Page 95 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

For at least a little while longer, I still have my father.

What we don’t have is our freedom. Vito’s eyes are burning coals in the night, like he’s been possessed. Gone is the pain-stricken gentleness of the man in the hallway who let me kiss his hand and rest his head in my lap. In his place is a pure monster. There are no other words for him. He’s still squeezing the shit out of my upper arm hard enough to bruise.

“You’re hurting me!” I snap at him. I try to shake him loose, but he doesn’t let go, doesn’t say anything, just stares into the night.

“Let’s go, Vito,” Mateo says. He too has that thousand-yard stare on his face, though it looks less violent and more sorrowful than his older brother’s. Dante is catatonic. Leo has retreated inwards.

The brothers are collapsing before my eyes. Maybe I would have cared about that a day ago. I was falling for them, I realize now. Funny how trauma can make me see things that were happening right in front of my face. But now, with everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve heard, I don’t know what I feel for them. My body and heart both ache so badly. The thought of something like love or caring for another human being is so ridiculous compared to the pain I’m feeling. Not to mention the pain that lies ahead of us.

Everything is broken. I’m broken. They are broken. My father’s body is broken. Whether we’re all beyond repair is a question for another time. All I know is that, the longer we stay here, the fainter and fainter our hopes of a happy ending will become. We have to move. We have to go.

Most of all, I have to leave the Bianci brothers behind.

But Vito seems intent on keeping me ensnared. Even as the door explodes outwards, sending jagged shards of wood ricocheting into the night, and we all take off full-tilt running down the hill, he maintains his grip on my arm.

It’s all a blur of motion and bullets, my father’s ragged breathing in my ear, the spurting of his blood on my side. Through it all, the only constant is Vito’s vise-like grip on my bicep. “Spread out,” Vito orders, and the brothers disperse at once into the night, disappearing behind trees and turning to fire back at our pursuers.

It doesn’t feel real. All of this is a bad dream, but I can’t wake up. I’ve tried over and over again these last few weeks to wake up. I’m stuck here, caught between my dying father and the cold cruelty of a man I might have loved once. It’s worse than a nightmare. It’s hell on earth.

One thought runs through my mind for some inexplicable reason: did Vito intend to kill my father? It seems stupid on the face of it. Of course he did—why shoot someone in the chest if you don’t intend to kill them?

But then I remember what Mateo told me about the decades of hard-core training the Bianci boys went through. Countless hours spent honing their crafts of killing and coercion. And it occurs to me that maybe Vito missed on purpose. I don’t know what to make of that doubt. I choose to ignore it. My heart can’t handle the implications.

It doesn’t matter anymore, of course. We’re all going to be dead soon. Sergio, newly risen from the dead, didn’t seem interested in keeping any of us alive. These could be my last few breaths on earth. I can only hope that death will end this nightmare I’ve been trapped inside, but even that is uncertain just like everything else. The only thing that matters is to keep moving. Keep running. What was that thing Vito whispered to me in the hallway:“If you stop, you die”?It was perhaps the first honest thing he ever said to me. Not honest as in factual, but honest as in spoken from the heart. Something he truly believed. Not a lie or a con or a manipulation, but a fundamental credo, words from his soul.

Right now, it is my guiding light.

Vito is still holding me. Sergio’s soldiers are still advancing. It all comes to a pinnacle, a moment where I have to act. If he keeps us trapped here, both my father and I are going to die. I have to move. I spy a rock on the ground. I reach down, scoop it up, and try to swallow the sorrow rising like a tsunami in my chest as I bring it crashing down on the back of Vito’s head. He was in the middle of saying, “What are you—” before the blow landed. The words die on his lips. I feel a crunch. It takes everything in me not to puke immediately.

I feel like I’m sentencing him to death. But he made his choices. He chose to pull the trigger of his gun. He chose to pluck me out of that hotel room.

He made his bed, and now he has to lie in it.

“Come on, Dad,” I say, re-shouldering his weight upon me and turning back down the hill. It’s hard to fight the pull of gravity as we stumble and drag our way down. Fortunately, the moon is bright enough to light some of the path, but in the places where it’s dark, I trip repeatedly over sticks, rocks, and roots, nearly crashing to the ground each time. By some miracle, I manage not to kill us both as we reach the bottom of the hill, near where it borders civilization.

The sounds of gunfire have softened and remain at the crest. I wonder if they’ve found the rest of the brothers or if they all escaped after parting ways. I have to force myself not to care. My feet are bleeding and bruised, each aching worse than the other, but I have to force myself not to care about that either. There is no time to stop and rest, to lick my wounds. I have to go. The only other choice is death.

Dad is slumping on me harder and harder. I don’t know how much longer I can carry him. I glance over at his face and realize that he is ashen. I have to look at his wound.

Squatting down gingerly, I lean him up against the side of a building out of the light. He is soaked in blood and mumbling something nonsensical as his fingers feebly try to reach up and grab me.

“Shh, shh,” I whisper to him, touching the side of his face. “Don’t use your energy.”

Opening his shirt with careful fingers, I peel back the fabric. When I see the bullet wound, I suck in a painful breath.

It’s an ugly, ragged hole just below his collarbone. In my EMT prep course last semester, we covered gunshot wounds. This is as bad as anything we saw in a video or textbook. As best as I can tell, the bullet passed straight through, though the extent of the blood and messed-up tissue makes it hard to know for sure. If that’s true, it’d be a miracle. But he’s far from safe. He’s lost so much blood. His lips are blue and he’s having a hard time just keeping his eyes open.

He needs help. I can’t help him without supplies, and even if I did have stuff, it would just be a temporary measure. He needs a hospital, surgery, a team of professionals. Not his frightened barefoot premed daughter performing slapdash surgery in some gross LA back alley.

“I’m gonna go get help, Dad, okay? Help,” I repeat.

He nods, just barely, but it’s enough.

I kiss him on the forehead. I’ve learned so much about him in the last few weeks, things no daughter ever wants to learn about her father. But he’s still my dad. I still love him. I can’t let him die.

Turning, I run into the city, hoping desperately that someone can hear my cries for help.

And hoping that I find a rescuer before the Bianci brothers find me.

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