Hours.
I close my eyes. I go back to his voice in my head.
I'm coming.
Something changes.
I feel it before I hear it. A vibration in the floor, the kind that comes through concrete when something heavy moves fast and close. Then sound. The crunch of tires on gravel. More than one vehicle. Doors opening. The flat, hard voices of men who are moving with purpose and coordination.
My heart rate spikes. I feel the glucose burn immediately, the adrenaline dumping fuel onto a fire my body can't contain. I breathe against it, four in, six out, four in, six out.
Footsteps. Close. On the other side of the wall.
In the next room, Viktor's chair scrapes back. I hear his voice, sharp, speaking Russian. Fast. A question, maybe, or an order. Another voice answers. Then a third. Viktor comes into the room where I am and moves towards me with a purpose that looks menacing.
He stops just short of where I am, his head cocked to the side.
The silence is so complete that I can hear the drip in the corner and my own pulse and the faint creak of the chair under my weight and nothing else.
Three seconds. Four. Five.
The door comes off its hinges.
It doesn't open. It breaks inward, the frame splintering, and the sound is enormous in the concrete room, a crack that fills my chest and makes my teeth vibrate. Light floods in from the corridor, grey and industrial, and in the center of it is a silhouette I know the way I know my own name.
Nick steps through the doorway with the Makarov level in front of him and his eyes locked on the room.
Viktor is frozen in the no man's land between my chair and the threshold, one hand reaching for the inside of his jacket, his mouth open around a word that will never arrive.
"Koly—"
Nick shoots him between the eyes.
The sound is different this time. Closer. Louder. It fills the room and leaves no space for anything else. My ears ring. My vision whites out for a fraction of a second, and when it comes back, Viktor is on the floor and Nick is already past him, crossing the room in three strides, and his hands are on my face.
"Sadie." His voice is wrecked. The control he held on the phone is gone. His hands are shaking against my cheeks and his eyes are moving over me, cataloguing damage, reading my face, looking for the signs that tell him whether I'm okay.
"I'm here," I say. My voice breaks on the second word. “You came.”
He pulls a knife from his belt and cuts the zip tie at my wrists. The blood rushes back into my hands and the pain is extraordinary, a bright white burn that makes me gasp. He catches my wrists, holds them, his thumbs pressing gently against my pulse points.
"Your sugar," he says. "What number?"
"I don't know. High. I can feel it."
He turns his head. "Dmitri. The kit."
Dmitri is in the doorway. He steps over Viktor's body without looking down and crosses the room with a black medical bag that he sets on the table next to the water bottle. Nick opens it. His hands are still shaking but his movements are precise, muscle memory from weeks of watching me do this, and he pulls out the glucometer and the test strips and holds my hand steady while he pricks my finger.
The meter beeps.
He looks at the number. His jaw goes tight.
"Two-twenty," he says.
High. But not critical and not DKA. The long-acting insulin from this morning bought me more time than I thought.
Nick reaches into the bag and pulls out an insulin pen. He uncaps it, looks at me, then injects what I need into the soft flesh of my stomach.
