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"You sure? Because I swear if the fucker isn't dead this time—"
"He's dead."
Fire trucks are pulling up, lights flashing everywhere. Arman dumps me in the back of an ambulance, and a paramedic presses a patch of gauze to my thigh.
A firefighter is yelling in my face. "Anyone in there? Mr. Kislev! Is there anyone in the house?"
I look over his shoulder. My brother walks toward us, silhouetted against the backlit smoke and steam.
He has a body draped over his arms.
The paramedic pushes me aside and runs to assist Sasha. They put Morgana on the gurney beside me, an oxygen mask over her face. She's blackened from smoke, her hair greasy and streaked with soot. Her face is shiny like she's sunburned. She's unconscious.
The paramedic slams the ambulance doors and dives into the driver's seat. I take my wife's hand and press her wrist to my cheek, feeling her pulse fluttering like a bird.
"You're so fucking brave,lisichka. Hang on in there. You're gonna be alright."
* * *
Eighteen hours later…
"Morgana will recover fully within a few days. She may suffer from shortness of breath for a while, but it all looked worse than it was. It was more shock and fright than anything."
"Good," I say, my tone brusque.
This doctor is getting on my nerves. He tends to talk to me and not to my wife, as though I'm in charge of her. Doesn't he know she saved my lifeandher own?
"Thank you, doctor," Morgana says. She waits until he's gone before speaking to me. "Don't be rude, Vladi. I'm okay, and so are you."
The wound in my leg is deep and pretty fucking painful. It missed the artery by an inch but could have been a different story. I needed a lot of stitches and a blood transfusion to get me right again.
Morgana got me out of the house just as the fire took hold, but her legs gave out, and she fell, dropping me on the deck. She rolled off onto the sand, and that's the last she knew before she came round in the ambulance.
I've never known joy like when I saw her beautiful eyes again. They rested on my face, and as she smiled, I knew it was all over. We'd made it.
I told Sasha and Arman the whole tale, and then they went home at my insistence, to be with Lilyana. Arman found David's car in the hospital parking lot, the old man's brain splattered over the seat. It only took one amoral mortuary assistant and a wedge of cash to get that dealt with, and our usual people hauled the car away. I'm unsure what cover story we'll tell, but it's not my priority.
I'm only two hours from the city, but I wanted things locked down quickly. Sasha surprised me by jumping straight into action, calling in favors to shore up our defenses and quell the rumor mill ahead of my return to Manhattan. Threats and bribes work best when used together—like I told Morgana, it's the carrot-and-stick thing.
Morgana flexes her neck. "It aches a bit still," she says, touching the dressing on her wounds. She stretches in her chair and yawns. "I hate hospitals."
"We'll leave as soon as Sasha and Arman can come back together. One of them needs to drive my car home."
"You're supposed to be resting for a couple of days. The doctor won't like it."
"Lisichka, I'm not staying here and paying Michelin prices for the swill they call food. I need Dulcie's cooking and my own bed with my wife in it."
"But we never got the burgers," she says, smiling.
The humor doesn't last. She looks away, her pretty face marred with pain, and I take her hand.
"You did what you had to, Morgana. Cassius could have backed down, but he didn't. You wanted to live. You wantedmeto live. What choice did you have?"
"This is the bratva." She glances at me. "Kill or be killed. Dominate or be dominated. Right?"
"Sometimes. But not everything is that way. Maybe we can find beauty amid all the nasty shit."
She grins. "But keep some ofyournasty. I'd hate for you to lose your edge."
