He steps back and looks at me over his glasses again, nods.
I roll my eyes as I stand and drop my trousers, revealing a very bruised lower leg.
“No swelling though,” I argue before he has the opportunity to berate me.
Mikhail just shakes his head solemnly and gestures for me to lie on the table. He watches my face as he pokes and squeezes parts of my leg, but I don’t so much as wince, even when histhumb presses into my shin and send a shooting pain right up to my groin.
He finishes with a sigh and a shake of his head.
“Dmitri is here; he has a change of clothes for you.”
“Thanks, Doc,” I say pulling my slacks back into place.
He doesn't laugh. He's not a laughing man. But something around his eyes softens for half a second. He claps me on the shoulder that isn't injured and he walks me to the door.
"Go see your father," he says. “And tell him Mikhail sends his respects.”
I nod, appreciation for his words tightening my chest momentarily. I leave without another word.
Dmitri has a car waiting and hands me a garment bag with a fresh change of clothes. I change awkwardly in the back seat as he drives me to my father’s house.
"How is he," I ask.
"Worse, but holding on."
"How much worse."
"It’s bad, Kol.”
Dmitri only calls meKolwhen he is anxious, which is hardly ever, and tells me all I need to know.
“Doctor said something about reduced breaths and organs shutting down. He’s mostly been sleeping due to the meds and your Uncle has been making noises abouthierarchyandtraditional lines of succession.
He pulls into traffic and the clinic falls away behind us as we move through the city in the failing light.
“And Yuri,” I ask. All I know is he was taken to the emergency hospital on the other side of the city.
“In surgery. Bleed on the brain.”
Fuck.
How the fuck did today unfold like this?
I close my eyes for ten seconds and I let myself see her face one more time, the blond woman at the edge of the wreckage with the juice box and the foil blanket.
When I open my eyes again we are pulling up the drive to my father’s house and I realize I must have fallen asleep.
Three stories of brick and ivy greet us as we come to a stop on gravel that crunches under the tires. The front door opens before we are out of the car. Lucia, my father's nurse for the last six months, stands in the doorway in her white uniform with her hands folded in front of her, and the expression on her face is the expression I have been waiting for since last fall.
I walk past her into the house without speaking.
The downstairs is quiet. Too quiet. There should be men in the front room, in the library, in the kitchen eating whatever my father's cook has put together for them today, only there are none. The house has been emptied. This has been done deliberately by someone, because a man should not have to hear his soldiers laughing and gambling in his house as he dies.
I know who has done it before I reach the stairs.
His coat is on the rack in the foyer. Black cashmere.
I climb the stairs.
