Demyan & Ana (11 page)

Ana felt Koldan’s arm find her waist, holding tight.

“… She won’t breathe and her heart won’t beat,” Viviana finished.

Chapter Eleven

Demyan

She was sleeping. Demyan’s tiny two kilogram daughter rested inside an incubator. She was dark-haired, like him. No doubt blue-eyed, too, but he couldn’t be sure until she woke up and opened her eyes. The tiny creature looked like Gia. The way her nose curved to the tip, the pout of her pink lips, and the height of her cheekbones.

Just like her mother but for the black lashes fanning her pale skin.

Skin the doctor explained had been blue when they finally pulled her from Gia’s body.

Small, heart-shaped bandages held the oxygen tubes secure to her puffy cheeks. A feeding tube had been inserted through her right nostril. Leads for monitors were placed on her chest and stomach, recording her respiratory actions and heartrate. She was naked but for a diaper and yellow hat that seemed to swallow her little body whole.

Demyan didn’t know what to do.

“She’s a little tiny but seems mostly healthy,” his mother said softly. “They’re concerned about the oxygen loss. They’ll do more tests over the next couple of weeks and whatever results you get should give you some kind of outlook on what to expect. There’s the long term to consider, but you won’t be able to know how this will have affected her until she’s a bit older. Say like when she should be reaching normal milestones.”

He was hearing his mother, but the words weren’t adding up.

“Uh …” Demyan cleared his dry throat. “I don’t understand.”

“Brain damage,” Anton clarified. “It’s a possibility. A small one, but it is there. Demyan—”

“Brain damage?” he asked hoarsely. “My baby might have brain damage?”

It was something Demyan hadn’t considered.

“Ana went without oxygen for several minutes. Close to the same amount of time. She was fine,” his father rushed to say. “Don’t jump to conclusions just yet.”

Demyan nodded, but on the inside, everything was recoiling with fear and panic.

The NICU had wide open windows as a way to allow a safe method for family and friends to visit the babies. Familiar faces of men Demyan had grown up surrounded by stared in through the glass. Bratva men who were there for his father, Ivan, and himself. His heart was breaking, his world was shattering and he couldn’t keep control.

“Papa,” he started to say, something awful swirling in his stomach as he stared at the men looking back.

“Close the curtains,” Anton demanded.

“Anton—”

“Close the damn curtains, Vine!” he shouted. “Now!”

Demyan’s mother shut out the outside world just in time. The sickness rising in his stomach spilled into a garbage can as the tears fell. Demyan’s knees hit the hard floor with a crack as he grappled for purchase on the rim of the can. Dry heaves were followed by his sobs. Cries violent enough to shake his entire frame. The bile burned on the back of his tongue. A dizzying sensation had him swaying on the spot. The edges of his vision darkened.

“He’s sick, so he needs to leave. He can’t be in here with an immune-compromised infant,” Demyan heard a nurse say in a way that had his anger boiling. “Even if it is his daughter.”

“He isn’t sick,” Viviana snapped. “He’s in
pain
. His fiancée is on life support and his newborn daughter is in the NICU.”

“Vine—”

“No, Anton. She should know better. I don’t give a fuck who you are, because I sure as shit know who
we
are. You might not know us right now, but trust that you will before the day is done. You need to leave,” Viviana demanded.

“Excuse me? You can’t order me—”

“Get out and send in a new nurse or so help me God, lady, you won’t have a damned job to come to tomorrow!”

Demyan felt the strong arm of his father wrap around his chest. Anton held tight, rocking his son in a side-to-side motion gently. More tears fell. His teeth clenched so hard beneath his tightened jaw that they literally fucking ached. Just like his heart and soul.

“Please don’t tell me it’s going to be okay,” Demyan managed to say. The trembling in his hands covered the rest of his body. “Please.”

“I won’t, son. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.”

Demyan wasn’t sure how long he stayed like that. Immobile and stricken by his grief and shock. Apparently long enough for an older nurse to take the previous position of the one his mother kicked out. Anton finally let his son go to stand. Demyan glanced up at the woman when she placed her hand on his clenched fist. Her soft stare and tender smile remind him of Sasha, his grandmother who had died a few months after his twenty-third birthday.

“Hi. My name is Jeannie,” the woman said, speaking in a hushed tone. “I’m going to be taking care of your new baby girl for the rest of the shift. Does she have a name?” 

Demyan nodded. Yes, she had a name. “Vera. Gia wanted to call her Vera.”

“Okay. That’s a great name. Have you held her? We can get you cleaned up and we’ll be careful with the tubes and wires. If you want to sit and rock her, we can do that, too.”

A passing look at the sleeping baby in the incubator sent Demyan’s panic spinning out of control again. She was too tiny for him to hold. He would probably break her. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can, Demyan,” his father said. “She’s your daughter.”

“No, she’s so little. I don’t want to hurt her.”

“I understand your concern. Don’t be worried about her size,” the nurse said. “It’s extremely important for her to have skin-to-skin contact with someone, especially one of her parents. Right now, it’ll be even more beneficial for her to have it. She’s been out in the world for how long?”

Demyan blinked, unsure. “A few hours, maybe.”

Anton coughed. “About twelve, actually.”

Had that much time passed already?

Jeannie smiled sadly. “And she’s not felt her mother or father once. The world is not the same as where she spent the last few months growing and thriving. It’s much more frightening without some kind of familiar comfort. She’s heard your voice before. She’ll know who you are. The way you smell, how you sound, and the way your touch feels. It’s the best kind of love for a baby. She needs to feel you, okay. Please.”

Demyan couldn’t argue with that. He wasn’t allowed to see Gia, yet, for whatever reason. He could do this for Vera. “I can’t hold her. Not yet.”

