Page 127

Nothing. The monitor beeped.

I put my forehead down on the edge of the mattress, next to his hand.

It was cold. It was always cold. But it had a weight, a real one, and I took it in both of mine and held it against my mouth.

I’m going to tell you what I kept thinking, in that hospital, with the light coming gray at the window. I kept thinking about the sound of the gun. I kept thinking about how it felt when he threw me aside, that huge cold arm around my ribs, that unbelievable speed, and how for one white second, before I heard the bang, I had been sure I was going to be shot and was, God help me, at peace with it. Because it would have been his arm. Because it meant he’d come.

He’d walked into a trap for me. Knowing what it was. With a hole in his back and no plan.

And I told him to fuck off, I thought. In a text.

I laughed. It cracked. I put his hand against my cheek.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I thought you’d left. I thought you’d got what you wanted. It’s a thing I do. I think I did it because my dad—” I stopped. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you when you wake up. I’ll tell you everything.”

The monitor beeped.

They’d taken him to St. Aldric’s because it was the closest, and because Sabine, sitting bloody-handed in the passenger seat of the ambulance with her curls stuck to her forehead, had leaned over and told the paramedic, in a very calm voice, “He is my brother, he is Russian, and he heals quickly. Please don’t be alarmed by the chart.”

The paramedic had been alarmed. So had the surgeon. There was a bullet in Maksim’s shoulder, a lump of hand-cast silver the size of a hazelnut, and when they’d wheeled him into the OR, the surgeon had found that the entry wound had already begun to close around it. They’d dug it out with a look of professional distress. It had come out black. It had hissed on the tray.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the surgeon told me afterward, in the corridor, holding a tiny clear bag with the bullet in it. “It’s as though his tissue is rejecting it. Like an allergy. Like an actual chemical reaction.” He blinked at me through smudged glasses. “Is he… is your friend on any kind of medication?”

“He’s Russian,” I said.

“Right. Yes. Of course.”

“They’re very hearty.”

“Clearly.”

He’d gone away shaking his head. I had gone into the men’s room and slid down the tiled wall and laughed until I cried.

Now it was nearly dawn, and Jason was asleep in the corridor with his head on a vending machine, and Sabine had gone to find food. The police had taken my statement at midnight on charges of kidnapping, assault, and unlawful confinement. A group of men with fake IDs and a sheaf of forged medical credentials had been arrested at a cold-storage plant on Harbor Road, and one of them had talked. It would be on the news by breakfast under a headline like Prominent Boston surgeon arrested in bizarre abduction plot. They would say Roake had lost his mind after his wife died, and they would say he’d fixated on a professional athlete. They would say a lot of things, and none of them would be true, and all of them would end up in a filing cabinet somewhere.

I let them.

That was Sabine’s arrangement. Some story about “a stalker” and “a tragic grief spiral.” She’d sat next to the detective in his office with her hands folded and her huge gray eyes shining, and by the end he’d offered her a tissue.

I didn’t think I could sit through another of those interviews. I had one more thing to do first.

I had to call my mother.

She arrived at seven.

I heard her before I saw her. A brisk, familiar, clicking tread down the corridor. A voice, raised and pitched to carry: “ Where is my son? Alexander Pendleton, six-foot-one, bruises. Do not tell me he isn’t here. “ A murmur. “Thank you, dear.”

Then she was in the doorway.

My mother is fifty-eight. She is five foot four. She wears her hair in a French twist and her pearls in all weather, and she has never in my hearing raised her voice at a waiter. She was wearing a wool coat over what I was fairly sure was a nightgown, and her lipstick was on crooked, and she had my sister by the wrist, and she was, I saw at once, terrified.

“Lex,” she said.

“Hi, Mom.”

“You’re alive. “

“I’m alive.”