Page 95 of Cruel Submission

When we finally pull apart, he holds our hands and looks between us, and his mouth works around words that won’t come. Finally, he manages one.

“Stay.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I say. “Not tonight.”

He nods. The effort of the reunion is catching up—I can see it in the way his eyelids droop, the way his grip softens even as his fingers refuse to let go. The machines register a slow return to baseline, his readings settling, his body accepting what his mind has already decided: his girls are home.

“Stay,” he says again, already drifting. “Don’t… don’t disappear again.”

“Never,” Debra whispers.

His eyes close. His breathing evens out—deeper than before, steadier. The wheeze on the exhale is still there, but it’s quieter. Like his body is calming down, settling into a rest it hasn’t been able to find in months.

I watch the monitors. The numbers hold. Steady. Normal. Better than they’ve been in weeks, if I’m reading them right—and I’ve spent enough hours in this room studying those screens to know what baseline looks like.

Debra catches me looking. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah.” I don’t hide my surprise. “His numbers are actually… good. Better than last time.”

We sit there, holding Dad’s hands, watching him sleep. The room is small and smells like antiseptic and old flowers. Somewhere down the corridor, a nurse is laughing about something mundane and wonderful. Life carrying on.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out with my free hand.

Arkady: How is he?

He’s sleeping, I type back. He saw Debra. He cried. We all cried. His vitals are stable. Better than expected.

His reply comes in seconds: Good.

I look at my sister. At my father. At the three of us, together in a room that smells like endings but feels, right now, impossibly like a beginning.

I’ll be home tonight, I type back.

We can get through this, I know it. With the way things are unfolding—this unlikely, impossible, ordinary miracle of a family sitting together—I know we can get through this.

Chapter Thirty-One

Mirabel

Time can change everything.

Or maybe it doesn’t change anything at all, just peels the cover off what was already there, waiting.

Dad is still in the hospital. Stable, according to Dr. Klein, which is the medical equivalent of hanging on by his fingernails but doing it politely. We’ve visited as often as we could since that first trip with Debra. Dad’s stronger each time we’re there. I can see it in the way his color lifts, the way his sentences come out whole instead of in fragments. He’s met Arkady once, briefly—a twenty-minute window where my fiancé sat in a hospital chair that was far too small for him and shook my father’s hand and said, “I’ll take care of your daughter, Mr. McLeod.” And Dad, bless him, said, “She doesn’t need taking care of. She needs someone who can keep up.”

Arkady actually laughed. A real one, the kind that ambushes him, where his mouth opens before his brain can stop it. I nearly fell off the bed.

We talk to Dad on the phone most evenings now. Short calls—his energy is rationed, portioned out carefully—but they matter.

And Arkady—my strange, controlled, devastating man—has been different these past two weeks. Not a different person. More like the same person with a door left ajar. Since the night he told me about Mishka, since he cracked himself open and let me see what he’d been carrying all his life, something in him has loosened. Not all at once. Not in some dramatic cinematic transformation where the hero tears off his armor and weeps. It’s smaller than that, and more real. He’ll say something about his day without me having to drag it out of him. He’ll touch the small of my back when we’re standing in the kitchen and keep his hand there, like he’s reminding himself I’m solid. Last Tuesday, he told me he was afraid.

Not of anything specific. Just… afraid. The word came out of him like a stone being pulled from a wall, and I could see what it cost him. A man who has killed people, who commands men with weapons and manages criminal empires and doesn’t flinch when rooms go sideways… telling me he’s afraid.

I held his hand. I didn’t try to fix it. I just let the word exist between us.

He’s still struggling with it. Openness doesn’t sit well with him; he keeps reaching for the old armor, catching himself, adjusting. Some mornings, I can see him retreating behind the ice, the responses going monosyllabic, his face closing up like a shopfront at the end of the day. And then he’ll look at me, and something gives, some invisible lock turning, and he’ll say, “I’m trying, zaychik.”

That’s all that matters. The trying.