a step behind, both of them coughing, guns still in their hands. They drop down beside me. Kirill takes one look at Giovanni’s back and whistles sharply, and his men come running.
“I’m going with him,” I say.
“You will.” Kirill’s already lifting. “But we move him now.”
They get him up between them. Christov takes my arm and pulls me toward the cars, and I’m shaking, and he’s talking low and steady the way he used to when we were small.
“It wasn’t a big charge,” he says. “It would’ve killed the man holding it and not much past him. But you ran at him. Giovanni was close. He took it.” He gets me into the car. “He took it for you.”
We drive.
I hold Giovanni’s hand the whole way, both of mine around it, his fingers slack and cold.
Why didn’t you tell me? I press his knuckles to my mouth. Why did you let me believe it? Why did you let me put two bullets in you, thinking you’d killed my brother? Why didn’t you tell me?
I ran the whole way. From the airport gate through the terminal back to Kirill, and I grabbed his sleeve and begged him to help me save Giovanni.
Kirill said he wasn’t doing it for free, but he barked orders.
We armed up, Christov and I, who I’d dragged into this and felt sick about, and we raced out behind Kirill’s men.
And we’d arrived too late to stop the button.
“Wake up,” I tell Giovanni in the car. My voice is breaking.
“Wake up and tell me you love me properly to my face! Wake up and tell me every twisted game you played, all of it, the whole thing, so I can hate you for it as you deserve. You don’t get to do this.
You don’t get to die and leave me only the letter. Wake up.”
They take him through the doors into the emergency room, and I’m stopped at the line, and the doors swing shut in my face.
I pace. Kirill stands against the wall, arms crossed. Christov leans beside him, his eyes on me.
The doctor comes out after a long time. He pulls his mask down.
“He was in a bad way,” he says. “The wounds were already infected before today. On top of that, the blast, and there are old fractures — he’d been badly beaten over the last several days, both hands, ribs.
” He hesitates. “We’re doing everything, but I have to be honest with you.
If he survives this, he may not be the same man you knew. ”
My heart drops all the way through the floor.
I failed. I failed Lucia, who handed me her brother and asked me to keep him alive. I failed myself. I failed him.
Christov hugs me, and I press my face into his shoulder. Kirill watches me, and he doesn’t say anything.
* * *
Days pass.
Giovanni is in the hospital bed, wired to machines that breathe and beep for him. I sit beside him and talk to him through my tears, saying the things I’d never say if his eyes were open.
The door opens. Max comes in with flowers.
I get up and go to him and put my arms around him before I’ve decided to.
“Kirill sent me to cheer you up,” he says, holding me. “He said you’ve been here for days.” He looks past me at the bed. “You want to tell me what all this is?”
“It’s such a long story.”
“Make it short.”
I look at Giovanni on the bed.
“I loved him,” I say. “And I hurt him.”
Max breathes out slowly. “That happens to the best of us.”
“No. I did this. I shot him. If he’d been strong enough, he would’ve —” I can’t finish it.
“Nobody’s perfect at love.” Max’s voice is gentle.
“What makes it worth anything is the hoping. You let yourself see a future, even when it’s only a fantasy, even when it’s just some happily-ever-after that might never come.
That’s the beautiful part. We see it anyway.
” He looks at me. “So, what’s the future, Yana? ”
I close my eyes.
And I see it. Him and me on a bed, the light low, his mouth on mine — no guns, no games, no enemies. Just that.
“I want a future,” I say. “With him.”
“Then dare to hope.”
I wipe my face, and the machine behind me starts to shriek.
I spin. “Nurse — nurse!”
They come fast and push me back out into the corridor, and the door swings shut, and I’m pacing again, my hands shaking, when Christov comes around the corner with a bag of fruit he’d gone out to buy.
“What’s wrong?” He drops the bag and pulls me into him. “Yana, what happened?”
“His machine — he started jerking; something’s wrong—”
“It’s okay. Breathe. It’s okay.”
Even shaking, even with my heart in my throat, the habit holds. “This is Max,” I tell him. “My friend. Max, my brother, Christov.”
The doctor comes out.
“Good news,” he says, and I stop breathing. “His vitals have come up suddenly. His recovery may be much faster than we thought. It’s not as bleak as I told you.”
I wipe my face. “Really? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. He should recover. We’ll be taking him off the ventilator soon.” He nods toward the door. “You can go in. But keep it calm. Don’t stimulate him.”
“Thank you. Thank you —” I turn and throw my arms around Max.
“Go on,” he says, smiling, nudging me toward the door.
