“I never wanted them harmed.”
Then he’s gone from the frame of the door.
I don’t think after that. I move.
The cuff is old-fashioned, meant for speed more than permanence. One hand jammed half numb, head splitting, body still half in the dark, I wrench at the angle until the metal bites skin and then gives just enough for my hand to tear free. It takes skin with it. I don’t care.
I fall half out of the car onto rough gravel and catch myself badly on my palms.
The world sways. Then it clears.
Katerina is on the ground near the second vehicle, curled around the children, both of them alive, both of them crying now that whatever held them frozen has finally broken. Sofia is pressed into her mother’s chest. Nikolai is white-faced and shaking but trying not to show it.
A few feet away, Mikhail is down on his side, blood at his stomach, one hand twitching weakly.
Vika lies farther out, flat and still in the dirt.
Dead.
I look for my father and see only the open dark beyond the yard gate. No sign of him. No second shot. No final word.
Just… Gone.
Katerina lifts her face when she sees me, and the sound that comes out of her is unlike anything I’ve ever heard from her. Not my name, not quite. Something deeper. Something torn straight out of the center of her.
I crawl the last few feet before I can get my legs fully under me.
“Mikhail,” she says, voice breaking. “He’s still breathing.”
I turn, grab the phone from the inside pocket of the nearest dead man’s jacket because mine is gone, and call emergency before I’ve even thought the number through. My voice sounds strange to my own ears as I give the location, the number of wounded, the fact that there are children, the fact that they need an ambulance now, not questions.
Then I drop the phone and go back to them.
The children see me properly then.
Sofia makes a small, strangled sound and reaches for me with both hands. Nikolai doesn’t move at first, then suddenly does, throwing himself forward with all the fierce control he’s been trying to hold breaking at once.
I pull them both in.
Katerina is still kneeling there, one hand on Sofia, the other shaking so hard she can barely keep it on Nikolai’s back. I put my arm around her too and bring all of them against me, blood and tears and cold morning air and all of us trembling too hard to pretend otherwise.
For one long moment, none of us says anything.
We are alive.
That’s the only thought large enough to hold.
Sofia is sobbing into my shoulder. Nikolai is trying not to, which means he’s shaking even harder than she is. Katerina presses her face into the side of my neck, and I feel her crying there, silently now, spent past sound.
I hold them. I hold all of them.
And for the first time since this began, since the message and the warehouse and the old grief dragged up into daylight, something in me unclenches enough to let the truth in.
These are my children. This is my family.
Not in some polite, careful sense. Not in any way the world would call easy. But real all the same.
I hear sirens in the distance at last.