Ignoring the blood gushing from the stump, I climb to my feet, holding the severed appendage by the fist wrapped around the detonator. My heart thumps in a hollow, uneven rhythm as I turn toward the entrance. Behind me, Michael’s mother is sobbing and his father is groaning in pain, but I don’t give a fuck.
All I care about is Yulia.
She’s lying unmoving amidst shards of broken mirror, her body crumpled like a rag doll’s. Her long blond hair covers her face, but there’s blood everywhere, all over her slim frame.
The hollowness in my chest spreads.
No. Fuck, no.
She can’t be dead. She can’t be.
“Yulia,” I whisper, sinking to my knees beside her. I feel like I’m suffocating, like my lungs are collapsing in my ribcage. “Yulia, sweetheart…”
She doesn’t move.
Numbly, I tighten my left hand around Kirill’s fist, pressing down on the thumb to secure the detonator inside, and with my right hand, I reach for her. My fingers are drenched with Kirill’s blood, and as I brush aside her hair, I have a sudden horrible feeling that I’m polluting her with my touch, that I’m destroying something pure and beautiful… an angel who doesn’t belong in my ugly world.
Her lashes are brown half-moons on her pale cheeks, her mouth slightly parted. It’s as if she’s sleeping, except there’s blood.
So much fucking blood.
“Yulia…” My hand shakes as I touch her face, leaving bloody fingerprints on her porcelain skin. The hollowness inside me expands, my very bones creaking under the pressure of the emptiness within. I can’t picture a life without her. Fuck, I can’t picture a single week without her. In a few short months, she’s become my entire world. If she’s dead, if she’s gone… My fingers graze the side of her neck, feeling for her pulse, and I freeze, a violent shudder rippling through me.
There is a beat. A faint, but unmistakable beat.
“Yulia!” I bend down, gathering her against me with my free arm. She’s soft and warm, unmistakably alive. I feel the puffs of her breath on my neck, and my pulse roars with fierce joy.
She’s alive.
My Yulia is alive.
For a moment, it’s enough, but as my head clears, a new fear seizes me.
Why is she unconscious, and where did all the blood come from?
Lowering her to the floor, I frantically pat her down, looking for the bullet wound. She has numerous small cuts from the broken glass, and there’s a bloody gash on the side of her head, but I don’t see where the bullet went in.
“Is she okay?” Michael says, and I glance up to see him standing there. He’s swaying on his feet, his face greenish white. For a moment, I think he’s going to puke from the sight of the severed arm I’m still holding, but as I watch, he sinks to his knees next to me—or, more precisely, collapses to his knees.
Frowning, I start to reach for him and stop.
Blood is dribbling from under Michael’s dark T-shirt.
“Misha?” Yulia croaks hoarsely, and I turn my head to see her eyelids open. As she focuses on us, horror crosses her face, and I know she’s reached the same conclusion.
Her brother has been shot.
50
Yulia
In the next ten minutes, everything seems to happen at once. There’s blood everywhere: on Misha, who lies down beside me, on Lucas, around Kirill’s mangled body, and on the severed arm Lucas is holding. A couple of meters away, Misha’s father is groaning in agony, his leg bleeding uncontrollably, and Misha’s mother is weeping and rushing back and forth between her wounded husband and son. Lucas’s men—who must’ve heard the unsilenced gunshots—burst in, weapons ready, and Lucas starts barking orders at them. Within a minute, he has two men working on disarming the explosives, and two more trying to stem Misha’s and his father’s bleeding. I try to get up to help, but every time I move, a wave of nausea hits me and I have to lie down, my skull throbbing where I split my head open on the mirror. My frantic questions go unanswered in the chaos, but by the time we’re back in the armored SUV and speeding toward a hospital, I piece together what happened.
It wasn’t a bullet that slammed into me. It was my brother. Misha knocked me out of the way, pushing me headfirst into the mirror that shattered. In the process, he took the bullet meant for me. According to Lucas, it went through the fleshy part of his shoulder, knocking him down on top of me. It’s mostly Misha’s blood that covers me, though I also bled from my head injury and the glass cutting into my skin.
