I get the twins out of the vehicle. Mila wakes up confused and immediately starts looking for Luca. Alexei finds him before she does, already crossing the car park toward us, and something in the way my son moves toward his father makes my chest ache in a way I don’t try to name.
Luca crouches down when Alexei reaches him. Says something I can’t hear. Alexei nods and leans against him, and Luca’s hand comes up to the back of his head and stays there.
Mila reaches them a second later, and Luca pulls her in with his other arm, and for a moment, he’s just on the ground in a hospital car park with both of his children pressed against him and his eyes closed.
He doesn’t look at me.
Not in the car park. Not in the private waiting room, which he has cleared of other patients with a single word to the hospital administrator, who appears within minutes of our arrival. Not when he stands at the window making calls, and not when he sits with the twins, and not when a surgeon named Dr. Havel comes to find him and speaks to him in a low voice that I’m too far away to hear.
He handles everything. Every detail, every arrangement, every person who needs to be spoken to. The private facility he has connected to the estate, where my father will be moved once he’s stable. The security rotation for my mother’s room beside his. The food appears for the twins without anyone asking. A changeof clothes for me, that one of his men brings in a bag, because somehow, in the middle of all of this, he thought of that too.
He does all of it without once looking at me directly, and I understand why. He’s giving me space. Letting me breathe. Letting the night settle before whatever comes next between us.
I sit in the waiting room and watch him with my children and think about my father’s coat folded under him on a warehouse floor and the sound of my mother’s voice counting his breaths.
I did that.
I pulled on threads I didn’t understand and walked into a room I couldn’t walk back out of and handed the most dangerous network in this city exactly what they needed. I told myself I was protecting my family. I told myself my name was a shield. I told myself I didn’t need Luca to fix what I could fix myself.
And my father almost died on a concrete floor because of it.
Alexei falls asleep in the chair beside Luca somewhere around midnight, tipped sideways, his head on Luca’s arm. Luca doesn’t move. Just sits there with my son’s weight against him and his phone in his other hand and his eyes on the door where Dr. Havel will eventually appear.
Mila climbs into Luca’s lap without asking, tucks her head under his chin, and is asleep within minutes.
He looks up then. Across the waiting room. At me.
Just looks. No expression I can read. Just his eyes finding mine in the quiet of a room where our children are sleeping against him, and my father is in surgery, and there is nothing left between us to hide behind.
I look back.
Dr. Havel comes through the door at half past midnight.
The bleeding was from a ruptured vessel. They’ve repaired it. Full recovery expected with rest. My mother closes her eyes when she hears it and doesn’t open them for a long moment.
I exhale for what feels like the first time in hours.
Luca is already standing, already talking to Dr. Havel about transfer arrangements and recovery protocols and security requirements, already moving to the next thing the way he always does. Mila is awake and pressed against his side. Alexei stands beside him, rubbing his eyes.
My children won’t leave their father.
After everything. After days away from him and a warehouse floor and hours of terror and a drive through the dark. They found him in a doorway, and they haven’t let go since. Watching it, standing in this waiting room at half past midnight with my mother crying quietly across the room, I understand something I’ve been fighting for months.
I built walls to keep him out because I was afraid of what letting him in would cost me.
I never once considered what keeping him out was costing them.
Luca glances at me over Mila’s head. “Ready to go home?” he asks.
I look at my children. At my mother. At the door behind which my father is finally, finally stable.
“Yes,” I say.
And I mean it in more ways than one.
39
LUCA
