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It’s as if someone’s blindfolded me—or cut out my eyes.

“Let me use your phone for a bit,” I tell Lyudmila when she returns, and she hands it to me before discreetly disappearing from the room.

As soon as she’s gone, I call my sister and ask her to get Chloe if she’s still awake.

If I can’t see my zaychik, at least I’ll hear her voice.

“First tell me how Slava is,” Alina says.

I swiftly fill her in on his condition—Lyudmila has already informed her about the salmonella diagnosis—and again ask to speak to Chloe.

“Give me a minute.” Alina’s voice holds a peculiar note. I hope she’s not getting another migraine, though I wouldn’t be surprised if she were, given the events of the night.

I’m not prone to headaches, yet my temples feel like they’re getting pounded by hammers.

I wait impatiently for Chloe to get on the phone. I probably should’ve called earlier instead of letting Lyudmila keep them apprised of the situation, but I needed to know what was happening with Slava first. The fear was like a boulder on my chest, but now I can finally breathe—and talk like a rational human being.

An hour ago, I was on the verge of ripping out the medical staff’s throats with my bare teeth over their attempts to make us wait our turn for admission.

Luckily, money speaks even in this neck of the woods, so as soon as I told the ER receptionist that I will make a million-dollar donation to their children’s department if my son is treated immediately, things got much smoother, and I didn’t have to resort to more extreme measures—like, say, planting bullets in a few of the denser heads.

“Nikolai, hi.” Chloe’s soft voice is like a warm blanket wrapping around me, lessening the pounding in my head and unlocking the tension in my neck and shoulders. I didn’t realize until this moment how tightly bunched they’d gotten.

Turning away from Slava’s bed, I walk over to the window to make sure I don’t wake him. “Hi, zaychik. How are you?”

“Better now that I know you and Slava are safe,” she says quietly, and I hear a small hitch in her breathing. “I was so worried, with the storm and all.”

My chest squeezes with tenderness. “We’re fine. We made it.” Keeping my voice low, I tell her all about the awful trip—how sick Slava had been throughout, and how we had to stop a dozen times for him to throw up and go to the bathroom in the pouring rain. How I kept wishing I were the one whose insides were being wrung inside out, and how terrified I’d been that we’d get to the hospital too late.

“I knew children get sick,” I say raggedly. “And I knew Slava might catch something one day, even though he’s strong and healthy. What I didn’t know was that it would feel like this… like someone was sawing through my heart with a dull knife, cutting it open one cell at a time.”

“Of course.” Chloe’s tone is soft, gently sympathetic. “Parents always feel that way when something’s not right with their children. Mom once told me she didn’t know what worry meant until she had me—and then she no longer knew what it was like to exist without worry.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Great. Just great.”

“She also told me she wouldn’t trade being my mom for the world.” She pauses, then asks quietly, “Would you? Trade being Slava’s father for peace of mind?”

“Fuck, no.” I glance at the tiny figure on the bed, and the tight, uncomfortable feeling I sought to avoid in the beginning invades my chest again. This time, though, I recognize it as worry. Worry and deep, all-consuming love. A different kind of love from the obsessive passion Chloe awakens in me, but one that’s no less potent.

I’d kill for them both.

I’d die for them both.

If I lost either one, I don’t know how I’d go on.

“So when do you think you’re coming home?” Chloe asks, and as with Alina, I catch a strange inflection in her voice. Not a tightness, precisely, but something slightly off.

“We should be back before the evening,” I say, glancing over at a clock. It’s five a.m., almost morning, though it’s still dark outside. “Zaychik… is everything okay?”

Chloe’s tone is now noticeably strained. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You tell me. Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing. Just… come home, and we’ll talk.”

“Talk? What about? Did something happen while I’ve been gone?”

“No, of course not.” She takes a breath. “It’s fine. Everything is fine. Just tired from being up all night, that’s all.”

She’s lying. I’m certain she is lying, and I’m about to press her for answers when Pavel walks into the room.

“Masha’s on the phone,” he says curtly, handing me his device. “The operation is finally on. He’s coming to her place in fifteen minutes.”