“He’ll be fine,” Lucas says for the fifth time as I reach for Misha, who’s passed out in the backseat next to me. “He lost a good amount of blood, but we stopped the bleeding and he’ll be okay. He saved us all. If he hadn’t gotten my M16—” He breaks off, but a chill streaks down my spine as I fill in the unspoken words.
We’d come within seconds of dying, all of us. In one fell swoop, I could’ve lost my brother and the man who’s become my entire life.
My hand trembling, I squeeze Misha’s palm, and then I reach for Lucas, who’s sitting on the other side of me.
Only he doesn’t let me hold his hand. The minute I touch him, Lucas pulls me into his lap, wrapping me tightly in his embrace, and buries his face in my hair. I can feel the shudders wracking his big body, and I can no longer restrain myself.
Clutching him with all my strength, I cry.
I just hold Lucas and cry.
* * *
A local hospital takes care of Misha’s and Viktor’s gunshot wounds and the gash on my head, and then we fly to Switzerland to recuperate at a private clinic Lucas has used before. Misha’s parents come with us, not wanting to be separated from their son despite their fear of me and Lucas.
I do my best to reassure them that they’re safe, but I know that to them, we’re scary strangers from a violent world—a world that invaded their lives in the most brutal way. What Kirill did, the way he terrorized them, left scars that will never go away.
Before that awful day, they knew what Natalia’s brother did for his country, but they didn’t truly understand it.
“We woke up that morning, and he was there, holding a gun on us,” Natalia sobs as she tells us what happened. “He tied Viktor up and strapped the bomb to me, and then he did the same thing to him. We thought he was a terrorist—we thought we were going to die—but then he started talking about you and how he was waiting for you, and that’s when we realized what he was really after…” She breaks down in hysterics at that point, and Lucas has to call a nurse for a sedative to calm her down.
Viktor—Misha’s adoptive father—is in a similar state, though he tries to put on a brave face for his wife. Whenever Natalia starts to cry, he comforts her, telling her that he’s fine, but the nurses told me that he himself wakes up screaming from nightmares.
The bullet that entered Viktor’s leg shattered his kneecap, and he may never again walk without a limp.
The only bright spot in the whole mess is that Misha’s shoulder wound has indeed turned out to be as clean as Lucas said. My brother lost a lot of blood, but the doctors promised that he’ll be back on his feet—albeit with an arm sling—within a week.
While we recuperate, Lucas’s men tear apart Rudenkos’ apartment to figure out how Kirill got in unseen, and what they find gives us all pause. It turns out that Misha’s parents’ new apartment—where they had been relocated after I returned—had originally been a UUR safe house. As such, it had a secret apartment concealed behind the living room wall—a place stocked with medical supplies, ammunition, and enough food to last for several months. It was there that Kirill must’ve gone to heal when he escaped from the black site. How he survived the trip and concealed his tracks will always be a mystery, but judging from the state of the apartment, he’d been hunkered down there the entire time we’d been searching for him. Misha’s parents swear they had no idea he was there, and after questioning them extensively, Lucas decides they’re telling the truth.
Apparently, they heard noises in their living room several times, but chalked them up to strange acoustics of their new apartment building.
“I thought it was a ghost,” Natalia Rudenko whispers, her eyes red and swollen in her pale face. “Viktor told me I was being an idiot, and I shut up. But I should’ve listened to my instincts. I’ll never forgive myself for what happened.”
Lucas starts to fire another question at her, but I stop him by laying my hand on his arm. The poor woman is in no state for further interrogation. “It’s not your fault,” I assure her gently. “Kirill was a seasoned agent. If he wanted to stay hidden, you didn’t stand a chance.”
“That’s what Viktor said, but still, I should’ve known.” Squeezing her eyes closed, she pinches the bridge of her nose with trembling fingers. “There were little clues, like our computer getting hacked that time, and a few things seeming to get moved on occasion…”
Secretly, I agree that she should’ve found those things suspicious—I certainly would have—but she’s a civilian, and I’m not. Regular people aren’t trained to look for those types of patterns, and even though Natalia wasn’t a complete stranger to the shadowy world of intelligence organizations, she couldn’t have imagined that a secret agent would be hiding in her apartment.