Chapter 312: Grateful

Marcel pulled back. He held her face in both his hands and stared at it. He looked at her short hair, her sunken cheeks, and the bruises under her eyes.

"What did they do? Mother, look at you. Look what they did to you." His voice broke. "Who did this?" She shook her head. She could not answer.

Viktor did not look their way.

He heard the crying. He heard the voice, and the name, and the choked words. But he did not turn his head. He kept his eyes on the stretcher and his fingers on a thin wrist, and the whole of him was somewhere else.

The wheels clicked on. The nurse called out a number. The front doors swung open, and cold air came in, smelling of rain and exhaust. A white van waited at the foot of the steps, with its back doors wide and its blue lights turning.

"You should be lucky."

It was Marcus. He had walked across the hall. He stood a few paces from the kneeling man, with his arms folded and the wet cloth still pressed to his eye. His voice was flat and hard.

"The big boss did not leave her there to die." Marcel’s head came up.

"He could have. Nobody would have blamed him." Marcus’s eyes were cold. "He could have left her on that floor in the dark, with the rest of them. Like Aliya. Like Don Capri."

The hall went still.

Marcel stared up at him. His face was wet and blotched. His mouth was slightly open. Slowly, the color drained out of it.

"What?"

"They are dead."

"What?" He said it again, smaller. "Aliya? And the Don? Don Capri?"

"Both."

"But I..."

"Shot. One in a cell. One in a hall." Marcus’s jaw tightened. Marcel did not answer.

He knelt there on the marble with his mother in his arms, and the news went through him like cold water. Aliya, who had been so beautiful. Aliya, who had once laughed at him over a bowl of strawberries. Don Capri, who had shaken his hand and called him son. They were gone. They had been breathing a few days ago, and now they were not.

He should have felt horror. He did feel it. It sat in his chest like a stone. But under the horror, small and shameful and warm, was something else. She is alive.

He looked down at the gray head on his shoulder. He felt the thin arms around his neck, and the rise and fall of her breath. She was here. She was safe. She was shaking in his arms, and she smelled of smoke and salt and old soap.

He had his mother once again.

It was the only thing in the world he had wanted. And he held it, and he did not let go, and he hated himself a little for being grateful.

"Thank you," he whispered; he did not say who he meant.

At the doors, Viktor climbed into the back of the ambulance.

He sat on the narrow bench beside the stretcher, with his knees pressed against the rail. A doctor sat opposite him, and a nurse bent over the machines. Aria swung herself up behind them, with Manuel at her heels. Nobody argued.

Marcus slammed the doors.

The engine roared. The blue lights threw a spinning wash across the wet drive, and the siren rose, high and thin and strange. The great house on the hill dropped away behind them, with its hundred windows and its slate roof and its long dark shadow.

Viktor did not look back.

He bent over the stretcher and laid his forehead against Sienna’s cold hand. He closed his eyes. And in the dark behind his lids, very small and very far away, he let himself think the thing he had folded up and put aside.

A baby. We are going to have a baby. Please. Please let her stay to see it. The ambulance sped on into the night.

Present day

The drive was long.

The ambulance wound through wet streets and out onto the north road, and every mile felt like ten. Viktor sat with his forehead against Sienna’s hand and counted her pulse with his thumb. When it slowed, his own heart dropped.

When it jumped, it dropped again. The nurse watched the monitor and said nothing. Aria sat rigid on the opposite bench with her arms wrapped around herself, and Manuel held her elbow.

When the doors finally opened, the doctor was waiting.

She stood under the white lights of the entrance with her arms folded. She was a small woman in a long gray coat, with silver hair cut short and a face that looked carved from dry wood. She wore a stethoscope around her neck and a thin cloth roll tucked under one arm.

"Dr. Lydia," Aria said, in a rush of breath.

"Aria." The doctor did not smile. "Bring her in." They wheeled her through a long hall and into a quiet room at the end of it.

It was a small room, plain and warm. A lamp burned beside the bed. There was a window with a green blind, and a shelf of glass jars filled with dried leaves and roots. It did not smell like a hospital. It smelled of ginger and smoke and old paper.

Dr. Lydia pushed the others back. "Out," she said. "Everyone but the husband." Aria opened her mouth. "Out."

Aria went. Manuel went with her. The door closed, and the room was very quiet.

The doctor set her cloth roll on the bedside table and unrolled it. Inside lay rows of needles, long and thin, fine as hair. She did not hurry. She looked at Sienna’s face for a long moment, and she laid two fingers on her wrist and closed her eyes.

"Hm," she said. Viktor stood against the wall. He did not breathe.

She began.

She placed the first needle at the crown of Sienna’s head, so lightly that it seemed to float. The second went behind the ear. The third and fourth went into her wrists, one on each side, a hair’s width from the bone. Her hands moved slowly and steadily, and she hummed under her breath, a low tuneless sound, like a woman stirring soup.

Minutes passed.

The monitor beeped. Its green line wobbled, steadied, wobbled again. Dr. Lydia added a needle at the breastbone and another at the center of the palm. She sat back and watched.

Viktor’s hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against the wall. Then, on the bed, Sienna’s eyelids moved.

She opened her eyes slowly.