“Nobody in that building walks out except my family.” I head for the door. “Make sure everyone understands that.”
“They understand.”
The convoy moves out through the estate gates, and I sit in the front vehicle with my eyes on the road ahead and my phone in my hand, and I type and delete a message three times before I finally send it to Anna’s number, even though I know she won’t see it until this is over.
36
ANNA
My father hasn’t movedin an hour.
He’s propped against the wall with my mother’s coat folded under him and his head tipped back and his breathing shallow in a way that makes me count the seconds between each rise of his chest. The bleeding has slowed. There’s no one here who knows what a wound like that needs. Just my mother pressing her folded sleeve against his side and whispering things to him, I can’t hear from where I’m sitting.
The twins haven’t stopped crying.
Mila is in my lap, face buried in my neck, hiccupping through sobs that have been going on for so long she’s running out of breath between them. Alexei sits pressed against my side with his knees pulled up and his arms locked around them, not crying anymore but shaking in a way that’s worse than crying. Every time one of Renat’s men moves near the door, both of them flinch.
My wrists are still bound. They gave my mother enough slack to tend to my father, but they didn’t touch mine.
Renat comes in at some point. I’ve lost track of time. There are no windows and the single bulb overhead hasn’t changed and my phone was taken the moment they had me in the car, so I’m measuring time by my father’s breathing and the twins’ exhaustion and the slow deepening of the bruise I can feel forming along my cheekbone where one of Renat’s men caught me when I tried to pull away in the corridor.
He stands in the middle of the room and looks at us with the mild satisfaction of a man reviewing something that has gone according to plan. “Your husband hasn’t responded yet,” he says.
I say nothing.
“That’s fine. He will.” He looks at my father against the wall. “How is he?”
“He needs a hospital.”
“He needs Luca Volkov to answer his phone.” Renat crouches down to my eye level. “You understand that everything happening in this room right now is a consequence of your husband’s choices. His territory. His operation. His refusal to negotiate like a reasonable man.”
“You were surveilling my family’s home. That’s not negotiation. That’s provocation.”
“We were applying pressure. Standard practice.” He tilts his head. “You applied your own pressure by walking into our office alone. That was brave. Extremely stupid, but brave.”
“If you want Luca to come, hurting his family isn’t the way to bring him to the table. It’s the way to make sure no one in this building walks out.”
Something moves in Renat’s expression. Not fear. Just the brief acknowledgment of a man who has considered a possibility and decided it doesn’t change his plans.
“Men like Volkov don’t come for business arrangements,” he says. “They cut their losses and find another wife.” He stands. “You’re leverage, Mrs. Volkov. Nothing more. The sooner you accept that, the easier tonight becomes.” He walks out.
Mila lifts her head from my neck. Her face is red and swollen from crying, her eyes barely open. “Is Papa coming?” she whispers.
I look at her. At Alexei, turning his face up to mine with that careful, measuring look that has been his father’s since before he knew his father existed.
The honest answer is that I don’t know. I left. I refused his calls for days. I walked into this building without telling anyone because I was too proud to ask for his help, and now my father is bleeding against a wall, and my children are shaking, and Renat’s message has been sitting in Luca’s phone for hours, and I have no way of knowing what he’s doing with it.
Renat is wrong. I know he’s wrong. Whatever Luca and I are to each other, whatever is broken between us, these are his children on this floor. That is a fact that doesn’t bend.
But I also know that knowing something and believing it are different things, and right now, in this room, with my father’s breathing too shallow and the twins exhausted past the point of tears, I need to believe it.
“Yes,” I tell Mila. “Papa is coming.”
Alexei holds my gaze. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He nods once and puts his head back against my arm.
