Page 68 of Under Control

But Karine’s right. I promised I would protect her, no matter what.

A truck pulls up behind my SUV and Anton jumps out with more soldiers. His men start pushing the neighbors away and helping anyone in the nearby houses.

“Pakhan, how bad?” Anton asks.

“Watch her,” I bark at him and push Karine in his direction. “I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going?” he yells, but I don’t answer. I kick open the neighbor’s door and hurry through a quiet, empty house, past a sink filled with dishes, and into a yard overgrown with weeds. I leap over the fence and land on Miriam’s back concrete slab.

Alexei’s lying in the bushes. I hurry to him and kneel down. The young man’s pale and he’s not breathing. An ugly wound in his chest leaks red, and bubbly bloody spittle covers his mouth.

Calling me must’ve been his final act.

I turn to the house. He’s lost, but Karine’s screams still ring in my ears.

The back door is closed, but I manage to get it open. The kitchen’s filled with smoke and I start coughing like crazy as I crouch down to get underneath. The fire isn’t bad back here, and I shout for Miriam as loud as I can, but it’s impossible to seeanything. I run into a chair, stumble into a table. I knock a glass off the counter and curse as I bash my face on the goddamn refrigerator.

I nearly stomp on her fucking neck.

But Miriam’s body appears on the threshold of the living room. The fire’s bad here and I’m coughing so hard I can barely think. My eyes are stinging and tears stream down my face as my body tries to clear the smoke from my vision, and I’m getting weak already.

I grab Miriam’s legs. No time to see if she’s still alive. I drag her back into the kitchen and try not to pull her through the broken glass. I keep going, even though my legs are burning and I’m fucking dizzy, even when I knock my head into the doorframe. I get her outside and collapse onto the grass, coughing and spitting and sucking in fresh air, but the world’s a black tunnel around me. I pull Miriam into my arms and pat her face. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” I tell her, but it’s coming out in Russian, and I can’t find any English words as the tunnel around my head starts to narrow, and I feel like I’m dropping down to the bottom of a well, the world turning to darkness.

Chapter 24

Karine

Hospital equipment beeps. The stink of acrid cleaning supplies makes me lightheaded. I pull my knees to my chest and close my eyes as I remember only a few hours earlier when I found Valentin collapsed in the back yard of my mother’s house with Mama lying right beside him.

It was tied for the worst moment of my life, only equaled by the moment my father passed away.

I was frozen. I stood there, horrified, staring at Valentin’s smoke-and-fire scorched clothes, at Mama’s unmoving body, and I was broken. Everything in my brain short-circuited. Everything inside of me shattered.

Until Anton grabbed me and pulled me away, and Valentin’s soldiers took over.

Everything after that is a blur. I moved in a haze of pure horror. The firemen arrived and began to douse the building, and they made sure the blaze didn’t spread to the entire block. An ambulance arrived moments later, and I caught a glimpse of my husband and my mother getting driven away.

Anton ushered me into his truck and followed, not saying a word.

The memory is too painful. I have to push it away. I wipe tears from my face and notice a smear of dark soot. I don’t know when that happened—probably when I tried to get in through the front door, but the fire was too hot and I couldn’t get through.

“She’ll be okay.”

I look up. Valentin’s standing in the doorway with a weak smile on his lips. He’s wearing fresh clothes and leaning slightly on an IV drip, and I jump to my feet. I run to him and bury my face in his chest, and he laughs softly as he kisses my hair.

Behind me, Mama’s lying in bed, unconscious and burned, but alive.

“She’d be dead if you hadn’t gone in after her,” I say as I help him into a chair. He sighs, leaning his head back.

When we reached the hospital earlier, he was already awake. Apparently, the doctors had to hold him down and sedate him to keep him from trying to come find me. Since then, I’ve been splitting time between his room and Mama’s room, but now he seems well enough to start moving around on his own.

I touch his bandaged arm gingerly. It’s still burned and painful, but he’ll survive it. The smoke inhalation is worse; the doctors say that will take longer for him to recover from.

“I did what I had to do for my wife,” Valentin says, staring at me. He reaches out and pulls me into his lap. I resist at first, but he’s unyielding, and finally I let him draw me down against him. I breathe in his smell, a musky scent mixed with the unmistakable stench of smoke.

“You shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have asked you to. I’m sorry, Valentin. I really am. I don’t know what I would have done if I lost you.”

“I would have expected you to end your life. You know, to accompany me to the next world.”

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