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“The mole.” It comes out flat and far off, like it’s routed through somebody else. “Oleg Sharapov. He’s Zakharov—or he was. He’s the one. He’s been running every bit of it, the whole year; Ray was just the pipe he poured it through. He’s cashing out and going to ground tonight, if he hasn’t already gone.” I drag in a breath that feels like swallowing glass. “Tell Trifon. Tell Anton. Tonight, Iosif. Don’t let him reach the airport.”

Iosif’s jaw goes to iron. He locks it away behind his eyes the way we’re all built to, nods once, hard, and turns to put it down the line, already lifting a hand to his ear.

And then there’s nothing left in the whole burning building between me and her.

I go down to my knees in front of her, and it costs me—the ribs light up white, the floor tilts and rights itself, my body sending up one last petition to be allowed to quit that I overrule, because I’m the dictator and it doesn’t get a vote. I don’t reach for the blood on her face. I don’t tell her it’s going to be okay, because it isn’t, and she’s too smart and too gutted to be insulted with it. I just get my arms under her.

She fights me. Of course she does. She shoves at my chest with both hands, shaking her head, her mouth working out sounds that aren’t words yet, and every shove lands square on the worst of what Ray left me, and I take it. I take all of it. I’d take it all night. Because there is not one thing left on this earth with the power to keep me from carrying this woman out of this room.

“I’ve got you.” I say it into her hair, the only true thing I have left in the tank. “Meera. I’ve got you. It’s done. We’re done here. I’ve got you.”

I’m a wreck. I can barely hold myself upright, never mind another body—my ribs are kindling and my face isn’t a face and by every law of medicine I should not be able to lift a glass of water, let alone all of her. But I get my arm behind her knees and the other across her back and I stand, the world going to static and then steadying, and the fight goes out of her all at once. Collapses. She caves into me, a shaking, clinging weight, her bloodied face buried in the side of my throat where her tears run hot down inside my collar, and her hands fist in the front of my ruined shirt like it’s the last handhold on the side of a cliff.

So I carry her. Past her father. Past my brothers and their grim, efficient work. Out through the smoke and the cordite and the dying roar of the worst night of both our lives, one foot in front of the other, holding the whole shaking weight of her against my chest.

It is the easiest thing I do all day.

Chapter 24 - Meera

I don’t remember most of the drive. I remember the smell of him—blood and cordite and, underneath it, the warm cedar that is just him—and I remember my own front door, which I have unlocked ten thousand times without ever once looking at it, and which I look at now like I have never seen a door before in my life.

Leonid takes the keys from my hand. I didn’t know I was still holding them. He works the lock one-handed, his other arm not letting go of me even a little, and then the door swings in on the smell of home—old paperbacks and the ghost of last week’s garlic and the lavender drawer sachet my mother insists on mailing me—and something in my chest cracks straight down the middle.

It is the smallest apartment I have ever lived in. One bedroom you can cross in four steps. A kitchen the size of his penthouse closet, with cabinets I painted butter yellow over a single furious weekend after a breakup, books doubled up on every shelf and stacked sideways on top of those, a couch that came from a curb, Post-its in my own handwriting stuck to surfaces with reminders I no longer need. It has none of the grandeur of anywhere I’ve slept in three weeks. No marble, no vaulted stone, no view of a city laid out like a circuit board.

And I would not trade its ordinary, lamplit solace for any of it. Not one square foot.

Because Leonid is in it. Because the man who is too large and too dangerous and too much for this whole building has folded himself through my front door and is standing in my shoebox of a living room like he belongs here, and instead of looking out of place he just looks like the last piece of something I didn’t know was a puzzle.

He stays.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to, in the blur of the next little while. He doesn’t make a call. He doesn’t hand me off to a guard or a clinic or a competent woman with steady hands. He stays, and he moves through my tiny home like he’s lived in it for years, and when he disappears into my bathroom and I hear the groan of old pipes and the rush of water against enamel, I understand that he is running me a bath.

