She is right, I reflect. We cannot even chance going outside. Fyodor’s men might be waiting for us there.
“Stay—”
“Close, I know.”
We share a look, a small smile playing at her lips. For a second, we are both astounded by what we are doing, by the blunt absurdity of it. Then her lips flatten and she nods toward the staircase.
“Let’s end this, Erik.”
My father’s voice fills my head, taunting.
“You are a fool for allowing her to stay with you,” he tells me. “You have become just like me, putting your woman in the face of danger. You always thought you were better than your silly old father, did you not? And now look at you.”
I push the voice away as I have done many times before. It is blood loss, I tell myself, plus the adrenaline, and the fear for Camille’s sake, all mixing together.
We move through the lower floor of the mansion like ghosts, as quietly as we are able. The whole time I am aware of a fracture within myself. One part of me watches Camille as another scans the surroundings.
“What was that?” she hisses, when I have turned on the kitchen light.
“What?” I growl, glancing around the room.
It has recently been cleaned, everything glittering. Camille and I stand reflected in the stainless steel stove. She seems even smaller like this, even less suited to this sort of situation.
“Nothing,” she mutters. “It must’ve been the stove. Jeez, I need to calm down.”
“Just stay vigilant—”
Crack.
The sound seems to go on forever, ricocheting around the room and ringing through my ears.
Then I feel the shattering in my back, a few inches from my spine, something vital and important seeping out of me in a waterfall flow. I spin to find Fyodor standing in the doorway, another, larger man behind him like a sentinel.
“Fucker!” I roar as I unload two bullets in their direction.
The first hits the doorframe, throwing up pieces of shrapnel that spray Fyodor in the face. This is the only thing that saves Camille. Fyodor screams, pawing at his face, losing his aim.
My second bullet bores a hole in the soldier’s forehead. He stumbles to his knees, dropping his gun.
Click.
Fuck. I am out of ammunition.
Camille fires from beside me just as Fyodor is raising his gun again, eyes red and streaming from the wooden pieces lodged in them. She fires twice but each bullet misses. Her hands are shaking too much and she is not anticipating the recoil.
I sprint headlong at Fyodor, arms spread wide so that I, and not Camille, will catch anything he fires our way. The muzzle flash throws dancing dots across my field of vision and another sharp bite twists through my shoulder.
Then I am on top of him, hands closing around his throat. He angles his gun up into my belly. I dart my hand down, squeezing his wrist so hard I am sure I hear the crunch of bone and the snap of tendons.
But I have forgotten the most important thing about him.
He is a snake. With his free hand he slides a blade from a sheath on his thigh and stabs me in the side twice. A bleak haze washes over me, weighing me down as I fight to keep the strength left in my hands.
“Erik, move!” Camille is crying. “Get out of the way!”
“It was always going to come to this,” Fyodor says with something like calm. “You must have known that.”
A wet squelching noise sounds when he stabs me again. My eyelids get heavy, vision threatening to desert me.
“Your child will never live to see what a failure his father—”
Something in me ignites.
Over the sound of Camille’s screaming voice, I hear the imagined cries of my child. With the last of my fading strength, I grab Fyodor around the throat and roll over, holding him up to give Camille the best shot she is going to get.
“Do it!” I roar.
Fyodor makes to lash out at me with the blade again.
But then his head jerks violently to the side and his body begins to twitch, knife sliding limply from his hand and bouncing off my belly.
I hold him a moment longer—as much as I am able, just to make sure he is dead—and then let him drop on top of me.
The world becomes a place of muffled sounds and bleary lines, dancing sideways.
I am vaguely aware of Camille kicking Fyodor’s corpse from me, of Anatoly and the others crashing through the door, of Camille whispering in my ear as I bounce around the back of a car.
“You can’t die,” she hisses. “Are you really going to leave me and the baby alone? Fight, Erik! Fucking fight!”
“I’ve spent my whole life fighting,” I say, but nobody hears me. “We can call our son Rob. It is not Russian but for you, my love, I would name him anything. And if our child is a girl, we can name her Angela.”
My words seem far away, drifting further each moment. The only thing I know as the world turns black is Camille’s hand upon mine.
For a few days, I slip in and out of consciousness.
Camille is there, always, either sitting at my bedside dabbing at my forehead with a damp cloth or asleep in the chair in the corner. The first time I wake up, I am sure I see her feeding our child, a bottle of milk in hand as she sways him back and forth, singing in a sweet voice that sends me into a deep sleep.
When I am finally able to stay awake for longer than a few minutes, I discover that almost a week has passed.
I blink open my eyes to find Camille leafing through a photo album, a tear clinging to her eyelash. On the front the words ‘The
