Authors: Shannon McKenna
Rudd held the top of the railing, placing one foot carefully on the top rail, and then the other. He balanced there, squatting.
Perfectly poised, facing out. The shouts and pleas began.
“That man’s going to jump!”
“Oh, my God! No! Please, no! Don’t!”
“Stop him! Somebody grab him! Quick, he’s about to—”
“Rudd? Oh shit, that’s Harold Rudd! Harold, no! Don’t jump!”
But Harold did. His bent knees straightened into a powerful spring, arms spread wide. He let out a loud, despairing wail as he leaped, legs flailing as if he were trying to run upon the air.
In the sudden and terrible silence, everyone heard the awful sound when he hit the ground.
Things got loud and chaotic for a while. Screaming, shouting.
Noise, movement. Oleg yanked up one of the flounces of Nina’s skirt and tore it off. He pushed aside the soggy, blood-soaked rag in her hand, and pressed the new, somewhat dryer wad of cloth against Aaro’s wound. He placed her hand upon it, and then covered it with his own.
“Do you, ah, want another piece of the skirt for him?” she asked, jerking her chin in Dmitri’s direction.
“No,” Oleg said.
“No? Isn’t he your nephew? Doesn’t he work for you?”
“He did. Let him bleed. If he lives, I will deal with him later.”
She grabbed Aaro’s cold hand, feeling for his pulse. At first she could not find it, but there it was. Faint, but there. Hanging on.
She was crying, she realized. And she didn’t care. She was so far beyond embarrassment now. Like the bare tits. Who gave a shit. About anything. Rain poured down, harder than ever. The sky wept. All of existence wept with her.
Presently, people showed up who seemed to know what they were doing. They gently pushed her away from Aaro and got to work on him.
Someone wrapped a jacket around her shoulders and tried to make her get up. She refused to move, just sat there on the boards, watching them minister to him. Her eyes focused on Aaro’s gun, sticky with blood. It lay forgotten, half hidden beneath the bloody rags of her dress. Voices began to register. The first one she understood filled her with panic. Oleg, as they strapped Aaro onto the gurney.
“. . . want him airlifted to Denver. I will not have my Sasha taken to your local hospital. He must have the very best.”
“But, sir, it’s an extra forty minutes, and he’s lost so much blood.”
“I’ve arranged for two liters of O negative to be waiting in the helicopter. It will be landing in the pad on top of the Convention Center, in ten minutes,” Oleg said firmly. “You will accompany us.”
“No!” Nina sprang to her feet. “No, you can’t!”
Oleg’s eyebrow twitch was so eerily similar to Aaro’s, it was unnerving. “I most certainly can,” he said. “My Sasha will not go to a substandard country hospital to be tended by dogs and pigs.”
“My Sasha! My Sasha!” Her voice was quivering. “You always say that! That’s your problem, Oleg! That’s always been your problem!”
Both brows shot up, affronted. “Oh?”
“You think he’s yours! That he belongs to you! But he doesn’t!
He belongs to himself! That’s what makes him special, but you don’t get it! You just keep trying to make him part of you! Give it up! Let him go!”
“Calm down, my dear,” he said. “You’re delirious.”
“I won’t let you take him!” She lunged toward the gurney.
People grabbed her and held her back. “He’s been trying his whole goddamned life to get away from you! I will not let you take him back!”
“You will have nothing to say about it,” Oleg said, his voice steely. “I will do what is best for my son.”
Nina lunged for Aaro’s gun, grabbing it from beneath the folds of the bloody cloth on the ground. She swung it up, aiming at Oleg’s chest. “No!” She stared around wildly. “Don’t let him control you!” she yelled at them. “It’s what he does! Don’t let him decide!”
Panicked voices swelled around them, but Oleg did not flinch.
He stared at her for a moment.
So different from Rudd’s coercion. Oleg’s felt like a quiet, smothering blanket of absolute authority. He stepped forward, his big, bloodstained hands seized hers, forcing the gun barrel down. He pried her hands loose, and took the gun, slipping it into his pocket. “No, my dear,” he said gently. “He is mine, and I will take him.”
She stood there, frozen with despair. Her head swam, her vision blurred.
“. . . certainly I don’t intend to press charges.” Oleg’s voice blared back into focus. “Anyone can see that the poor girl is out of her head. God knows what she’s just been through. Just look at her. Poor thing.”
