Page 64 of The Pakhan's Bride
Konstantin opens his eyes again, finds mine, and for a moment, the whole world shrinks to that pinhole—two people locked in a nightmare, refusing to die.
Above us, the chandelier spins on its chain, scattering light across the ceiling like a warning.
He's still bleeding, but so am I, somewhere inside. The alarms blend to a single note, a drone of pain and rage and terror.
I grit my teeth and hold on, refusing to let him go.
The trauma specialist arrives then, and mercifully, he is not a doctor so much as a machine. He has a team of two in his wake, and the instant he sees the wound, he forgets that the man on the floor is the reason his family lives in gold-plated luxury. Hebarks at the guards, then at me, a string of instructions so tight it would choke a lesser woman. I don't move until they physically pull my hand from Konstantin's shoulder. My palm leaves a print, a negative, a piece of my own heat clinging to him even as his drains away.
They take him from me. The nurse slides a splint under his arm. The other one—barely old enough to shave—dumps a full bag of saline into a vein. The senior is already in with the clamp, the light, the gloves. They don't have a surgical table, just the bedroom rug and the urgency of knowing if the boss dies, they die with him.
I slide back until my shoulders touch the far wall, knees drawn to my chest. My hands don't know what to do. I wipe them on the shirt, then on the floor, then on my own skin. It doesn't come off. The blood seeps into the creases, thickens at the cuticles, and begins to crust. I stare at the webbing of my left hand and remember when that skin was new, before the burns and the blade scars, before I knew that real love was whatever survives the shrapnel.
Sokolov blocks my line of sight, voice gentled for the first time in memory. "He'll pull through. It's superficial." His hand rests on my shoulder, an awkward, fatherly gesture that doesn't fit either of us. I want to rip it off, but I don't. I nod.
"You need to see about the boy," he says.
The words snap me upright. I leave the blood, the medics, the ring of guards, and find myself in the back corridor of the suite. It smells of ammonia and old food, the air filtered through a hundred meters of ductwork. At the far end, Galina waits. She has a towel in her hands, knotted so tightly it could throttle a cat.
"Where is Lev?" I ask.
Her voice is a whisper. "In his room. He's still sleeping."
I nod, more to myself than her. "Stay with him," I say, and she flinches. "Don't let anyone in. If the alarms go again, get to the panic room, use the code from last year."
Galina's eyes water, but she blinks it away. "Is thePakhan…?"
"He'll live," I vow. "It's a flesh wound. Drama for the underlings."
She makes a sound that wants to be a laugh and doesn't make it.
I don't go to Lev. I leave the suite and take the stairs two at a time, up to the third floor, where the staff rooms are dark and abandoned. I pick the lock on the linen closet with the pin from my hair and collapse among the towels, the scent of bleach so thick it burns. I pull the door closed and scream into the terry cloth. No one hears it.
The adrenaline is gone, but the shakes stay. I want alcohol, or a pill, or a bullet in the mouth, but I settle for the scratch of fabric against my skin, the way it hurts the raw places on my knuckles. I count breaths until the world slows to something less than a landslide.
This is the moment they never train you for, the aftermath, the knowledge that no matter how fast you run, the wolf in your ribs is still chasing you. I let it catch up.
It's stupid, but I think of one of the nights we had in Paris, the stupid pizza place with the oily tablecloths, the way Konstantin picked mushrooms off my slice and pretended it was a service to humanity. The way he looked at me when I told him I didn't want kids, didn't want a family, didn't want to be a wife in a glass house. He said, "I only want you to survive," and laughed when I called him sentimental.
He built this world for me, brick by bloody brick, and all I ever did was count the ways it would fail. In the end, I failed it. Ifailed him. I curl tighter in the dark. The towels suffocate, but it's a good kind of death.
After a time, I hear footsteps in the hall. Heavy, measured, not a threat. A voice—Sokolov, again. "Zoya. It's over. You can come out."
I stay another ten seconds, then emerge, brushing lint from my hair, face stiff and cold but dry. Sokolov looks me over, says nothing. He hands me a damp cloth, and I scrub the blood from my arms, though it's already dried into the skin. "He wants to see you," Sokolov says.
I wipe harder. "Is he awake?"
"Yeah. First thing he did was ask for you. Second thing was threaten the shooter."
I almost smile. "They caught him?"
"Not yet," he says, eyes flicking to the window. "But they will."
I hand back the rag, now pink with the effort. I run my hands over my shirt, flatten the creases, and walk back down the stairs. Each step brings the sound of the house alive again—the static of radios, the click of guns being checked and rechecked, the low murmur of staff cleaning up the blood as if it were just another wine spill on a Monday.
The medics are gone. In their place, a ring of loyalists. Konstantin is on the couch in my bedroom, shirt off, bandage across his shoulder, chest shining with sweat. His color is bad, but his eyes are pure steel.
He sees me, and in that second, everything I wanted to say is nothing. The words are too thin. I cross the room and take his hand, careful not to jostle the IV or the dressing. "You look like shit," I say.
