Page 136 of Fractured Ties

They didn’t know Kolya at all.

He was angry anyway.

That’s just what he was.

“Yep, go on,” the woman said.

Maya didn’t need to be told again. She darted forward and slipped past the dimly lit threshold of the room. A curtain had been pulled all the way around Kolya’s hospital bed so she couldn’t see him at all when she first entered.

He must have heard footsteps, though, because his first words were, “I swear to fucking God if someone came in here to poke me again or talk, and it isn’t Maya, we’re going to have a problem.”

The nurses were right. He did sound pissed. Not any more than usual, though. This sounded like typical Kolya on one of his good days.

But fuck what everybody else thought, because she loved typical Kolya. She would take him any way she could have him.

“And what if it is Maya?” she asked, grinning.

Silence echoed back before the bed creaked, and then the curtain was ripped back faster than Maya could blink.

The first thing she thought?

Oh, good, he’d gotten to shower.

It was a stupid thought to have, considering all they had been through. A thought that really didn’t matter in the grander scheme, but apparently, this was the way her mind was choosing to deal with all of this shit.

For a long while, the two of them stared at one another and didn’t move. Maya, at the end of the bed. And him, sitting with his legs thrown over the other side.

“Someone got you pants?” she asked.

Kolya smiled. “Konstantin snuck a pair in.”

“And he didn’t tell me.”

She tried really damn hard not to sound petty right then. It was good for Konstantin that he had managed to get through the barricades the police had thrown at them over the past couple of days as they’d tried to talk to Kolya. But at the same time, it still irked her that he had gotten in to see his brother while she had needed to wait.

The pants were only one thing she noticed. The other bit was the burn that had been wrapped on his arm, and that spot she thought was an ash mark on his face? Was actually a badly blackened bruise.

Kolya didn’t miss the way Maya was looking him over, if his fading smile was any indication. “It’s fine, dushka.”

Maya sniffed and tried to ignore the way her eyes prickled with the threat of tears. “It’s okay, really?”

“Here we are, Maya.”

How black and white he saw things.

How simple things were for him.

“Barely,” she whispered. “We are barely alive.”

Kolya nodded. “Maybe so, but we’re alive nonetheless.”

Maya’s mind flashed back to those last few seconds in the warehouse. How everything had seemed entirely fucking impossible, and she was staring at the end. She always thought when the end of her life came, she would see what everyone else always talked about.

Flashes of her life.

The important moments.

Things—people—she loved.