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He put one in my palm handle-first, and I drove the blade into the crack and leaned my weight against it. Paint broke away in long strips, exposing a recessed metal panel.
Flames burst through the vent and caught Maksim's jacket. He knocked it onto the floor and stamped it out while Kirill wedged his fingers beside mine. Together, we hauled the hatch open.
Darkness waited beyond it, along with air that didn't burn my lungs. Maksim grabbed the journals. “Go.”
Fire dropped from the vent and rolled across the floor between us in long, liquid coils that made no sense. Fire didn’t move like that. Unless it had already melted something and that fed it, making it stronger. Maksim leaped toward the locker, trying to grab everything else we hadn’t had time to examine. The paper on the children’s books curled before he could reach them. He moved forward anyway, but I caught the back of his shirt.
“Leave them.” Heat scorched my face while pages blackened. He resisted, and I didn’t let myself wonder why. “Maksim, leave them!” We had enough. It would have to be enough.
His hand closed around my wrist, and he pushed me through the hatch first.
I crawled on concrete barely wide enough for my shoulders. Kirill followed with Roman behind him, protecting the laptop beneath his jacket. Maksim pulled the hatch shut, then came after us as something exploded in the annex.
The shock wave lifted me off my knees. Kirill caught my ankle before I landed face-first and kept hold while the tunnel filled with dust. Behind us, metal screamed and a series of heavy thuds against the metal panel gave us no exit strategy except to keep going.
The maintenance passage ended at a ladder beneath a corroded grate. Maksim forced it upward, and cold air rushed over my face. I gulped it in so fast I coughed, but the blessed sweetness meant salvation and life, so I continued to drag it into my starved lungs. We emerged behind the hospital laundry while alarms screamed through the building. Our men converged from both ends of the service corridor, weapons drawn, but no one fired. Patients and staff occupied the floors above us, and from the flurry of information being thrown around, no one had seen whoever tried to trap us.
Maksim caught me beneath the arms when my knees gave out and lowered me instead of trying to keep me upright. Kirill dropped beside us, coughing soot into his hand, while Roman pressed two fingers to my throat and counted. His face had gone gray beneath the streaks of smoke.
“I'm breathing.” I pushed his hand away when an armored SUV shot around the corner. “We need to find Nora.”
“Which is why we leave now.” Roman rose and held out his hand. “We need to reevaluate, but not here.”
“Where can we go?” I took his hand and let them put me in the vehicle.
“Safe house.” Kirill answered me while climbing into the seat across from me.
We were covered in soot and smelled like the bottom of an ashtray, but none of that mattered. Our next step was the only thing I could let myself think about. How did we find Nora and Mikhail and get them to safety?
The safe house occupied the top floor of an unremarkable brick building in the middle of the most ordinary street imaginable. Nothing inside suggested three pakhans owned it except the armed men controlling every entrance and the doctor who met us at the door. She listened to my lungs, insisted we all wear oxygen masks, and ordered all four of us to remain still for half an hour.
Kirill lasted four minutes before he began pacing between the windows, nasal cannula attached and the hose swinging behind him. Maksim took over the dining table with reports from the hospital while Roman set up the laptop, checked every connection twice, then announced the transfer was complete.
“So we didn't lose it?” I turned Alina's last journal over in my hands.
Roman sat across from me. “We have her evidence.”
My vision turned blurry as relief and grief tangled together in a wicked slurry that tightened my stomach. I breathed through it, fingers cramping on the paper that held Alina’s words to me. I should’ve been grateful we escaped, and I was, but I kept seeing those books and whatever we hadn’t been able to grab burning. Gone. Never to be seen or read. What else had I missed from my sister? She’d spent years writing down every failure because she expected someone to need it. She expected to die.
The thought locked in my throat and stole what little breath I had left. I bent at the waist and focused on the journal in my lap, opening it to where I’d stopped and read through several pages that took me through years of memories we’d shared. Phrases leaped out at me. Mikhail crying is a sound Grandmother would have told me I deserved. Some days, I want nothing more than to go back there, to the cabin at the lake. Blue was always her favorite color, and she used to watch us swim from the window seat.
These were tucked into snippets of memories, not quite fitting neatly in place because I’d been there when they happened. To anyone else, it would’ve made sense. But Grandmother never would’ve said something so mean. I backed up to the beginning and read through everything again, using a sheet of blank paper in the back to write down everything that stood out.
It didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge. Alina mentioned Grandmother fifteen times, sometimes at random, and in memories where she’d never been.
I sat forward so quickly the oxygen tube caught in my hair. “These are not random memories. She’s set up more clues.”
Roman rounded the table, tossing his oxygen mask aside. “Explain.”
I ignored the barked order but still raised an eyebrow at him until he added a quiet please that had Kirill snickering into his fist. “We used to stay with our grandmother in the summers, in a cabin by the lake. Alina keeps referencing it, but in the wrong memories. Things only I would know and remember. I think we need to go there.”
Maksim stood. “How far is it?”
“Ninety minutes north.” I removed the oxygen and ignored the doctor’s protest. “I’m going.”
“Naturally.” Kirill winked at me, and I breathed out a puff of relief. No more sitting around waiting on men to solve problems for me. Kirill took my hand and laced our fingers together. He was by far the most touchy-feely of the trio, and I low-key loved that about him, especially when he leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Lead the way, darling.”
Dusk had settled over the lake by the time we reached the rutted private road. Grandma's cabin appeared between bare trees with one shutter hanging crooked and moss darkening the roof. She'd been gone eleven years, and neither Alina nor I had managed to sell the place. We didn’t want to. Too many good memories here. Even though I could’ve used the money, I had always been reluctant to part with the past.
