“Put him on speaker.”
“…fell off the bridge.”
“Who fell off the bridge?” I roared.
“Sato and Mrs Zahkarova.”
The rest of his words receded in a tunnel and my vision hazed as a roaring rage ripped inside me, quickly suppressed by the icy vise of fear. Fear that I’d lost Lucy. That my wife was dead.
No.
As I neared the crash site, I heard the sirens of the emergency vehicles. Usually, they weren’t sounds I wanted to hear, but in this instance, I would give up anything for her survival.
She was going to the damn hospital and was seeing the best trauma surgeon. I was preparing for the worst even when I hoped against hope that I’d see my wife walk away without a scratch.
We should have stayed in the fucking cabin another day. I didn’t even know why the unfinished jigsaw puzzle was a regret taunting me. I didn’t recognize its significance when Lucy had been hell-bent on bringing the puzzle with us. But I was seeing it differently at the moment. Our nights in front of the hearth…
“Kirill, watch out!”
But as much as I was drowning in my regrets and barely hearing the sounds around me, my eyes were laser focused in theway that managed to avoid vehicles and pedestrians by a spitting distance.
“You know New Jersey is not a fucking racetrack.”
“Shut up.”
“Getting into a wreck?—”
“Shut the fuck up,” I gritted just as I avoided a couple who thought they were strolling in fucking Central Park. The Porche struck a trash can in the corner as the tires skidded on the sidewalk for a few feet before we resumed speeding down the road.
Despite barely listening to Feliks’ recounting of events, the abandoned garbage truck smashed into a store indicated we’d arrived at the scene of the ambush. I spotted the black security vehicle following Lucy’s car. It was riddled with bullets.
Those who did this were dead.
My tires slammed into the sidewalk as I jumped out of the vehicle, where spectators had already gathered at the edge of the road looking down at the street below.
I raced around the slope and jumped, landing on top of a stalled vehicle. I spotted Lucy’s wreckage. The front of the car had pancaked into a concrete pillar.
Adrenaline spiked, and my heart pounded erratically, or was it my lungs trying to drag in air?
I leapt onto the pavement and sprinted towards the destruction. My ears were clogged from the frenzy of my trampling thoughts.
A sizable crowd circled the area, but I threw people aside to get to the vehicle.
“Lucy!” I yelled.
Outraged protests erupted behind me, but Kolya simply shouted, “Husband,” and shut them up.
I ducked under the remains of the sedan. Shattered windows, twisted metal, my wife lying across the front seat,unrecognizable because blood was covering her entire face. The source of the bleeding was at the top of her head. Her body was at an odd angle…her left wrist…I blinked.
“Lucy,” I choked as I reached in and felt for her pulse.
It was faint, but it was there.
“Hang on, baby. Please, don’t leave me,” I whispered.
“Sato’s alive,” Kolya said, but had the sense not to move him any more until the first responders arrived.
“Sir, we need you to move aside.”
