"Of course."
“Nikolai told me how he pulled you from the water,” she says. “The jet had already taken off when he started searching for you. The water was so cold that the doctor said it slowed down the bleeding, which saved your life. I thought you were dead…” Lucya stops for a moment. “Dmitri shot you so many times.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, squeezing her hand.
“Don’t be,” she says. “You came back to us.”
“Us?”
Taking my hand, she slips it between us, resting it on her stomach. “Us. Me, and your child.”
I never knew how much I wanted a child with her until this moment. “You’re sure?” I ask hoarsely.
“Yes, my mother got me a test when I was dragged back here and she kept our secret.” She puts her hand over mine. “The doctors here gave me a blood test, I’m about six weeks along. They wanted to give me an ultrasound, but I refused until you could be there with me.”
“A baby…” I say, “yours and mine.”
“At the wedding,” she begins quietly, “I had a knife and a vial of poison under my wedding dress. I was going to kill him when we were alone. No matter what else happened after that, I knew our baby would be safe from him.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner,” I croak, trying to clear my throat.
“Are you trying to shut down any unseemly emotion?” Lucya asks with a little grin.
“I’m the Angel of Death. I don’t feel emotion,” I reproach her.
“Of course,” she agrees, curling closer against my side.
Later that night, when she’s asleep in the recliner next to my bed, Nikolai turns off the alarms on all the machinery clogging up my bedside and helps me up.
Turning to me in the hall, he frowns. “Are you sure? Let me handle this for you.”
“It’s my responsibility to remove any threat to Lucya’s life,” I say. “Show me where they are.”
My demons roam free, whispering under my skin and filling my lungs with fire. I’ll let them play. Just for a while.
We start with the room at the end of the hall. Rurik is unconscious, mouth open, and a bloody gash across his forehead. No one has bothered to clean him up, just kept him alive.
Screwing the silencer on my pistol, I kick his bed. “Wake up.”
The old bastard does, eyes wide with terror and cringing away from me. “I- I had no choice, Alexi Turgenev! You must understand that your brother, he forced me.”
I pistol whip him across the face, sending teeth flying from his lying mouth. “I watched all the videos The Butcher saved. He has quite a repository of evidence. If he was caught, he didn’t intend on going down alone.”
The memory of cutting the Siderovs, father, and son into human chum makes me smile, a sight that makes Rurik recoil from me.
“It took a long time to get everything I needed from them,” I say pleasantly, “and even longer to cut them into pieces. I kept them alive for much longer than you might think possible after losing that many body parts. I enjoyed every. Single. Cut.”
Leaning closer, I can see my grin reflected in his dilated pupils. I do look unhinged. “I only wish that I had the time to do the same for you, but…” I check my watch. All the medical personnel knew better than to walk this floor tonight. “I am on a schedule. And in the end? You’re not worth my time.”
I fire the gun three times. His gut. His heart. And his head. Wiping the blood off on his hospital gown, I pull the sheet over his face and leave the room.
“One last visit from the Angel of Death?” Nikolai asks, leaning against the wall.
“Just one more,” I agree.
Inessa’s room is next to her uncle’s, and she must have put up quite a fuss about the wound in her shoulder, because she was handcuffed to her bedrail. She wakes up as I stand over her. She looks very little like Lucya, she takes more after their mother. It’s a shame she didn’t inherit Sasha’s kindness and courage.
“You can’t hurt me,” she’s trembling so much that her voice shakes. “Lucya will never forgive you.”
