Page 47 of Vasily the Nail

“Laces?” Camilla says, startled. “Hey, are you okay?”

“My vacuum. I need to . . .” I stare down at the pile of fruit, the juice from the pineapple now soaking the carpet, staining it a faint purplish color. In the pink of the berry-stained juice, I see a bit of stained, nondescript pulp I would have thought was pineapple, but now I’m seeing black specks.

Like kiwi seeds.

“I can’t breathe,” I attempt to say, but my lips have gone completely numb.

“Laces!” Camilla yells. “Where’s your epi-pen? Look at me, focus, tell me where your epi-pen is.”

Do I have one? I think we discussed it, but I don’t know. My toiletries came in a giant Balenciaga bag my shampoo leaked into, and I don’t know if there was an epi-pen in the mess.

“Go wake up Vasily! Go get him now!”

I nod at that and attempt to get on my feet, but my legs get tangled in the blanket. I pitch forward.

“Gino!” Camilla screams as my head hits the coffee table. “Gino, you need to call Vasily! You get his number and you call him now!” As my vision goes black, I hear her shrieking for Vasily.

Vasily

Tapping on my cheekhas me grumbling, “Not yet,zvyozdochka,” and reaching for Ana, but what my hand hits is a man’s leg. I pry one extremely gunky eye open to see my brother standing next to me. “Oh, fuck off and die,” I groan, expecting a lecture from him as I roll away from him. I know I’m in trouble, I get it. But I’m twenty-six years old, not a child. I don’t need him chewing me out about my choices any more than I need him apparently telling the goddamn cartel to call him if I show up looking for heroin.

“You gotta get up, Vasya. This is important.”

I hear the urgency in his voice. The fact that he calls me Vasya has me tweaking slightly. Something is wrong.

I’m not ready for an emergency. I’m feeling about ready to die right now. Whatever the crisis is, I don’t need to be involved for at least another hour.

“Let me sleep.”

“Vasya, listen to me.”

“Noooo,” I groan, not caring that I sound every bit as petulant as Ana.

She’s probably worried about me. Fuck, she was confronting me about the exact fucking thing I ended up doing. She was probably trying to be nice about it. And I lost my cool immediately because once a junkie, always a junkie.

The bed dips under Artyom’s weight as he sits down next to me and sighs heavily. “What happened last night, we’ll talk about that later. But we need to go to the hospital. Now.”

Ah, shit. That’s rehab talk. I’m in my old bedroom at his house. That single glance out of one eye was enough to confirm that, as well as the fact that it’s daytime. So they’re not going to try to pump my stomach this time, at least. No Narcan. I’m pretty sure I was roofied last night. I don’t need to be dragged out of bed for rehab. “We’ll go when I wake up,” I grumble.

“Listen to me, Vasya,” he says, and God, I loathe the sympathetic tone in his voice every bit as much as I hate the way he’s currently squeezing my arm. This is the shit he does when he knows I’m about to get pissed about what he’s going to tell me to do. This is the tone he used last Friday, when he was scheduling me to rape an innocent virgin — not that it matters that she was a virgin — the next day.

My chest hurts at the expansion of my lungs filling on my next breath as I think he’s about to tell me that he’s got a room booked for me at Placid Meadow and has already sent Ana home. It would be for the best, but I wince at the thought.

“It’s Analiese,” he says. “She was taken to the hospital.”

I’m already on my feet before he can start explaining what happened.

The moment I see Dima standing there in the waiting room, I rush forward, shrugging Artyom off as I slam into the asshole.

He could have killed her.

Ana could be dead right now.

There’s a nagging voice reminding me that he couldn’t have known she was allergic to kiwi when he bought that fruit salad on the way home and ate all the kiwi with the thought they wouldn’t do well overnight. The nagging voice also tells me that he saved her life, that she’d been on the phone with Camilla when he heard her fall and had kept his head about him as he called Igor to find an epi-pen and performed mouth-to-mouth until Igor arrived.

There’s a nagging voice also telling me we’re in a goddamn hospital waiting room and I’m creating a scene, but it’s Artyom’s nagging voice, and he can fuck off.

It’s the soft, angelic, weeping voice of Ana begging me to stop that has my attention shifting.

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