“Move,” I tell the driver.
The convoy pulls out onto the dark road. In the vehicle behind me, Dasha is working on Viktor. In the vehicle behind that, Maxim is with Anna and the twins.
I sit in the front and look at the road ahead and think about Anna on the floor of that room with her hands raised and her body between my children and whatever was coming.
She told them I was coming. She believed it before she had any reason to.
My phone buzzes. Maxim.
Alexei wants to know if you’re in the car.
I text back:Tell him yes.
Three seconds.
He says okay. Mila is asleep already. Anna hasn’t let go of them.
I put the phone down, watch the road, and say nothing the rest of the way.
38
ANNA
Dasha workson my father for the entire drive.
I can’t see her from where I’m sitting, but I can hear her through the partition, low and clipped, directing the men holding my father still, calling out numbers that mean nothing to me but clearly mean something to her. My mother’s voice responds steadily.
Mila is asleep against my side before we’ve been in the vehicle for ten minutes. The kind of sleep that comes from a body that has simply run out. Her mouth is slightly open. Her eyelashes are still wet.
Alexei doesn’t sleep. He sits beside me with his head against my arm and stares at the seat in front of him, and doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then he says, “Is Grandpa going to be okay?”
“Yes,” I tell him.
“How do you know?”
“Because Dasha is with him. And because Papa arranged everything.”
He’s quiet again. Then, “Papa came.”
“He did.”
“I knew he would.”
I look down at him. “Did you?”
“You said he would. You don’t say things you don’t mean.” He closes his eyes. “That’s what you told me when I asked if you were still angry at him. You said a little. Not none. So I knew you still believed in him.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. So I press my lips to the top of his head and hold him against me and watch the city lights move past the window.
In the front vehicle, I can see the back of Luca’s head through the glass. He’s on his phone. Has been since we pulled out of the complex, one call ending and another starting, too far away for me to make out words.
Moving pieces into place the way he always does, except the pieces tonight are a surgeon and a private facility and security rotations and whatever he went back inside that building to finish before he got into the car.
I watched him go back in. I knew what it meant, and I didn’t stop him, and I’m not going to pretend I wanted to.
The convoy pulls into the hospital through a private entrance. Staff are already waiting, which means Luca called ahead, which means he thought of it while coordinating fourteen men through a warehouse and getting my family out alive. The stretchercomes out before the vehicle fully stops. Dasha steps back and lets the surgical team take over, briefing them in quick, precise sentences as they move my father inside.
My mother goes with him without looking back.
