Her hand stills in my hair and her breath hitches.
“Please.” Each word costs me but I force them out anyway. “Don’t kill him. Don’t kill Katya. They’re not responsible for what happened to you.”
“Shh.” Her fingers curl through my hair again, gentle. “Don’t talk. Save your strength.”
“No.” I try to shake my head but pain explodes through my side and I gasp. “Please. If you ever loved me at all—” My voice breaks. “If you remember the little girl I was, don’t do this. Don’t kill him. It will break me.”
Silence except for the roar of the engine and the harsh rasp of Kirill’s breathing from the front seat.
Marina’s thumb brushes across my forehead, and when I manage to focus on her face again, I see something crack in her expression. The ice queen facade shatters and what’s left underneath is raw grief.
“I won’t,” she says quietly, her voice is thick. “But you need to live, do you understand me? You need to fight.”
“Okay,” I breathe. “Okay.”
A lightness takes over. Kirill’s safe. Katya’s safe. I can at least die knowing the man I love gets to live.
“Two minutes,” Kirill growls from the front seat. “You’re going to live, solnyshko. You’re going to live and be my wife for real. We’re going to do this properly. I’m going to ask your father for his blessing, we’re going to have a wedding where you choose to marry me, and then we’re going to have an army of children who are as brilliant and reckless as their mother. You don’t get to leave me before any of that happens.”
I want to tell them both that I’ll be fine, but I’m pretty sure that would be a lie. The pain is fading now, which some distant part of my brain knows isn’t good, and the edges of my vision are going soft and dark.
“Dinara.” My mother’s voice cuts through the fog, her tone vehement but soft. “Stay awake. Look at me.”
I try. I really do. But the darkness is inviting.
“You stay with me, Dinara. You fucking stay.” Kirill’s voice is raw, barely holding together, and the car accelerates harder, the engine screaming. “I’m not living this life without you.”
The last thing I feel is my mother’s arms tightening around me, cradling me like I’m six years old again, like she can physically keep me tethered to this world through sheer force of will.
Then the edges blur and soften, the voices fading to distant echoes, and the world fades away as I slip back under.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-ONE
KIRILL
The hospital waitingroom smells like disinfectant and stale coffee, fluorescent lights washing everything in a sickly pale glow. I’ve been staring at the same scuff mark on the linoleum for the past two hours, my elbows on my knees, hands clasped tight enough that my knuckles have gone white.
Across from me, Marina sits ramrod straight in a plastic chair, her white power suit still soaked dark with Dinara’s blood.
One of her soldiers—a woman with a shaved head and a scar bisecting her eyebrow—stands behind her chair like a sentinel. Marina herself sits perfectly upright, hands folded in her lap, but there’s exhaustion carved into every line of her face.
My brothers flank me on either side. Matvey’s sprawled in his chair with his legs stretched out, but there’s nothing relaxed about the way his jaw is clenched or how his fingers keep drumming against his thigh. Dem sits perfectly still, smoking a cigarette he definitely shouldn’t be, staring at Marina like he’s cataloging every way he could kill her if it came to that.
Marina’s soldiers captured them at Newtown Creek, zip-tied them alongside the other family heirs, and loaded them intotrucks. My brothers expected execution—a bullet to the back of the head in some abandoned warehouse—but Marina ordered them brought here when everything went to shit.
I guess she decided to spare us. I don’t know if that makes her merciful or just pragmatic, but they’re alive and that’s what matters.
Katya’s curled up on the row of chairs to my left, finally asleep under Matvey’s leather jacket. She refused to go home, insisted on staying even though she’s been through hell tonight. She’s tougher than any of us gave her credit for.
The steady tick of the clock on the wall counts out the seconds, the only sound breaking the heavy silence. We’re a goddamn portrait of dysfunction. The cartel queen who terrorized New York on one side. The Baronov heirs she was planning to execute on the other. But we’re all here for Dinara, still in surgery.
I've spent the last hour telling my siblings everything while we wait. Revealing that our father killed our mother was one of the most difficult conversations of my life. I watched grief rip through them fresh and raw, the poisonous truth settling into something we'll carry forever.
I also filled them in on Miron’s betrayal, the showdown in that warehouse where our father tried to make me choose which woman to kill and the most fucked-up irony of all—Marina, Dinara’s mother, being the Ghost.
We’ve said little since then. Everyone’s processing in their own way, but I’m grateful they’re here for me, because I don’t have it in me to do this on my own.