“You don’t have to hold her to touch her. Let’s wash your hands and arms first.”

Under the nurse’s supervision and instruction, Demyan scrubbed his skin until it felt raw. The older lady spoke to his parents all the while, discussing Vera’s condition and the circumstances of her traumatic birth. Demyan almost felt as if he was watching the scene from above and not actually in the moment like he truly was.

Demyan waited as the nurse opened up the two portholes on the side of the incubator. She waved him over and explained that even just his hands on the baby’s skin could and would comfort her. She might seem like she was okay sleeping, but it was very likely she still knew things were different around her.

The moment Demyan’s palms lay flat to his daughter’s stomach and chest, pain saturated him from the inside out. Her skin felt brand new against his. Warm and soft. Vera didn’t stir. Demyan felt her chest rise rhythmically and her tiny heartbeat. Black eyelashes fluttered for a brief second, but she didn’t open her eyes.

His baby.

His beautiful, sweet baby.

Demyan’s knees hit the floor again. He was eye-level with the infant in the incubator. Resting his forehead against the hard plastic, he watched his daughter.

He cried for all that she wouldn’t have.

So hard.

• • •

Documents were passed over with more care than Demyan had ever seen paper be handled by. Ivan scribbled his name across several of the sheets before giving them back to the waiting nurse.

“You understand, Mr. Lavrov, that once the ventilator tube is removed and the—”

“I understand,” Ivan interrupted coolly.

Detached, Demyan felt his body float away again.

“For legal reasons, we have to explain it one last time.”

Ivan sighed shakily. Eva cried.

Demyan blinked, breathed, and clenched his fists at his sides, but he didn’t feel alive.

Odd how that worked. The woman he loved was brain dead only feet away, but she looked like she might feel more alive than he did.

Demyan had the hardest time to look at Gia’s prone form in the hospital bed, blankets tucked in tight around her thin frame. There was no blood staining her skin and the bandages wrapping the bullet wound she sustained to her left temple were hidden by her long hair. He knew some of her blonde hair had been shaved when they attempted to operate, but it was a section underneath.

Silently, he listened as the doctor went through the procedures one last time. “The machines keeping her lungs and heart alive will be stopped. When the monitor shows a flat line for a designated period, the time will be called for death and the leads monitoring her rhythms will officially be silenced and turned off.”

The room was too quiet.

In a short time, what life was left in Gia would be gone.

It already was, Demyan knew. There was no coming back from being brain dead. The life of an invalid, where she wouldn’t even be able to open her eyes, was not something Gia would ever want. Demyan didn’t want it for her, and neither did her parents.

It was heartbreaking and unfair, but it was best for her.

Demyan kept reminding himself of that. It didn’t help much.

Somehow, Demyan found himself staring at Gia while the nurse and doctor did one last check. The tube in her throat was removed and the leads monitoring her breathing turned off. Ivan and Eva stood on either side of the bed together, each holding one of Gia’s hands. Demyan couldn’t move, not even when Ivan asked him over. He was stuck. Invisible cement weighed him down.

Minutes passed, but not a lot. Demyan wasn’t sure how long it would take and the silence was so thick he couldn’t even force himself to ask. The tightness in his chest increased as he stared at the place where Gia’s wouldn’t rise. Maybe he thought something amazing would happen.

This life didn’t offer miracles.

Not for him.

When the monitor beeped, a flat red line crossing the screen, a crack made fissures across Demyan’s heart, shattering his soul. Every head in the room turned to look at him. His heartbreak hadn’t been silent. He wished to God it would have been, but it wasn’t. One, aching sorrow-filled cry escaped the confines of his mind.

“I’m so sorry,” Demyan whispered.

It wasn’t meant for the people still breathing.

• • •

Demyan sat on the edge of his double bed in his old room at his parents’ home. The darkness of the night saturated the space but for the light from the moon high in the sky reflecting through the window. Through the baby monitor, he listened to Vera’s gentle puffs of air making a soothing whooshing sound with every exhale.

Three weeks after her birth, she was cleared to go home. She passed the most important tests. Her hearing and vision seemed fine. Oxygen wasn’t needed as the level in her blood was perfect and she breathed without issue on her own. Her motor skills were on par with a newborn born a month and a half early, and if anything, she was at the same pace of a baby who wasn’t premature. Vera took to a bottle without trouble and didn’t seem to have any digestive problems.

They’d only been home three days.

Well, not really home as it was his parents’, but close enough. Demyan refused to go back to the apartment where Gia was killed. Hired movers were already contracted to remove the belongings from the place and move them to a home Demyan purchased a week earlier.

For now, he and Vera would stay where they were.

A knock on the opened bedroom door drew Demyan’s attention to where his father stood, somber and silent. “Yeah?”

“How’re you doing?”

“Fine,” Demyan said.

“Fine is a relatively useless term, Demyan. It’s not a real answer, especially in this situation.”

Okay, then.

“I feel like I don’t know how to breathe anymore. I keep wondering what the barrel of my gun tastes like. Which would be quicker, the bullet to my temple or one in my mouth?”

Anton frowned. “Are these thoughts I need to be concerned about or are they actions you wished you could take?”

Demyan waved at the blinking baby monitor whispering sounds. “Life won’t let me go.”

“Ivan wanted to know when would be a good time for Gia’s sisters to come and visit Vera.”

A flippant shrug fell from Demyan’s shoulders. He wasn’t sure what Gia’s family wanted from him, frankly. They could come and go as they pleased. His daughter was just as much their blood as his, but they kept assuming his permission was needed for their presence.

“Whenever they want.”

“I’m going to have to go before your mother does, you know,” Anton said offhandedly.