The sight knocks the wind from my lungs. I stumble forward, hands braced against the edge of Matvey’s makeshift desk, unable to breathe, unable to do anything but stare as the feed shifts again to another angle, a closer one.
Mikhail’s face fills the frame, twisted into something monstrous and pleased. His arm is bent, his hand held firm and steady around the black steel butt of a gun. It’s drawn up and pressed flush to the side of my son’s head.
No, no, no, no.
A shot rings out, loud and final.
A broken sound tears itself from my throat, something guttural and animal and not entirely human. My knees giveout beneath me. I hit the floor with a thud, but I barely register the pain. It feels like I’m underwater, like my limbs are being dragged into the deep and I can’t get any part of me to move to pull myself up to the surface.
A set of hands grabs me, hauling me up onto a chair nearby. Andrey squats in front of me. His mouth moves, but I hear no sounds coming out of it. The blood is rushing too fast in my ears to hear anything other than the pounding of my own broken heart.
“Is he… he…” Oh, God. I can’t even finish the sentence.
“He’s dead!” Matvey claps.
I flinch, my hands flying to cover my ears, but the words have already wormed their way inside my brain. My sorrow bores down on me, the pressure so heavy that it nearly snaps my body in half. I wail and fold forward, curling in on myself as I rock forward in the chair.
Hands are shaking me again. Muffled voices cut through the noise, distant and warped like they’re coming from the bottom of the ocean.
Matvey’s voice slowly pierces through the noise, sharp and frantic. “—say anything? What the hell happened?”
“Zatknis,” Andrey barks at him. His grip suddenly tightens on my arms as he jolts me again. “Ivy.Hey. It’s alright, they’re okay.”
How can he say that? How can he possiblyknowthat?
I heard the gunshot. There could be no mistaking that sound for anything but exactly what it was.
I think I might be sick.
My vision swims with fresh tears as I curl in on myself again, shoulders heaving, my entire body rocking forward and back in a motion I can’t stop, like my brain is trying to comfort itself in the only way it remembers how.
I’d doanythingto rewind time. I’d do anything to go back ten minutes and fight Maksim when he had forced me out the back door of that restaurant, stop him from forcing me to walk away from my baby. Anything to have never put us in this position to begin with.
“Ivy,” Andrey growls, shaking me firmly this time. “Maksim and Leo are alive. Snap out of it.”
My breath hiccups in my throat, jagged and unsteady, and I lift my eyes through the blur of tears. I don’t want to believe him. Ican’tbelieve him. If I let myself hope—even for a second—and I’m wrong…
If he’s wrong… I’ll break in a way I can’t put back together.
Still, some part of me reaches for the screen, the part that’s desperate to want to believe in a fantasy.
Matvey is already reacting, his chair knocking back as he yanks one of the smaller monitors free from the bracket, ripping cords loose with a loudsnap. His fingers fly across the keyboard to redirect the feed, panic rising in his voice.
“Look,” he says, urgent now, glassy-eyed behind his lenses as he spins the monitor toward me and slams it down on the desk. “See? They’re okay. Look, Ivy. Look. I’m sorry, I didn’t… they’re both alive.”
I blink the tears away, just enough to focus on the zoomed in feed, the image sharper than before.
And there they are.
Leo is on the floor, a few feet from where Mikhail’s body is crumpled like discarded garbage. Maksim is kneeling beside him, both arms around Leo, his face buried in his son’s hair. His body shakes as he holds onto our son, his eyes squeezed tight. Leo’s tiny hands are fisted into Maksim’s jacket, clinging to him as his shoulders gently shake.
There’s no sound, but there doesn’t need to be.
Every inch of me trembles like my body can’t figure out whether to collapse in on itself or fly. My hands shake, and the inside of my cheeks sting from biting down too hard, but none of it matters now. Not with this image burned into the screen in front of me.
Not with the worst-case scenario rewritten right before my eyes.
For the first time in what feels like forever, something in my chest that had been fractured and held together with little more than hope and desperation finally feels whole again.