I go to the door and stop with my hand on it. I want a future with Lucia and me well, and Christov safe, and no one left to take any of it from us.
I want it so badly it aches. I push the door open and go in to him.
* * *
I come to the hospital every morning to clean him.
He is unconscious, but he doesn’t need all the wires anymore.
I wipe his face, his hands, the places the bandages don’t cover.
I’m careful around the dressings on his back.
He’s thinner than he was. The hard, certain body I fought in a parking lot and a warehouse has gone lean under my hands.
Christov sits with me in the afternoons.
I watch him while he talks, and I keep waiting to find something changed in him, and I don’t. Fifteen years and he’s still the same. Loyal and soft-hearted under the hardness the world put on him. He laughs at his own jokes the way he did when he was ten.
“They were good to me,” he tells me. “The family that took me in. Italian. They trained me up. They were going to make me a son of the house eventually.” He turns an apple in his hands.
“They were looking for you too, you know. I asked them to. But you didn’t exist anywhere.
No papers, no name, nothing. You were impossible to find. ”
“Kirill made sure of that.”
“I figured.” He sets the apple down. “Then Giovanni and Kirill came to the family and explained everything. The house was loyal to Giovanni, so they let me go. For a few favors.” He looks at the man in the bed.
I look at Giovanni’s face, and I don’t trust my voice, so I don’t use it. When I’ve finished cleaning him, I stand and stretch.
“Watch him,” I tell Christov. “I’m going to get groceries. I’ll make us all something and bring it back.”
“Go. I’ve got him.”
My phone rings on the way out. It’s Annika.
I step into the corridor to take it. I can hear them in the background: Lucia’s anxious voice, asking something, and Annika answering her low. Lucia comes on for a moment.
“Is he awake yet?” she asks. “Please, Yana, just tell me, is he —”
“He’s getting better,” I say. “Every day. He’ll wake up soon, I promise. Don’t worry.”
I don’t tell her he hasn’t opened his eyes since the courtyard. I won’t put that on her, not while she’s an ocean away and can’t do anything but turn it over in the dark.
“She walks better now,” Annika tells me when she takes the phone back. “Almost no limp. The physio is going well.”
We talk a bit more. “Be careful, Yana. We love you. Dimitri says he’s keeping a snow globe for you.”
“Tell him I’ll be there for it. I love you too.”
I get the groceries. I cook in the little kitchen Kirill arranged near the hospital, and by evening, I am returning to the hospital with a flask full of food.
I push the door open with my shoulder.
The room is empty.
The bag slips out of my hand and hits the floor. The bed is stripped. The machines are dark and pushed against the wall. There’s no one in it.
I back out into the corridor and check the number on the door. It’s the right room. It’s his room. I go back in and look again as if he might appear, and he doesn’t, and the floor tilts under me.
I catch a nurse in the hall. “The patient in that room. What happened to him? Where is he—”
“He went out a few hours ago,” she says.
My head spins. “That’s not — he was unconscious this morning.”
She’s already walking away.
I get my phone out, and my hands won’t hold it steady. I call Christov. It rings out, but no answer.
So I call Kirill, but it rings out.
I’m pacing now, fast, the panic climbing up my throat. I call Kirill again, and this time he picks up.
“He’s gone,” I say. “Giovanni’s gone, the room’s empty, they’re saying discharged, and I can’t reach Christov either. Kirill, I can’t find either of them—”
“Don’t panic,” Kirill says. “Stay where you are. I’m coming.”
I’m shaking. I press my back to the wall and try to breathe, and I’m doing the math: who’s left, who could want him. Fabiano’s dead. His body was scattered in the explosion.
And then I hear a voice from somewhere off the corridor.
I turn toward the sound. There’s a door to the hospital garden, propped open, and through it, in the last of the light, I see Christov.
He’s pushing a wheelchair. I run to him.
There’s someone in the chair. I get close enough to see, and it’s him. Giovanni. He is thin and pale, his eyes open just out in the garden. He is fine. I throw my arms around Christov first because he’s closest, and I can’t stop myself.
“He woke up,” Christov says, startled, patting my back. “An hour ago, he asked for air. I asked the doctor, and he said it was fine. Yana, what’s wrong? You’re shaking.”
I let him go and drop down in front of the wheelchair. Giovanni is looking at me. There’s no smirk. He’s gaunt and tired, and his eyes are soft in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times.
“You scared me,” I tell him, and my voice cracks on it.
I lean in, and I put my arms around him, careful of his back, and I hold him.