Sure. They could look all they wanted. It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered. The jacket placed on her shoulders slipped to the ground as she watched them wheel Aaro away, with Oleg stumping along close behind. Aaro’s face was so still.
Beaded with rain.
Panic rose up inside her. This was it, her last glimpse of him.
She wanted to run after him, to beg them to let her stay with him, but her muscles wouldn’t move. She would not even have that bitter solace, of being with him at the end. If he died from his wound. If he died from the drug. Either way, she would not be there to hold his hand.
This was all she got.
She flung her head back and let the rain mix with the tears until someone came up to her, pulling her inside, out of the rain.
Setting her down, who knew where. She didn’t care. It didn’t matter.
A sting in her arm, and it all faded blessedly away.
Aaro stared at the sunlight that streamed through sheer curtains. He looked around at the room, when it finally came into focus.
Too comfortable and luxurious to be a normal hospital room, but too bland and antiseptic to be an actual house. Telltale signs of a medical facility, like the grab bars and handicapped toilet that he could see through the bathroom door. He tried to get up onto his elbow, and thudded back down, with a whistling gasp of agony.
Ah,
fuck.
So that was how it was. Bummer.
He was pinned to an IV rack. There was a snarl of confused, bloody memories in his mind. Desperation. Hopelessness. The B doses, found, and then lost again. The loss meant death. But he was alive. Wasn’t he? He looked down at himself. With this much pain, he had to be alive. Only life hurt this much.
Nina.
Why wasn’t Nina here? He could think of a bunch of reasons why Nina might not be there. None of them were good.
He tried getting up again, and sweet holy shit, it
hurt.
But he couldn’t just lie here like a lump. He ripped the IV off, left the needle dripping, and choreographed movement to utilize gravity as much as possible, to spare his torn abdominal muscles. Finally, he was on his feet, blood seeping through the bandages. He was in a hospital gown, the kind that tied in back and let a guy’s ass hang out. Great.
He took a step. The world did a big three-sixty, and went dark.
He came to on the floor, a frowning face hanging over him. He knew the face, but wished he didn’t. Angry, harsh, pinched. Not flattered by being seen from below. Who . . . ?
Oh, Jesus. Rita, the hell-bitch. His stepmother, only nine years older than he, putting her in her late forties now. But she looked older. Once so beautiful, but now, she looked like she was pulled tight over angular bones that were too large for the shrunken bag of her skin.
She gazed down at him with distaste.
“I guess I’m not in heaven,” he said to her. “Not if you’re here. So this is just regular life, right? Or is it hell?”
Her frown line struggled to engage in her Botox-numbed brow. “Charming as you ever were, I see. Oleg!” she called.
“Your offspring is showing his usual intelligence, lying on the floor, bleeding like a slaughtered goat. Come deal with him. Because I absolutely cannot.”
She stalked out, and left him on the floor, bemused. Oleg?
The black rubber tip of the aluminum cane planted itself on the floor a couple of inches from his nose, with polished black shoes behind it. Perfectly pressed cuffs. He let his eyes slide on up to his father’s face.
They stared at each other, in blatant fascination.
Son of a bitch. He wouldn’t have been surprised at the barrel of a gun, or a knife’s edge, or even poison from Oleg. But high-end medical care in a swank private clinic—that surprised him.
Oleg sat in a chair next to the bed, folding his hands over his cane. A pair of male nurses came in, hoisting Aaro up, getting him back into the bed, reinserting the IV.
“I thought you wanted me dead,” Aaro finally said.
“Never that, my son. I wanted you with me, fulfilling your potential and the promise of your heritage.”
Aaro suppressed the adolescent eye roll with some difficulty.
“Where is Nina?” he asked. “Is she all right?”
“Nina is fine,” Oleg said dismissively. “I do not wish to talk of Nina.”
Like he gave a fuck what Oleg wanted to talk about. “How did she get away from Rudd? I know it wasn’t thanks to me.”
“Me,” Oleg said modestly. “Rudd leaped off the terrace railing, onto the rocks below. Had delusions of grandeur. Thought he could fly.”
“Oh,” Aaro said. After a long, confused pause, he added,
“Thank you. For saving her life.”
“And yours,” Oleg said pointedly.
Aaro nodded. “And mine. Of course.”
“So stiff,” Oleg said mournfully. “So formal.”
“It has been a while,” Aaro pointed out.