I didn’t ask for one. I didn’t ask for anything; I’m not sure I’ve said a word since the room with my father in it. But it’s exactly, precisely the thing I need, and I have no idea how he knew, except that he is a man who has spent his whole life reading what people need off the air around them, and tonight, for once, he’s not using it to manage anyone. He’s using it to be kind.

He comes back and crouches in front of me where I’ve sunk onto the edge of the curbside couch. His face is a horror—split and swollen, one eye gone dark, a man who should be in a hospital bed and is instead here, on his knees, for me. He doesn’t try to talk. He just lifts my hands, the ones with the dried blood gone brown in the creases of my knuckles, and he holds them for a second like they’re worth something, and then he helps me up.

The bathroom is warm and dim. He’s turned off the overhead and lit the stub of a candle I keep on the windowsill for power outages. The water is the right temperature; he checked it, I realize, while I wasn’t watching. He helps me out of clothes I will be throwing away, and there is nothing in it of wanting, nothing of the heat that’s lived between us for weeks—just his hands, careful as my mother’s hands over a wounded thing, guiding me down into the water until it closes warm around me.

And then he kneels on the cold tile beside the tub, dips a washcloth, wrings it, and begins to wash my father’s blood off my face.

He is so careful. That’s what undoes me first, before any of the rest of it. He cups the back of my head in one big, broken-knuckled hand and tilts my face to the candlelight and works the cloth over my cheek, my temple, my jaw, in small patient passes—and every time the cloth comes away red he rinses it in the sink, not the bath, turning his body to keep the water I’m sitting in clean. So that I don’t have to soak in it. So that the last of my father doesn’t dissolve into the water around me. He thought of that. In the wreckage of himself, barely able to stand, he thought of that.

I start to cry.

Not the clean, contained crying I’ve allowed myself a handful of times in thirty years. This is the other kind, the kind that comes up from somewhere below the floor of you, that you don’t decide and can’t stop, that bends you in half. And once it starts it doesn’t stop, and Leonid doesn’t try to make it. He finishes washing my face, and he sets the cloth on the edge of the sink, and he sits down on the bathroom floor with his back against the side of the tub, his shoulder a warm pressure against my arm through the porcelain, and he stays.

I cry for my father.

Which is insane. Which makes no sense, in any equation I know how to balance. He sold me. He fed me to those men like a coin into a slot, he put a tracker under my skin and a gun against my head, he was the cause of all of it, the rot at the center of the whole nightmare. I should feel nothing for him but the clean relief you feel when something dangerous is finally, finally still. And part of me does.

But the rest of me is crying for the man I made him into when I was small, because children will build a father out of whatever scraps they’re given. I’m crying for the version who pushed a swing and called me his girl like it was a title I’d won. I lost that man twenty years ago, slowly, one missed birthday at a time, and I did the work, I went to the therapist, I made my hard-won peace with the absence of him. And tonight I found out there was never even an absence to grieve—there was just this, underneath, the whole time. I’ve lost him twice now. The myth, and then the man. And the second one bled out on a concrete floor while the first one died all over again behind my ribs.

I cry for that. And then I cry for myself, which I’m ashamed of and do anyway.

Because my life used to be so small. I used to be able to hold all of it in two hands—my classroom, my Civic, my mother’s curry, a glass of wine and a show, a life with no surface area, nothing reaching in and nothing reaching out. I called it peace. I told myself it was peace and not just safety, told myself that contentment was the mature and reasonable thing to want, and I almost believed it. And in three weeks something reached in and cracked it open like a geode, and what’s inside is enormous and violent and luminous and so much bigger than I am, and I don’t know how to hold it. I don’t have hands that big. Nobody does. It’s terrifying. It’s real in a way nothing in my careful, curated little life was ever allowed to be real, and I am so frightened of how much I want it anyway.

Leonid says nothing through any of it.