Page 104 of Cruel Submission

He looks up.

“Dmitri’s wife. I’ll make the call myself.”

Stefan nods. Something passes across his face. Respect, maybe. Or sorrow. With Stefan, they look the same.

I walk toward the house. Each step costs something I don’t have a name for. The champagne is still on the tables. The jazz trio’s instruments sit abandoned on the stage. A woman’s shoe lies on the grass near the fountain, lost in the scramble.

Fifteen minutes ago, this garden held laughter. Now it holds the echo of automatic weapons and the silence that comes after men die.

I stop at the front door. Straighten my shirt. Check my hands for blood. There’s a streak across my right knuckles, somebody else’s, already drying brown. I wipe it on my trousers.

Then I go inside to find my fiancée.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Mirabel

The champagne is going flat on the trays.

Nobody’s touched it. Nobody’s touched anything—not the canapés in their sad geometric rows, not the finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off, not the miniature tarts glazed in something that was probably beautiful two hours ago and now looks like wax.

The catering staff bolted the minute the coast was clear. I imagine they’ll be updating their liability insurance before they reach the motorway.

The living room is full of people and empty of air.

Diane is curled into the armchair by the window, shoes off, knees drawn up. Her mascara has tracked two dark lines down her cheeks, and she hasn’t bothered wiping them. Natalia sits on the loveseat across from her, Julia at her side. She’s twisting a cocktail napkin between her fingers, tearing it into strips, building a small pile of paper shreds on the cushion beside her.

A few other guests huddle in clusters—Arkady’s cousins, a couple of business associates who didn’t flee fast enough, the jazz trio’s saxophone player who somehow got trapped inside when the doors locked and is now sitting on the floor with his back against the piano, staring at nothing. Fanny has taken Aleks to the nursery. At least one of us is sleeping tonight.

Nobody’s eating. Nobody’s drinking. Nobody’s doing anything except sitting in a room that smells of cold food and fear.

Arkady is in the corner, phone pressed to his ear. He hasn’t sat down since he came back inside. I catch fragments of his conversation. Double the rotation. South wall, west gate, rooftop access—seal it. How many did we lose? Then something in Russian, clipped and rapid, a language I still don’t speak but have learned to read by tone. This tone says: If anyone breaches this perimeter again, I will bury them under it.

He’s called four people in the last twenty minutes. Each conversation shorter than the last, sharper. He’s building a fortress, turning Ashwater Heights from a home into a compound.

My beautiful afternoon. My beautiful, impossible afternoon.

Gone. Replaced by bullet casings in the gravel and a dead man named Dmitri, whose pregnant wife doesn’t know yet.

But that’s not where my body is right now. My body is on the sofa with my sister, and my sister is falling apart.

Debra is beside me, folded into herself, knees pulled up, arms locked around her shins. She’s shaking. Her face is blank. Not calm—blank. That emptiness I’ve come to recognize as Debra’s emergency shutdown. The place she goes when the world becomes Gavriil’s hellhole and the years in between dissolve.

“Deb.” I pull her tighter against me, my arm around her shoulders, my other hand covering hers where she’s gripping her forearms. Her skin is cold. Colder than it should be on a summer evening. “I’m here. You’re at Ashwater Heights. You’re safe. He left. He’s gone.”

She doesn’t respond. Her lips are moving. Not words… or not words meant for me. A grounding exercise, maybe. Or something older and less clinical. The way she kept herself alive in a room she couldn’t leave.

Yanis is on her other side, sitting close but not crowding. He has her left hand between both of his, his thumbs moving in slow circles over her knuckles—the same motion over and over. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t try to fix it. Just sits there, solid, giving her something warm to come back to when she’s ready.

His jaw is locked, and his eyes—when they lift from Debra’s hands—track to Arkady in the corner. Brothers exchanging something wordless across the room. I can’t decode it, but the signal is clear: We handle this. Whatever it costs.

Another tremor runs through Debra. Stronger. Her breathing catches—a wet, ragged sound—and then her eyes go wide and unfocused and I know she’s not here anymore.

“Debra.” I angle my body toward her, blocking the room from her line of sight. My belly presses against her arm—my daughter kicking, insisting on being part of something she doesn’t understand yet. “Look at me. Look at my face.”

Her eyes search the middle distance. Hunting for threats in a room that holds none. For doors that lock from the outside. For the sound of heavy footsteps on a staircase she left behind, but carries inside her like a second skeleton.

“He was here.” Her voice comes out thin as smoke. “Mira, he was here. He came to—”