“Yes, it has,” Oleg said. “Twenty-one years, four months, twenty-two days, and give or take eight hours.”
“Ah, yeah. Long time. So, ah. Where is Nina, then?”
Irritation flashed across Oleg’s face. “Causing trouble, no doubt. A more stubborn, irritating, persistent female I have yet to come across.”
“You got that right. But you didn’t answer my question.”
“She’s been hounding me.” Oleg sounded aggrieved. “Phone calls, police, lawyers, what have you. She wanted to see you. But I was not obliged to tell her where we were keeping you. Not that anyone could have compelled me, of course, but still. The principle of the thing.”
“Keeping me? I don’t want to be kept.” He struggled up against stabbing pain. “Why didn’t you let her come to me?”
Oleg’s face hardened. “She defied me. Openly, in public. She brandished a gun at me, Sasha. She dared to scold me. And you expect me to invite the bitch into our life?”
“Yeah, well. The scolding. You get used to that,” Aaro said.
“She should be here with me. She’s my wife. Never call her a bitch again.”
Oleg’s eyebrow twitched, but he let it pass. “She said she was your wife, too. She had no documentation to that effect, however.”
Aaro thudded back onto his pillow, sweating with the effort.
“That’s going to change real soon,” he said. “I need to see her.”
“What’s the rush?” his father asked. “She seems like an exhausting personality. Very intense. Wouldn’t you rather get stronger first? Relax a little, before you face her again?”
“No,” Aaro said. “I want her now.”
Oleg’s eyes were hooded and inscrutable. “So it’s like that.”
“Oh, yeah,” Aaro said. “It is
so
like that.”
Honesty had never been a wise course of action around Oleg, who could twist anything to fit his own agenda, but Aaro didn’t have it in him to be crafty, not when he was this desperate.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday,” Oleg said.
Aaro tried to crunch the numbers. The sun had the color of late afternoon. “What . . . you mean . . . but the fund-raising party was Saturday.” He counted, and counted again. It didn’t add up.
“That’s right. You were unconscious, in and out. For five days.”
What the hell? He should be dead, or dying, at least. It was day six. He felt like six kinds of shit, for sure, but he didn’t feel like he was on his way out. He felt like clawing his way back to Nina.
Through giant spiders or poisonous green slime or solid rock. He wanted to
move.
“Nina’s OK?” he insisted. “Everything is fine? With her health?”
“She certainly seems feisty enough,” Oleg said. “Though she hasn’t come around today or yesterday. Perhaps she’s gotten bored and moved on. God save me from a troublesome woman.”
“She thinks I’m dead,” Aaro blurted. “That’s why she stopped coming.”
Oleg’s eyes narrowed. “How’s that?”
He explained swiftly, about Kasyanov’s A and B doses of psi-max. Oleg scowled thoughtfully throughout the strange account.
“You’ve shown no such symptoms, my son,” he said. “And you do not have the vibration of a person who has been altered by ar-tificial chemicals. Dmitri had it, assuredly. That turd Rudd did, too. Not you.”
“What happened to Dmitri?” he asked.
“Dead,” Oleg said, waving his hand as if fanning away a bad odor. “Thank God. At first, he seemed to improve. Then the day before yesterday, he began raving. His speech became disordered. It became impossible to care for him. No one could stay in the same room with him.”
“Why not?”
Oleg shrugged. “Strange things happened. Visions. People saw ghosts, snakes, monsters. He died of cerebral hemorrhaging, early yesterday morning. Everyone was relieved to have him gone.”
“He wanted to be your heir,” Aaro said.
Oleg’s face hardened. “He was not good enough.”
“No one ever was,” Aaro said.
Oleg was silent for a heavy moment. “You would have been,”
he said. “If you had only behaved. If you had made the smallest effort.”
“I couldn’t,” Aaro said. “That Sasha in your imagination who behaved, the one who agreed with you and was glad to take your orders, he was never me.” He pressed against the pain in his belly. “If only I hadn’t been me, I would have been just perfect.”
“I have seen how you make your money,” Oleg said. “You do well enough. An independent contractor, clearing a half a million a year. Not bad. Not a shameful level of prosperity. By some standards.”
Aaro braced himself. He knew where this was going.
“With me, you could add two zeros to that figure,” Oleg said softly. “At least, Sasha. More likely double that, or more. Per year.”