I think about Lauren.
I think about what I’ve done to her—dragging her back into the orbit of a life she never asked for, giving her something to hold onto and then lying here bleeding out on a concrete floor while our daughter watches. She’ll grieve me again. She’ll have to explain it to Hannah again, and this time Hannah will be old enough to remember.
If she survives this.
Blyad.
Lauren should hate me for all this. Maybe she will.
The blood comes faster now, pooling dark on the floor beneath me, and I watch it with a strange detachment. I’ve put men in the ground and never thought much about what their last minutes felt like. I’m thinking about it now.
Lauren’s face appears in my mind again, the way it always does—not as I last saw her this morning, exhausted and terrified, but as she was the first time. My estate. A lemon dress. The specific quality of her walking into a room like she hadn’t decided yet whether to own it or burn it down. I knew then. Not what it would cost me—I wouldn’t have believed that—but that this woman was going to take me apart completely.
I was right about that.
I look at Hannah across the floor between us.
I was right about her too.
“Should I put you out of your misery,” Aslanov says, almost to himself, “or do you want to suffer a little longer?”
“Don’t hurt him!”
Hannah’s voice. He turns toward her and grabs her shoulder, pulling her back, and something in me that was already at its limit goes past it.
“It’s okay.” I catch her eyes from the floor and hold them. “You don’t have anything to worry about.” The words cost me something, but I mean them, and she needs to hear them. “I love you, kiddo.”
She doesn’t answer. She’s looking at Aslanov with an expression I recognize—Lauren’s expression, the one that comes just before she stops calculating and acts. She twists in his grip, once, twice, and then she drops her head, and does something you would never expect from a four-year-old.
She opens her mouth and bites down on his Aslanov’s wrist with everything she has.
The sound that tears out of Aslanov isn’t quite human as he pulls his arm back.
A temporary distraction.
That’s all I need.
I move before the pain has time to register its objection—off the floor, one functioning leg, one functioning arm, closing the distance on pure forward momentum. The bullet wounds tear open with the effort, fresh blood running hot, but I don’t stop. I hit the fucker with my shoulder first, driving him back, and then my fist finds his face. His head snaps sideways, and for one moment, all twenty years of accumulated debt between us are in my knuckles and his jaw.
He staggers.
The gun drops.
He reaches out for Hannah as he goes back, and that removes the last of whatever restraint I had left.
I hit him again.
Even harder this time.
He goes down and I go with him, and what follows isn’t a fight anymore. It’s a reckoning.
My fist rises and falls and I feel things crack beneath it as I keep going—for my mother, a bullet and no funeral; for Lauren, four years of grief she was handed like it was her inheritance; for Hannah, bound and taped and terrified in a room full of armed men because thispizdadecided she was useful.
I keep going until there’s blood on my hands that isn’t mine and his face is something he won’t recognize in a mirror. I keep ruining what’s left of his face, running on pure rage and adrenaline, the sound of my fist connecting is the only sound in the room.
I stop.
The room has gone quiet around us. Faint light bleeds in from the main room, enough to see by, not enough to soften what I’m looking at.
