absquatulate
(v.) to leave without saying goodbye
MILA
I’d once thought Ronan would let me drown; that he would watch me sink, curly hair floating and aglow. But in the end, it was his voice that dragged me from the darkness.
“Prosnis’, Mila.” Wake up. “Goddammit, prosnis’.”
Ronan had demanded so much from me since we met—so many orders he was confident would be met—but this request held a vulnerable crack. It wasn’t a demand at all. It was a need.
I found another weakness.
He was weak for me.
Drawing in a shallow breath, I struggled to open my eyes. I forced them open and saw I was lying on the floor of a moving car that vibrated beneath me. Yellow and red. My new coat was ruined, the faux fur matted with streaks of blood. Crimson-soaked bandages lay discarded around me. My shirt was torn open, and the sight of the hole gushing blood in my stomach made me so dizzy I was almost pulled under again. Though Ronan’s voice as he snapped something at Albert grounded me.
My eyes lifted to Ronan, who ripped open a new sterile bandage with his teeth and used it to put pressure on the wound. I tensed in expectation of pain but only felt a twinge in my abdomen as a tremble began to shake my entire body.
Our gazes met.
Russian roulette.
One blink, and—
I’d only miss the sight of him.
A dark, tortured gaze held mine for a long moment. Finally, it seemed to sink into him I was awake and farther from death’s door than he’d assumed. Keeping pressure on my wound, he leaned against the back seat, rested an arm on his elbow, and dropped his head to his chest, eyes closed.
“Ona ne spit,” he exhaled roughly. “Fuck. Ona ne spit.”
“We are almost there,” Albert announced from the front seat.
I’d expected to be in a lot of pain from being shot, though my entire body tingled as if I’d been injected with lidocaine everywhere.
When Ronan opened his eyes, they pinned me with fury. “Zachem ty eto sdelala?” he gritted. “Zachem?”
“English,” I said softly.
“Why the fuck would you do that, Mila?” he growled with a deep rasp. “WHY?”
“You’re not immortal,” I whispered, my throat thick. “I didn’t want you to die.”
He stared at me with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and something else indiscernible. “You don’t get to sacrifice yourself for me.” He clenched his teeth. “You DON’T get to die for me, kotyonok.” His eyes crucified me. “If anyone dies between us, it will be ME. Do you understand?”
I didn’t understand, so I shook my head.
“Then let me make it clear for you,” he said, the shadows in his eyes flashing. “You would survive without me. You would move on.” His tone roughened. “I can’t imagine a world where you and all your fucking yellow doesn’t exist. So if you die, you’ll take me with you. Your sacrifice would mean nothing, kotyonok. NOTHING.”
A tear ran down my cheek as a coldness began to invade the tremble inside me. My marrow was turning to ice, and I shivered violently.
“I’m so cold, Ronan . . .” My eyes felt weighted down, so I closed them.
“Nyet,” Ronan growled, grabbing my face. “Don’t fucking close your eyes.”
“I’m so tired,” I whispered, lethargy pulling at every muscle in my body. “I don’t think . . .”
“If you die, Mila,” he said harshly, “I’ll send Khaos to a back-alley pound.”
My heart beat. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would.”
When the car drew to a stop, Ronan didn’t waste a second. He picked me up and carried me into the hospital. I watched the doctors and nurses rush toward us and throw out questions in Russian. I couldn’t make sense of anything besides what Ronan had threatened as a cold weightlessness consumed me, tugging, pulling, trying to drag me down.
“Don’t do that to Khaos,” I pleaded weakly, interrupting the medical staff.
“Don’t die, and I won’t,” he responded while following the doctors down the hall.
He wasn’t being fair.
“Ronan . . .” A tear slipped down my cheek.
He wiped it away, his tone coarse. “Those are the conditions. You choose.”
How could I choose not to die? Today might be my day, and even D’yavol couldn’t stop fate in its tracks. I may have never gotten the family or love I’d always wanted, but at least I could say I gave it my best shot.
Ronan lay me on a gurney, and a nurse rushed me into an OR room. When a surgeon tried to stop Ronan from entering, he pulled out his pistol and pointed it at the doctor’s head.
“Yesli ona umret, ty tozhe umresh’,” he growled. If she dies, you die too.
The surgeon swallowed, stepped out of his way, and curtly nodded to an area where Ronan could stand.
A nurse put a mask on my face to induce sleep. I tried to pull it off, but it took little effort for her to hold it on while speaking to me in Russian. The gas started to pull my consciousness down, down . . . Though when I met Ronan’s eyes, I knew what I needed to say. Ya lyublyu tebya. I love you. In the end, only one word escaped with the fear I’d never wake up.
“Proshchay . . .”
The last thing I heard before the anesthesia took me under was, “Fuck your proshchay, Mila.”
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The steady beeps that drew me from a hazy sleep alerted me to the fact I didn’t die. Or Satan just had a sick sense of humor.
My body was in a tranquil, painless state, but I hesitated to open my eyes as my imagination went wild. Maybe the surgeons had to amputate a limb. Maybe I was paralyzed. Maybe I was waking from a thirty-year coma. Unfortunately, what I saw was worse than what my imagination could cook up.
Alexei Mikhailov and D’yavol sat in the same room.
Papa occupied the chair beside the door, wearing a charcoal suit and a black eye. He was staring at his hands, radiating a sense of remorse. I felt nothing when I looked at him. Not nostalgia. Not respect. Not affection.
Everything he’d done tainted my view of him. In truth, I didn’t think he’d ever planned to sacrifice himself for me. The phone call was just another lie and manipulation to make Ronan believe he’d conceded. My papa chose to put me in the middle of his war, unconcerned with the fact something could have happened to me. And it had.
