ALEKSEI STUMBLED THE few blocks to his car. His stomach roiled. The brutal scene in the kitchen—all that blood—seemed tattooed on his eyelids. No matter how much he blinked, he saw Stan, face down in a still pool of his own blood.
The smell of blood seemed to stick to him. To follow him. He hadn’t killed Stan. Yet, he thought he might never wash the blood off of himself.
He hadn’t had to pull the trigger. Sla va Bogu. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to do it, especially now. Now that he’d seen the body up close. Now that he understood the aftermath. The violent permanence.
What had he been thinking?
Woodenly, he got in his car. Peeled off his gloves. Fumbled with the seatbelt.
Sirens blared from every direction. He clutched the wheel, suddenly afraid. They were coming for him. They knew what he’d done. He’d be arrested. Thrown in prison. His life would be over.
Police. Fire. Ambulance. The vehicles streaked past him.
They weren’t coming for him. They were responding to an emergency. See? Nothing to do with him. He exhaled and relaxed his muscles.
He could have lost everything, but he hadn’t. Wouldn’t. It was over now.
A sapling of true optimism began to take root, a tight bud of hope born amidst all the blood.
Stan was gone now, just as he and Mikhail had planned. If this plan had worked out, then the others could, too. Even better, a dead man had big shoulders. If there were any questions from his father or the Georgians or the police, they could blame the dead pharmacist for everything.
He started the engine and drove slowly away from Stan’s neighborhood, even though he could hardly wait to put as much distance between himself and Stan’s corpse as possible.
In a few minutes, he’d be home with Katya. Maybe he could pretend, even with all of the horrors of the night, that everything was fine. She would hold him. He would put his hand on her belly and imagine the baby growing there.
Stan, face down in blood that Aleksei had promised to shed. The image invaded, wouldn’t leave him. He could smell the blood as if it were on him, all around him. Would Katya scent it, too?
What if she asked questions? Would she believe the lies he would have to tell her?
He turned onto his street with an urgent sense of foreboding. Maybe he shouldn’t go home just now. Maybe he should wait a little, have a drink, and settle his nerves first. He didn’t want her to be suspicious.
He thought about turning around and heading to Troika, but then he saw the emergency vehicles—the ones that had passed him only a few minutes before—now gathered in front of his house.
Katya!
He parked in his neighbor’s driveway and ran toward his home, where a team of firefighters aimed a hose at his burning house.
He ran up the driveway, but someone grabbed him, pulled him to a stop. “My wife,” he said. “Let me through. I live here. I have to find my wife.”
Then he saw her near the ambulance and tore away to be by her side. She was sitting on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, an oxygen mask over her face. He climbed in beside her. “Katya. Bozhe moi! Katya, are you all right?”
She nodded, but she was in an ambulance getting treated for smoke inhalation. How all right could she be?
“Mr. Koslovsky?” A cop poked his head into the ambulance. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“What the hell happened?” Aleksei demanded, as if this nightmare was someone else’s fault.
“Your brother-in-law called it in. Intruders. Firebomb. Same thing happened at your nightclub earlier.”
“My nightclub?” The Georgians had done this? He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t gather his thoughts. They’d come after him with far more violence than he had ever imagined, despite his cautious fear of Dato and his vicious knives.
Katya could have been killed.
“I should have been here,” Aleksei said. “I should have been here to protect you.”
“Where were you?” Her voice was scratchy, almost unrecognizable.
“Don’t try to talk,” the EMT told her.
Her gaze seemed to pierce him. He could plainly read the accusation in her wide green eyes. He felt all of his inadequacies and knew he deserved her sharpest indictment. He hadn’t protected her.
The oxygen mask covered her expression, but she stared hard at Aleksei as if she could see inside him, read his every thought and flaw.
He wasn’t a real man. Maybe she knew it.
She squeezed his hand, with enough pressure to make him believe she would forgive him for tonight, so long as she never learned the whole truth.
“I was on my way home from Troika,” he said. “I guess it was before the bombing.” He reached for the first convenient lie to flit into his head. “Then I got a flat tire and stopped to fix it.”
Katya squeezed her eyes shut. A tear slid down her cheek.
“Hey, I’m here now,” he tried to soothe her.
Too late, he realized he’d already used the flat-tire excuse the night they were supposed to meet Inna, the night the violence began. And Nick had been the one to change the flat, because Aleksei had pretended not to know how.
“Mr. Koslovsky, would you mind coming with me? I need to ask you some questions.”
Quietly, he followed the cop. He had survived tonight, but he might still lose everything anyway.