Chapter 278: Wrong hit

Behind them, in the dark of his own blood, Shemmel’s hand found something cold on the floor. It was his gun. It had skidded to rest by the wall, and his groping fingers had landed on it. He felt the silencer. He felt the grip. He did not need to see.

He lifted it. He aimed at the blurred shape of the white suit, the one thing in the whole hall that was bright enough to find. His finger tightened on the trigger.

Pfft.

It was not a loud sound. The silencer made it little more than a cough. But something was wrong. Viktor had not been hit. He felt nothing at all. He turned his head, and his hand tightened on Sienna’s.

Behind them, Aliya had stopped walking.

She stood very still in the middle of the passage, with her head slightly bowed. Her hand had gone to her stomach and pressed against the gray apron. "Viktor," she said.

It was barely a whisper.

She looked down at her fingers. They were red. The color was spreading under her palm, dark and warm, soaking into the gray cloth and running down in a thick line.

Sienna’s hand flew to her mouth. "Aliya."

The girl lifted her head. Her eyes were wide and puzzled, like a child who has been startled from a dream. She tried to take a step toward them. Her knees folded, and she sank to the floor on her side, slowly, with the red growing and growing on the white stone beneath her.

Sienna did not hear herself scream. She only felt her hand drop from her mouth. Viktor let go of her. He did not look at Aliya. He did not look at the blood. A cold, flat quiet had come down over him like a lid, and everything in him narrowed to a single point.

Shemmel was on his knees by the wall.

He was wiping at his eyes with the back of one wrist, smearing red across his face. He was breathing in short, wet gasps. The gun hung loose in his other hand. He had fired once, blind, toward the shape of a white suit, and had hit something else. He did not know what. He was still trying to clear his sight, still muttering under his breath, still lifting the weapon.

He never saw what came.

Viktor crossed the passage in four steps, and his hand closed around the gun and tore it out of the other man’s fingers. He turned it in his palm. He did not say a word.

He fired.

It was a soft, ugly sound. The silencer swallowed it. Shemmel’s head jerked, and his body folded forward, and he fell against the wall and slid down it, slowly, leaving a long dark smear on the white stone.

He did not move again. The corridor was silent. Viktor stood with the gun in his hand and his chest heaving.

The smoke curled away from the barrel and vanished. A single drop of blood fell from his chin and splashed on the floor. He stared down at the man in purple, and he felt nothing, nothing at all, only a great empty ringing.

Then, behind him, Sienna’s voice.

"Viktor. Viktor. Help me." He turned, and he saw her on her knees beside Aliya. She had pushed both hands against the girl’s stomach, and the red was running between her fingers, and her whole face was pale and fierce and terrified.

"Hold on," Sienna was saying. Her voice was shaking. It was steady and not steady, the voice of a student reading a chart while the world burned. "Aliya. Look at me. Look at me. Stay with me."

Aliya’s eyes found her face. She smiled, very faintly. "Hold on," Sienna said. "Aliya, look at me. Stay with me."

She had pulled the girl’s head into her lap. One hand pressed on the wound, and the other cradled the back of her neck. The red kept coming through her fingers, warm and slow, and it soaked into the white of her gown.

Sienna knew exactly what she was looking at.

She knew where the bullet had gone in. She knew what lay behind that place, and how fast it bled. She pushed harder anyway.

"We will get you out of here," she said. Her voice shook, and she made it steady. "Do you hear me? We are going to get you out. You are going to be okay."

It was a lie. They both knew it.

Aliya looked up at her. Her face was gray, and her lips had gone pale. Her eyes were clear, clearer than Sienna had ever seen them. There was no scheming in them and no mask, only a tired girl looking at the one person she had spent months trying to destroy.

"You still want to save me," she whispered. "After everything."

"Don’t talk."

"You really are..." She stopped to breathe. It was a small, wet sound. A faint smile touched her mouth. "An angel."

"Aliya, please."

"I am going to see my father now." Her eyes moved past Sienna’s face, to the harsh white light on the ceiling. They stayed there. Her chest rose once, slowly, and fell.

Then it did not rise again. Sienna did not move.

She knelt on the cold stone with the girl’s head in her lap and waited for another breath. She counted the seconds, one, two, three, the way she had been taught. She put two fingers under the jaw and held them there.

Nothing. The hall was so quiet that she could hear the lab machines humming behind the open door.

Her hand came away from Aliya’s neck, slowly. The tears came without a sound. They ran down her cheeks and dripped from her chin onto the gray apron. She could not hold them back, and she did not try.

She did not cry because they had been friends. They had never been friends. She did not cry because it was fair, or because it was kind.

She cried because a girl had died with her head in her lap, and the last thing she had said was angel. Aliya had tried to take her life more than once, but had used her last strength to help her.

Viktor stood over them. He wanted to kneel. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her until the shaking stopped. He did not. Not now.

They had been gone from the hall for a long time. The cameras were dark, but they would not stay dark forever. The party was still going, but the Don would be back soon. And at his feet lay Kalisto’s son.

Viktor did not let himself think about it for long. He had killed the heir of the Purple family, in the Don’s own house, with a silenced gun. Kalisto would tear the world apart when he found out. If he found out. If anyone did.

It was the kind of fear that did not shout. It sat low in his stomach, cold and heavy. He pushed it down. He would feel it later. "Sienna."

His voice was gentle, but it carried. "We cannot leave them here." She lifted her head. Her eyes were red.

"Not in the hallway." He looked down the long passage, at the dark smear on the wall and the pool spreading on the floor. "Any guard who turns the corner will see. The whole house will know in a minute."

She looked at Aliya’s face. She closed the girl’s eyes with two fingers, very softly. Then she nodded. Viktor knelt.

He worked fast and without any show. He took Shemmel by the collar and dragged him across the stone. The purple suit left a long, dark streak behind it. He pulled the body through the open steel door into the lab, past the long tables and the humming machines, and dropped it behind a cabinet where no one would look at once.

He came back for Aliya.

He slid one arm under her knees and the other behind her shoulders and lifted her. She weighed almost nothing. Her head fell against his chest, and her hair hung down loose over his sleeve. He carried her through the door as carefully as if she were still alive.

He laid her on the floor in the quiet corner by the wall of charts, and he folded her hands over the dark stain on her apron.

He looked at her for a moment. I did not hate you, he thought. Not in the end. He did not say it out loud. Then he walked back out, pulled the steel door shut, and heard the lock click.