Men behind him.
I cried out and threw my weight against the door.
Too late. His polished shoe was already jammed in the frame, immovable, the door bouncing uselessly against it.
“No,” I cried, trying to force it closed anyway.
He pushed it open with one hand and I stumbled back into the apartment.
Runa whimpered.
I pulled her closer and felt her heart against mine—fast, confused, too young to understand and old enough to feel the fear radiating off her mother.
His eyes found her immediately.
“I believe you have something that belongs to me,” he said, striding into my apartment as though he had always owned it—pausing only to straighten his cufflinks, tugging his jacket sleeves into place with the unhurried precision of a man entirely certain of the outcome.
I shook my head. My nightmare. My deepest fear made real and standing in my doorway in a tailored suit with cold eyes and men at his back.
Konstantin moved in behind him. Then Bogdan.
A fourth hung back.
The man from the park.
“You can go,” Vadim said, without looking at me.“She is mine.”
“No,” I croaked.“You can’t have her.”
I backed away. Nowhere to go. The wall found me before I found it. Cornered—the suitcase still by the door, Runa at my hip, my eyes still moving across the room looking for something that wasn’t there.
“Nobody steals what is mine,” he said, his voice dropping to something quieter and infinitely more dangerous than a shout—the anger finally showing at the edges, controlled but present, a door held shut by a man deciding whether to open it.
“Bogdan,” he said—and with that single word a gun cocked somewhere behind me.
I shielded Runa and swivelled, putting my back between her and the room so no bullet could reach her. My legs buckled. I went down to my knees on the hard floor, Runa screaming against my chest, her fear and mine indistinguishable from each other.
Before I could soothe her the blow landed—sharp, at the back of my head—and as my body began to crumple I could only think of her. Only of Runa. Her cries were already fading at the edges, growing distant, as though someone were slowly turning down the volume on the only thing that mattered.
Someone began to pull her from me.
My arms wouldn’t respond.
My eyes closed before the tears could fall.
It was happening all over again.
Then.
Darkness.
Silence.
He had torn my heart from my body once again.
Taken my child.
Again.
