Page 214 of Sexting the Pakhan

Ruslan turns his face toward her, rain sliding over his cheeks, and his voice is barely more than breath when he answers. “I told you to run.”

“I did,” Mila cries.

His fingers tighten weakly in my hair. “Good girl,” he murmurs. “You did good.”

I keep both hands on his face because I’m afraid that if I stop touching him, he will become something my mind invented out of shock and rain and grief.

His skin is cold under my palms, but not death-cold. There is heat beneath it. There is breath. There is pain. There is Ruslan, ruined and bleeding and staring up at me as if he has climbed back from hell only because he had unfinished business with my face.

“Mila is safe,” I tell him, though my voice breaks around every word. “She ran exactly like you told her. She found me.”

“I saw,” he says, and even those two words cost him.

His eyes move slowly from me to Mila, then to Nadia, who’s standing a few feet back with both hands over her mouth, crying so quietly it hurts more than if she were screaming.

Mila cries harder at that, because she knows he’s trying to make her less afraid.

I bend over him, one hand sliding to his chest, feeling the rough rise and fall of it under my fingers. There’s blood everywhere, too much of it, soaking through fabric, mixing with rain, running in thin lines over his ribs and down into the mud. His leg is worse than before, and there’s a tear across his side that makes my stomach turn.

“We need help,” I say, more to myself than to him.

His hand catches my wrist before I can move. Not hard. He doesn’t have enough strength for hard.

Still, I stop.

“Zoya,” he says.

“Don’t,” I say immediately, because I know that tone. I know men who sound like that in movies when they’re about to say something noble and stupid and final. “Don’t talk like this is goodbye. I swear to God, Ruslan, if you start giving me instructions for after you die, I will push you back over this ledge myself.”

A tiny breath leaves him. It might be pain. It might be a laugh. With him, it’s hard to tell.

“I was going to say,” he says slowly, “don’t call my men.”

I stare at him through rain and tears. “That’s what you wanted to say?”

“Yes.”

“You’re bleeding into the grass, and that’s your priority?”

“My men are the problem.”

I press my lips together because he’s right, and because I hate that he’s right, and because there is something horribly normal about him still giving orders while half-conscious beside a quarry.

“Fine,” I say. “No men.”

His fingers loosen around my wrist, but he doesn’t let go completely. His eyes stay on mine with that heavy, focused intensity that has always made lying to him feel useless.

“I heard you,” he says.

My breath catches.

For a moment I don’t understand.

Then I do, and the rain seems to go quiet around us.

I look at his face, at the blood at the corner of his mouth, at the exhaustion pulling at his eyes, and all the things I cried into the rain come back to me at once.

“I thought you were dead,” I whisper.