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The men are beginning to retreat. They’re getting into their SUVs andit’s over it’s over it’s actually over…?My head fills with cotton, so light that I take a staggering step backward without meaning to. I hear Aleks’s voice in my ear, but the words are unclear. The pistol falls from my limp fingers.
This hell is over, we lived.But in this moment, now the adrenaline has released me, I’m feeling it all: every sleepless night and beating, every panic attack, every betrayal, every blow and loss. My head feels like it’s made of lead, like if I let it, it will bring me straight to the ground.
“Kat!”
What the hell? Not possible. That can’t be…
But it is—Mom. Mom, my mom, forever disappointed, running toward me from one of the SUVs across the clearing. Running to me, with James at her side, the both of them harried and pale and wild-eyed, but otherwise, almost mystically—unharmed.
“Kat,” Mom gasps. She’s crying as she throws her arms around me. “We saw everything, we saw everything, are you alright? Look at me, look at me, oh, God, what happened to you…”
She’s still talking, and so is James, with anger in his voice. And I hear Aleks, too, and Yuri. The SUVs are beginning to reverse and peel away, driving out into the trees. The war is over, and we won. We are all here. We are all alive.
I think I’m smiling when my knees give out. I don’t know who catches me, my mom or my brother or my husband, but someone does, and I never feel myself hit the ground.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Aleks
I feel out of place, here; a dirty thing in a clean space. Somewhere I don’t belong.You do, though. You do belong here, because she is here.Where Kat goes, I follow. That is my pledge, now.
She doesn’t look peaceful, like they always say they do. She looks beaten. Battered. Her face is pale, and her hair is dull, despite how many times her mother has brushed and braided it. The tubes in her nostrils look so obtrusive, and I know I’ll never get used to the sound of those machines: beeping, whirring, humming, endlessly. Like unwanted guests, crowding too close in a room that’s already too small.
Her hand in mine is small and cool, her fingers elegant. Yet, these are hands that know how to fight.
And how to kill.
“How is she?”
I look up as James enters. It’s been touch-and-go with him as much as it has been with Kat, but the coma the doctors induced to reduce the swelling in her brain seems to have nullified the will in any of us to infight. I am Kat’s husband, now, despite whatever else I am or have been. And I am Adam’s father.
Still, the look James gives me is icy, even as he hands me a coffee and goes to sit on the other side of his sister.
“No change, really,” I say. He nods, and we sit in silence awhile. It’s been two weeks since the final showdown in the woods up by the border. I, myself, spent much of that time in a hospital bed, recovering from both the more superficial gunshot wound, and the more serious stab in my side. I’d lost so much blood that night that I wasn’t far behind Kat in fainting. Butwhen I came to, she was already under, really under. And it’s been this way ever since. “James…”
“Don’t. Please, Aleks—don’t.” His face is ashen. He looks like he hasn’t slept. But after he drags a hand over his face, he looks at me squarely. “Look. I want to hate you. I should, probably. But…” He grimaces, then looks back to Kat, her motionless face, her colorless lips. “I know that you meant to die, that night. To save Adam’s life.”
I say nothing. There’s no honor in that. It was the only thing to do.
“Will you stay?” He asks, after a moment. “You and Kat are married now, after all, God knows how you accomplished that. And she’d never admit it, and I hate to even say it—but you know it was a struggle for her. Doing it all alone. Raising Adam. Not to mention…with her connection to you known, I can’t imagine she’ll be safe without your protection.”
I nod grimly. But I’ve given the idea, and this family, and the future, a great deal of thought over the last few weeks. “I won’t stay,” I admit. “I can’t. She deserves better.”
“She deserves a man who will stay by her side,” James shoots back. “You may be a gangster, you may be dangerous, and all of this may have been fucking hell—but she loves you, Aleks. That much is painfully obvious. She probably always has; God knows what she sees in you.”
“She has a soft life here,” I say, studying her. If I could have one thing in the world, it’d be to share in that soft life. But after what I have brought down on her, I’d never ask for such a thing. It isn’t mine to ask for. It never was. “I can provide for her, both financially and for her safety. From Russia. The further I am from her, the better.”
“And your son?” James’s voice is blade-sharp, and I can’t begrudge him that. “What about Adam?”
“He’d do better with no father than me as his father.” I look at James hard, daring him to say otherwise. He doesn’t. “I will wait until all is settled. Then I’ll return to Russia. And I’ll never come back.”
James shakes his head. “I’ll never understand you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You got a second chance. More than one second chance.” James is looking hard at his sister, a furrow between his brows. “Both of you almost died. Hell, Kat might still…” He shakes his head, lips sealed, as though he can’t even bear to verbalize the thought. “And yet, you’re still going to walk away. And choose the world that almost killed you both—the world that almost killed your son.”
Despite their truth, the words are hard to hear. I don’t tell him what I think:It is the only honorable thing.What do I know of honor? Kat killed a man to save my life. To save her son. She’s the one with honor between us.
