Page 156 of Dirty Hit
I swallow hard. “Can I see him?”
She studies me briefly, then nods. “Short visit,” she says. “He’s still heavily medicated, so he might not wake up. But he’ll hear you. Try not to upset him.”
Too late for that, I almost say, but I keep it behind my teeth and just nod.
She leads me down the hallway, away from the chaos of the ER, into the quieter, more muted hum of the wards. The smell shifts—less blood and antiseptic, more stale coffee and sleep.We take an elevator up, and ride in silence. My reflection in the metal doors looks like someone who lost a fight with a crime scene. There are still faint red streaks on my hoodie that I missed.
We stop at a door near the end of a corridor. She taps a code into the pad, pushes it open, and steps back to let me pass.
“He’s in here,” she says. “Hit the call button if he seems distressed. Don’t tug any lines. And try to rest yourself at some point, Mr. Volkov. Adrenaline doesn’t last forever.”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “Thanks, Doc.”
“I’ll give you some privacy,” she says. “If there’s any change, we’ll let you know.”
I nod again, not trusting my voice, and step inside.
Dominic
Theroomisdim,with only a lamp in the corner and the monitor’s soft glow lighting the space. The steady beep of the heart monitor is the first thing that hits me, a rhythmic reminder that he’s still here. IV bags hang from a pole beside the bed, clear tubes snaking down to his arm. There’s a cannula under his nose, tape holding it in place. His skin is too pale against the white sheets, freckles standing out like marker dots.
I stand there and look at him.
He looks small in the hospital bed. Smaller than he ever does in my head, where he fills entire rooms with his anxiety and his sarcasm and his stubborn faith. The cuff is gone from his wrist for surgery, but I can see the faint line where the leather usually sits.
His chest rises and falls slowly, evenly. Each breath is a quiet miracle.
I cross the room in three strides, drag the chair from against the wall right up to the side of the bed, and sit hard. My handfinds his, cool under my palm, and I wrap my fingers around it like a drowning man grabbing a rope. His hand is limp, but it fits into mine exactly the way it always does.
“Hey,” I say, and my voice comes out wrecked. “You’re late for our session, Little Sin.”
The joke falls flat in the quiet. His eyelids don’t even twitch. The monitor keeps up its steady beep.
The knot that’s been sitting under my ribs for days finally pulls too tight and snaps. Then the tears hit without warning.
One second, I’m sitting there, trying to smirk at an unconscious boy, and the next my eyes are flooding, my vision blurring, a sob ripping up my throat so fast I don’t have time to choke it down. I slap my free hand over my mouth instinctively, like I can shove the sound back, but it doesn’t work. It comes out anyway, low and ugly and raw.
I bend over his hand, elbows on the bed, forehead pressing into the back of his fingers, and I fucking break.
I’ve never been big on crying. My mother taught me pretty early that tears don’t fix anything and only make you easier to hit. By the time I was old enough to really understand what she was turning me into, I’d already figured out that if you’re going to break down, you do it alone—somewhere no one can use it against you.
I don’t cry after kills. I don’t cry after games. I didn’t cry when I watched high school friends vanish one by one, swallowed by “accidents” I knew weren’t accidents at all.
The last time I cried was when my dad died; now it all comes at once.
“Fuck,” I whisper, the word torn out of me. “Fuck.”
I cry for him, obviously. For the way his eyes looked in my living room, when he asked if it was that easy to leave. For the way his body felt limp and hot in my arms on the couch, with blood slicking my fingers. For the way his parents dismissed himover the phone, like he was a problem that had gotten solved the moment they decided he wasn’t theirs anymore. For the fact that if I’d been five minutes slower tonight, he wouldn’t be here at all.
It’s the alleyway victims whose faces I never bothered to remember, and the fact that the first time I really cared if someone lived or died was tonight.
But it doesn’t stop there. Once the dam is cracked, everything I’ve been stacking behind it for years starts to pour through.
I cry for every time my mother put a knife in my hand and a target in front of me and called it “training.” I cry for the nights she stood over me with that cold, proud smile, and wiped other people’s blood off my cheeks like it was finger paint. I cry for the first time I realized a friend was missing, saw the satisfaction in her eyes, and understood, on some level, that love from her meant death for everyone else around me.
I finally cry for my twin brother, Daniil, who was born four minutes after me, and somehow that four minutes made him the softer one. For Kyra still tangled in the web I just set on fire, for the fear that she’ll pay for the way I just cut us loose.
I cry for the part of me that never got to be a kid. For the teenage boy who realized being good at football could be a way out, and then discovered that the monster had followed him onto the field. For the first time my name hit a sports channel, and my mother’s voice on the phone said,“No mistakes now, Domenyk. You belong to the world, but you still answer to me.”
