Nick puts his forehead against mine. His breath is warm on my mouth. His hand slides from my arm to the back of my neck, and he holds me there, the weight of his palm against my spine, his thumb on the nape of my neck, and he breathes.
"I’ll always come for you," he says.
Behind him, Dmitri is making calls. Quiet, efficient, his voice a low murmur that I register without processing. Men are moving in the corridor. Doors opening. The sound of operations being completed.
Nick doesn't move. His forehead stays against mine and his hand stays on my neck and he breathes with me, four seconds in, six seconds out, as if he knows my rhythm. As if he's been counting it from the other side of the city all day.
The drip in the corner falls.
I don't count it.
Nick
She falls asleep in the car.
Her head tips sideways until it finds my shoulder. She doesn't choose it. Her body just gives out now the adrenaline has drained.
I don't move. Dmitri is driving, so I sit still and let her sleep against me while I watch the city come back through the window in pieces. Warehouses giving way to rail yards giving way to the on-ramp, the skyline assembling itself on the horizon, the early afternoon light doing something clean and sharp to the tops of the buildings that I don't have the capacity to appreciate right now.
My hand is on her thigh. I put it there when she got in the car, palm flat, fingers wrapped around to the inside, and I haven't lifted it because lifting it would mean breaking contact and I am not breaking contact with this woman for the foreseeable future. Maybe longer. Maybe forever.
Her sugar is coming down. I checked it again before we left the warehouse. Two-fifteen. Mikhail is waiting at the house with fluids and a monitoring plan and the particular brand of quiet competence that makes him worth every dollar I pay him. She'll need to eat. She'll need to rest. She'll need her levels watched through the night.
Viktor would have known she was Type 1. He would have learned everything about her when he first realized what she meant to me.
Viktor.
The name moves through me and settles somewhere cold. I think about his face in the room. The half-second of recognition before the bullet hit, then nothing. I think about the way he dropped, straight down, the way bodies drop when the central nervous system is severed in an instant. The immediate and total cessation of a man who had been my father's brother for sixty-eight years.
I shot my uncle in the head.
The sentence sits in my mind and I examine it from multiple angles, looking for the flaw, the fracture, the weakness in the structure. There isn't one. Viktor took Sadie. Viktor used her as a bargaining chip. Viktor calculated the timeline of her death against my willingness to negotiate.
He was wrong about that.
My father told me once, in the study, two years before he got sick, that family is the thing that makes you vulnerable and the thing that keeps you alive, and that a Pakhan's job is knowing which one it is at any given moment. He was talking about Viktor. He'd known even then. He'd watched his brother build alliances and move money and position himself for a future that doesn't include the current leadership. My father had watched it all and done nothing because Viktor was his brother and brotherhood is the original contract, the one that predates every oath and every title.
That decision almost cost me Sadie.
So I made sure that it could never happen again.
Dmitri catches my eye in the rearview mirror. He's been silent since we left the warehouse, letting me sit with it, giving me the space he always gives me when the work has been done and the processing hasn't finished yet. But I can see the question in his face. The same question he's been carrying since the study this morning, since Alexei.
I shake my head slightly. Not now.
He nods and returns his eyes to the road.
Sadie stirs against my shoulder. Her hand finds mine on her thigh and she tightens her grip on it briefly.
I look at her hand on mine. Her wrists are bruised. Dark bands where the zip ties sat, the skin abraded raw in places, swollen around the edges. I can see the indentation marks still pressed into her flesh, the pattern of the plastic teeth, and I have to close my eyes and breathe through the thing that rises in me because if I let it reach the surface, I will tell Dmitri to turn the car around and I will go back to that warehouse and I will put bullets into Viktor's men that I left alive because they had information I might need later.
We pull into the drive of my father’s house. Dmitri kills the engine but doesn't open his door. He waits. I look at Sadie, still sleeping, and make the calculation I've been making since the warehouse. Wake her or carry her.
I carry her.
I open the door and slide my arm under her knees and lift, and she makes a small sound against my neck but doesn't wake. I walk up the steps and through the front door that Dmitri holds open and into the house that smells like polish and coffee and the particular warmth of a building that has been kept running by staff who knew their Pakhan was bringing someone home.
Because this is my home now. Our home.
