The violence is impossible to comprehend. The front end is obliterated. The passenger side, her side, is caved in. Reinforced steel pillars, thick as a man's arm, are snapped like wet cardboard. A massive loader blocks the road, its steel bucket resting near the wreck like a tombstone.
"No," I whisper.
I scramble up the chassis, my boots slipping on the slick metal. I burn my hands on the hot steel, but I don't feel it.
I grab the frame of the shattered window and pull myself up.
"Helena!"
The rear door has been kicked open from the inside. It hangs off its hinges.
I look into the smoldering cabin.
The interior is a ruin. Airbags hang like deflated lungs. The rear cabin is scorched and covered in debris. Ash floats like black snow.
I scan the footwell. The ceiling. I look for a body. I look for the broken shape of the woman who slept in my arms last night.
No one.
My heart hammers against my ribs.
Empty.
Empty means she wasn't crushed. Empty means she got out.
It means she was taken.
I drop to the asphalt, my boots hitting the ground hard. I spin around, scanning the girders, hand going to my gun.
The shooters are gone. They hit the target and vanished.
"Helena!" I roar.
I check the perimeter, my eyes darting over the debris field. Shattered glass glitters in the soot. A glint of blue near the median reflects the firelight, catching my eye.
I walk toward it, legs impossibly heavy, like I'm walking through deep water. I reach down and pick it up.
It's her ring.
The sapphire. The ring of the Morozov Queens. The ring I forced onto her finger to mark her as mine. It’s cold, heavy, and smeared with oil.
It must have been torn from her hand in the struggle.
I stare at it, remembering the moment I put it on her. The weight of her hand in mine. Seeing it discarded in the dirt feels more violent than the crash. My protection, lying in the mud.
It’s a message.You can’t keep her.
"Helena," I whisper. I clench the ring until the metal bites into my palm, cutting the skin. I welcome the pain as fuel.
I look down the road, and bile rises in my throat.
Andrei lies twenty feet away. My head of security. A man who has been with me for five years. A giant.
He's lying on his back in the center of the road. Still. His tactical vest is pockmarked with gray smudges where he took rounds and kept standing. But the vest couldn't save him from the kill shot.
A jagged wound tears through his throat, just above the Kevlar. The story is written in his blood: he didn't run. He stood in the open, forcing a precision shot. He died shielding my wife.
His eyes are open, staring at the sky.
