Page 89 of The Mad Don
Fabiano’s head turns toward her. His thumb stays on the controller, but his whole face slackens, the madness stalling out into raw disbelief.
“She —” His voice is barely there. “She’s alive?”
Kirill steps from the second car, geared, both hands lifted. “Easy. Everyone, take it easy.”
Fabiano’s eyes dart from Yana to Kirill to me, and the laugh starts again, broken, wheezing, his head shaking side to side. “Good. Good. You lied to me — every one of you. Every single — Then we all go. We all go down together?—”
Kirill’s eyes drop to the vest on Fabiano’s chest. His face changes. “Shit.”
“Yana, run!” It rips out of my throat. “Kirill, get her out, get her out of here, now.”
She shouldn’t be here. She should be over an ocean with the sun on her face and none of this in her life. I cannot have her here, not for this, not for the last thing I’m good for —
“Let’s all meet in hell,” Fabiano screams.
His thumb comes down on the controller, and a deafening sound fills the air as the air turns white. The sound takes everything, and in the half-second left to me, I run to her, and I pull her into my chest and wrap every part of myself around her and turn my back to the blast.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Yana
His body covers me before the world ends.
I feel him before I understand it. His arms lock across my back and the back of my head, and he turns us, his chest against my face, his spine to the open air. And then the blast hits.
It comes through him into me. The pressure slams the breath out of my lungs, and the heat rolls over us, and I feel him jerk against me as something tears into his back. The ground breaks under us. We are lifted, turning, grit and smoke and a roaring that swallows every other sound, and through all of it, his arms do not loosen. He holds me in place. He keeps every part of me tucked behind him.
We come down hard. The roaring fades into a high ringing. Smoke hangs above us, lit from somewhere, and ash is drifting down through it. His weight is on top of me, his arms are still around me, and I feel him go limp.
“No.” I push at him. “No, no, Giovanni —”
I roll him off me and come up over him.
His back is a ruin. His shirt is gone in patches, the skin under it torn, and the old bullet wounds have opened, and they’re bleeding, dark and fast, soaking into what’s left of the fabric. His face is gray with smoke and ash.
“Giovanni.” I tap his cheek. “Giovanni, look at me —”
His eyes open barely. They find my face, and something in them softens.
“Lupa,” he murmurs. “Why are you here?”
Then his eyes roll back, and he goes under.
“Giovanni!” I press my hands to the worst of the bleeding. “Someone help! Help!”
A voice through the smoke. “Yana!”
“Here! I’m here, please?—”
Kirill comes out of the haze with Christov a step behind, both of them coughing, guns still in their hands. They drop down beside me. Kirill takes one look at Giovanni’s back and whistles sharply, and his men come running.
“I’m going with him,” I say.
“You will.” Kirill’s already lifting. “But we move him now.”
They get him up between them. Christov takes my arm and pulls me toward the cars, and I’m shaking, and he’s talking low and steady the way he used to when we were small.
“It wasn’t a big charge,” he says. “It would’ve killed the man holding it and not much past him. But you ran at him. Giovanni was close. He took it.” He gets me into the car. “He took it for you.”
