“Believe it or don’t, the next steps are the same. Get some sleep on this flight, because you’re unlikely to get much in the near future.”
“Sleep?” She laughs once. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Probably. All the same, sleep.” I close my eyes and let the dead sit across from me for a beat. Tanner with the loud shirts. Marcus who turned himself into a door when rooms needed one. The knot around their names tightens.
Vitaly killed two men he’s known his whole life. Three, if I count Fyodor.
That takes a special kind of brokenness. The kind that cannot be fixed. I’ve always known Vitaly wasn’t right in the head. Even as a baby, he didn’t cry like normal. Mostly, he stared, like he was trying to see into your soul. Always observing, always thinking. Calculating.
With Bridgette taking him under her wing, the kid stood no chance of being a normal person. Maybe none of us did, considering my own upbringing. But it’s hard not to wonder what went wrong with him. How I could have done better by him. Why he came out the way he did.
Those questions don’t matter right now. The only thing that matters now is solutions. I will not allow Yuri and Alexander to end up like Vitaly. I will protect them from him and the rest of the world. I will keep their mother safe. And I will love all of them with everything I have to give.
But love doesn’t matter now either. If I let myself think of things in terms of love and family, I’ll lose my nerve to do what needs to be done.
21
MINA
The cabin humslike a held breath. I stare at the oval window until the sky blurs and comes back. My phone lies face down on the little table, screen still, a quiet threat. I tell myself not to touch it. I touch it anyway.
I need confirmation of what I know has happened, and I google the island. Headlines pop up. All some iteration of “Fourteen dead in paradise massacre.”
My throat tightens. The words swim and then sharpen. There are three paragraphs of nothing. There are a hundred comments from people who will never smell salt and plaster dust in the same breath. It does not matter. Fourteen dead.
My lungs forget how to work. Air goes in wrong and comes out worse. Roman looks up from whatever gauge he was pretending to read. He reads me instead.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Fourteen…” The word scrapes my mouth. I show him the screen and keep my thumb over the comments.
He scans once and nods once. He does not tell me the number will change. He does not tell me the post is wrong. His breath is steadier than mine.
I blurt, “We keep them there. At the retreat. My mother. The women. I do not care how long. We keep the boys there.”
“Yes,” he says. He does not ask how long is long. He does not tell me I’m being dramatic. “For now they stay. You call when you need to. Not when you think you should.” His eyes hold mine. “We have a chance to pull him again. We take it. That is how this ends.”
My chest goes hot. “No.”
“Mina, it’s the only way?—”
“I don’t want another chance. I don’t want to be bait. I want our sons behind a fence. I want to close my eyes and wake up to a normal that never existed. I want?—”
“You cannot pretend it away,” he says softly.
“I know,” I say, and my voice breaks. My phone slips from my hand and smacks the carpet. “I know, but I want to. I want one hour where I am not a target. I want to be boring. I want you to lie to me and say everything is fine.”
He reaches for my hands. I pull back and my hands shake. Heat crawls up my throat. Shame follows it. He laces his fingers with mine and squeezes once. “Look at me. Only me.”
I look.
His gaze does not flick. “Breathe with me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“You already are.”
I try. The first inhale hurts like a bruise. The second catches on the way out. The third slides. On the fourth my hands start to remember stillness. I want to be angry at myself for needing help to breathe. He squeezes again and kills the anger before it grows.