Whether he lived or died, my mourning him was over.
My gaze slid to Ronan, who sat beside my bed wearing Tom Ford and tired eyes. Silently, he watched me. I somehow knew he’d stayed by my side for as long as I was unconscious. This man I once hated had become the man I loved.
Ronan was wrong.
I couldn’t bear the thought of living without him.
It terrified me, this love that threatened dependence. The devotion was a bright glow that warmed my soul, though it also left me feeling vulnerable, as if my chest would simply tear open if I loved him anymore.
I didn’t regret taking that bullet for Ronan, but the fact I’d almost died forced me to look at life from a different perspective. The truth was, I hadn’t truly lived yet. I’d experienced nothing besides the view of closed golden gates, the inside of a Russian mansion, and falling in love.
If I didn’t find myself, love would be all I’d be.
I knew what I had to do, though just the thought wrenched my heart. The fact I was about to hit one of Ronan’s weaknesses made me want to throw up. He was the strongest man I’d ever met, and still, I couldn’t stand the idea of hurting him.
“I guess Khaos doesn’t have to go to the pound,” I finally said, my raspy tone hiding the heartache inside.
My papa’s head shot up at my voice, relief filling his eyes.
Ronan’s stoic expression didn’t falter. My stomach clenched when I realized he knew what I’d come to terms with at the same time I had.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“Three days,” Ronan said emotionlessly.
My papa got to his feet, came to my bedside, and grabbed my hand attached to an IV. “I am so sorry, angel. I am so—” His voice cracked. “I will never forgive myself for this.”
I stared at his hand holding mine, unable to remember the last time he’d touched me intentionally. And all it took was being shot by his own gun to gain his affection.
Numb, I pulled my hand away. “I forgive you, Papa.”
His pained eyes found mine. “I always wondered how I made a girl as compassionate as you.”
“I’m compassionate, Papa, but not forgetful. I don’t hate you—not for what you did to my mother, not for lying, being absent, or for putting me here.” My voice was unnaturally calm. “But I will not forget.”
He soaked in my words silently.
“You will always be my father . . . but I think it’s best if we go our separate ways.” It surprised me I could say those words without any emotion. Though I wasn’t the same girl who’d boarded a plane to Moscow with hope in her eyes.
He looked a little stricken, but then sullenly nodded. “If that is what you wish.”
“It is.”
Without another word, my father walked to the door.
“Why did you do it?” I blurted.
He paused, his body tensing. He knew I wanted to know why he killed my mother. His hesitation created a heavy silence in the room, like he wasn’t sure if he should tell me the truth. In the end, I knew he did.
“She was pregnant with another man’s child.”
Then he walked out of the room and out of my life, leaving me numb at his response. “You look too much like my Tatianna . . .” His Tatianna. My papa may care for me, but he’d never truly loved me. I was simply a token of his toxic obsession with a famous opera singer. It felt like he’d abandoned me years ago, but there was a finality in the realization and watching him walk away that sent a shard of glass through my heart. The mayhem in my chest convinced me of my next conversation starter.
Staring after my papa’s retreat, I said, “If you hurry, you might be able to catch him in the parking lot.”
“I’ll pass.” Ronan’s tone was derisive.
“He knows you’re not going to harm me now. You’ve lost the upper hand.”
“He’s been here all day,” Ronan snapped. “If I wanted to kill him, I could have done it multiple times by now.”
I drew my gaze his way. The sight of him filled me with a heavy longing that spread through my veins: for him to touch me, hold me, show me he cared. Though the reminder I couldn’t have any of that felt like a blow to the chest.
I swallowed. “So you’ve given up on your revenge?”
He clenched his teeth. “You think revenge is on my mind right now?”
“You hit him,” I challenged.
“That was necessary to regain my concentration.”
“Your concentration of watching me sleep.”
“Yes,” he growled.
His response would be amusing if my heart wasn’t burning and retaliating against the decision I’d made. Nervously, I focused on messing with the tape that held my IV in my hand.
“So if revenge isn’t on your mind right now, then what is?”
“I’m waiting.”
I glanced at him. “For what?”
His eyes narrowed. “For the speech of forgiveness, ‘but it’s probably best if we part ways.’”
I looked away, unable to see the turmoil flaring in his eyes. He didn’t like being left behind—yet it seemed he was by everyone who mattered to him. And knowing I was only another one of them tightened my throat, burning the backs of my eyes.
It wasn’t until he got to his feet and set a single heart-shaped earring on the bedside table that the panic kick-started in my chest. What was I doing? Why was I doing this? As he headed to the door, my heart screamed at me to stop him. Stop. Please stop . . . But the grip on my throat refused to let out any words.
Ronan paused in the doorway for a second. He turned his head to meet my eyes and promised, “This isn’t proshchay.”
Taking a bullet had nothing on the pain of watching him walk away from me. The ache started in my heart, this raw bleeding throb, before it clawed at the walls of my chest.
It wasn’t proshchay.
The promise didn’t matter right now.
I wanted him back. Desperation burned in my blood, demanding I run after him and tell him it was just a mistake. Frantically, I tugged at the IV in my hand as the heartache tore through me, sending sobs up my throat that wracked my chest.
It wasn’t proshchay.
Just as I pulled out the IV, the chaotic energy inside faded, leaving me so drained I could only cover my mouth as tears poured down my cheeks. I ignored the sharp throb in my stomach. A machine began to beep, alerting me to the fact a nurse would be in here soon, but I didn’t expect a dog.
Khaos jumped on the bed and lay down beside me. Sobbing, I ran my hand through his fur, hugged him tight, and said, “It isn’t proshchay . . .”
