Page 82 of The Mad Don
“I’m no coward,” I say. “Just keep your end.”
I look at Yana one more time. “Keep them safe,” I plead. “Please.”
I mean Yana and my sister, and he knows it.
He nods, and I limp out, slowly, the crutches scraping the floor. I feel him watching me go.
Behind me, the door opens again, and I hear his wife come in, going straight to the bed.
“Good lord. What happened to her?”
“She got tangled up with a madman,” Kirill says.
“Oh, no.” Her voice breaks. “I knew I shouldn’t have let her go, Kirill. I knew it.” She’s crying. “I knew it.”
“She’s all right. It’s just bruises and a sprained hand. She’s all right.”
The voices follow me down the corridor and I keep moving, the crutches finding their rhythm against the floor, every step pulling at the holes in my side. Loyal to a fault, that one. I put two bullets in her and she still ran to me before she ran from me. She still tried to die alongside me. And I let her believe the worst of it so she’d live.
Then I hear it through the open door behind me.
Yana’s voice.
“My brother. My brother, where is he? Where’s my brother?”
I stop.
“Annika.” She’s crying, and I can hear her fighting to get up, fighting the bandage, the line in her arm. “Annika, I left him. I have to go back to him, I have to go to him, I left him there —”
She sobs, and I hear Annika join her.
I stand on the crutches a little way down the hall, looking back at the door I can’t walk back through. She’s crying for the brother I told her was dead when he is alive in a safe house. I can’t tell her. Just then, Kirill steps out into the corridor. He sees me there. He knows I heard all of it.
I look at him, I turn, and I hobble away down the corridor without a word.
Behind me, faint, I hear him exhale. “What a madman,” he mutters, and he goes back inside to his wife and the girl in the bed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Two days pass, and I lie in bed, and the light crosses the ceiling and hits my eyes. Annika sits beside me with the bowls going cold. She begs me to eat one spoonful or one for her. I can’t. There’s a hole where the part of me that eats and stands and wants things used to be, and I keep reaching for the bottom of it, and there isn’t one.
“Yana. Please. Just a little.”
I turn my face to the window.
Kirill comes in. His hand goes to Annika’s shoulder.
“It’s all right. Leave her.”
He kisses her. She looks back at me, eyes wet, and she goes.
He sits. “How are you holding up?”
“My brother.” It doesn’t sound like my voice. “If he’s gone — his body — I left him, Kirill; I left him in the rain; I have to go back; I have to —”
“I promised I’d find your brother. I don’t break promises to you.”
I look at him. The questions come, and they don’t connect. Did Christov die, or didn’t he? Why is he in a chair talking about finding someone?
