Page 114 of Scarlet Sins

All those things clang in my ears.

And my heart is aching. My soul hurting.

I want Demyan. I want to smell his scent, bury my nose against his warm throat, feel the beat of his pulse, the rush of blood. I want his strength and the gentle under the hard. I just want him.

Safe.

Here.

Now.

Sasha starts to shake. “Mama? Where’s Daddy?”

“Shh.”

His head pops up and he grabs my face. “Scared. I don’t like!”

“It’s okay, Sasha. Kara is here. Aunt Alina. Olga.”

“Milk, Sasha?” Olga asks and offers it, but he bats her hand away.

I mouth sorry to her and stroke his hair as he grabs my face again.

“Mama?”

“Daddy’s coming here soon,” I say, not sure if it’s an assurance or a lie. I glance about and spy a pack of cards on the coffee table, and I gasp. “Sasha! Look!”

He does.

“Do you want to play a game?”

“Yeah, Sasha,” Kara says, “wanna play Sasha Go?”

His little face lights up.

And he nods, letting me go and wiggling down.

Sasha Go is a made-up game that I think he only knows the rules to. Or maybe there aren’t any. It consists of him mostly winning—although sometimes he takes pity on us—and lots of giggles and card throwing.

Kara explains this to Alina and Olga and we all sit, with Sasha making Kara hand out the cards for the game.

“Oh, this is like snap,” Alina says, laughing. “With added flying cards.”

We all play, and I try to keep Sasha distracted and happy. But I’m also trying to distract myself, because in the back of my mind, the panic grows.

I don’t know where Demyan is, and Ilya deftly ignored me. I know steamrolling when I see it. And that’s what he did. Steamrolled over facts and details.

So I’m sitting here with Demyan having a supposedly dead phone while he works. Except I don’t buy it.

I keep coming back to that. Maybe his phone is out of juice. But he’s not doing something safe. If he was, he’d have powered up, borrowed a phone.

Something’s happened and each time I close my eyes, I see the bullets rip into the men outside the club. I see the bullet hit Ilya.

But it isn’t the men. It isn’t Ilya.

It’s Demyan in my head.

And he’s not getting up.

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