Page 216 of Sexting the Pakhan

“You idiot.”

“Yes.”

The answer is so immediate, so tired, so painfully him, that a laugh breaks through my crying.

His gaze drops to my mouth.

The world is falling apart around us. There are dead men below the quarry, armed traitors somewhere in the trees, one daughter trembling against my back, another crying into my sleeve, and Ruslan is bleeding badly enough that every second matters.

Still, when I lean down, he lifts his head the smallest amount to meet me.

The kiss is not graceful. It can’t be.

His mouth is cold from the rain, and there’s blood at the corner of it, and I’m crying too hard to breathe properly. I kiss him carefully at first, afraid of hurting him, but his hand rises to the back of my neck with what little strength he has left and holds me there like he has no intention of letting death, betrayal, or common sense interrupt him again.

When I pull back, his eyes are closed and his breathing is worse, but there is a faint steadiness in his hand where it rests against my neck.

“Don’t die after that,” I tell him.

His eyes open halfway. “Bossy.”

“You have no idea.”

“I have some idea.”

I laugh again, and it turns into a sob before I can stop it.

Then sense returns in one violent rush. He’s losing blood. The rain is getting heavier. The girls are freezing. The men who did this are not all dead, and I have no idea how far they’ve gone.

I pull my phone out with shaking hands, nearly dropping it twice because the screen is slick with rain and my fingers won’t obey me. And then, I dial 911.

EPILOGUE

RUSLAN

The hospital smells like bleach,plastic tubing, and the kind of helplessness rich men spend their lives pretending they can buy their way out of.

I wake slowly, not because I want to, but because pain keeps dragging me back every time my body tries to sink under again. My left side feels like it has been packed with broken glass. My leg is wrapped so tightly that I can feel my pulse beating under the bandages. My ribs protest every breath, and the machines beside the bed answer for my body in soft, steady sounds.

For a moment, I don’t open my eyes. I listen first.

That’s habit. A man in my position survives by learning the room before he joins it. Footsteps. Breathing. The shift of fabric. The pause before someone speaks.

But this room doesn’t sound like a threat.

It sounds like family.

Mila is whispering too loudly near the foot of the bed. “He’s sleeping like a bear,” she says.

Nadia answers in the same serious whisper, “Bears don’t usually sleep in hospitals.”

“He’s a hospital bear.”

Zoya sighs, and I hear the exhaustion in it, the kind that has gone past anger and landed somewhere rawer. “Both of you, lower your voices.”

“They are already low,” Mila says.

“They are absolutely not low,” Nadia corrects her.