Chapter 307: Awake

The doctor stared at her.

He had known her since she was a child. He had set her broken wrist when she was nine and given her sweets when she cried. Now, he looked at her, pale and straight in her gray dress, and he did not see a child.

"I understand," he said.

"Good." She opened the door, and he went out. The guards at the end of the hall stood stiffly, staring at the ceiling. The door closed behind him, and the room was quiet again.

Helena and Carina stood side by side, looking down at the man on the floor.

"There is one thing I could do," Carina said. She said it slowly, as if she were still working it out.

"The men need a Don. They need to see him. They need to hear his voice and see his face and know that he is standing." She turned her head. "And there is a man in a bed, in a quiet clinic, with that exact face."

Helena went still.

"He is waking up. You said so. He has the same eyes, the same bones, the same voice." Carina’s gaze was steady. "He is the Don’s twin. Nobody has seen him in twenty years. Nobody even knows he is alive. If he walked into this house in a white suit with his arm in a sling, who would know?"

"Kontino is not a mafia lord."

"No. But he does not have to be. He only has to stand there and smile." Her mouth moved. "I will do the rest. I will tell him what to say. I will run the men, and the business, and the books. For a few weeks. Until things settle."

Helena was silent for a long time.

It was a dangerous plan. It was an insane plan. It would depend on a man who had been asleep for twenty years, with a machine for a heart, pretending to be his brother, the cruelest man in the country. It could fall apart in a day.

But it worked in her favor.

She saw that as soon as she looked at it. With Kontino at the head of the house, there would be no more guards at her door. No more locked rooms, no more cut wires. They could end this. They could search for Sienna in every port and every sea. They could bring her home.

They could be a family again.

"Yes," she said. "I agree."

They left before noon.

It was easier than she had feared. The house was in a frenzy of wedding work, and nobody looked twice at two women walking quickly down the back stairs. Carina led the way through the servants’ passage. She took a key from her pocket and opened a low green door that Helena had never seen. A narrow path ran along the wall behind it, past the garbage bins and the laundry.

A gray car waited at the end, with its engine running.

Helena had changed. She wore a plain dark coat over her slip, with a scarf over her hair, and the great ivory gown hung forgotten in a closet upstairs. She sat in the back and pressed her hands together and watched the world go by through the window.

Carina drove.

They did not speak. The fields rolled past, brown and gold in the autumn light. Helena found that she was counting the minutes, and that her heart was going faster with every mile.

He will not be awake yet. It has only been two days. The doctor said slowly. He may not wake at all. He may wake and not know me. The car turned down the narrow lane between the tall hedges.

The green hallway was just as cold as before.

A nurse came to meet them. She looked at Helena’s face and said nothing, only turned and led the way. They passed the closed doors, one after another, and Helena heard her own footsteps as if from a long way off.

The nurse stopped at the last door. "He woke up this morning," she said softly. "A few hours ago. He has been asking for you."

Helena’s knees went weak.

"He is still very tired. His legs have not yet recovered. He cannot stand without help." The nurse touched the panel. "Please be gentle with him."

The door slid open.

The room was bright. Someone had pulled back the curtains, and the pale autumn sun fell across the white bed. The machine in the corner hummed. A green line moved on the screen, quick and strong.

A man sat propped against the pillows.

He was thin. His hair was gray, and it lay flat against his forehead as though someone had combed it with their fingers. His hands rested on the blanket, long and pale, with the veins standing out. He was looking at the door.

He was looking at her. "Helena," said Kontino.

His voice was dry and cracked, like a thing that had not been used. But it was his voice. It was the same low, warm voice that had said her name in a garden, so long ago, with the sun in his hair.

She could not move.

He looked at her the way he always had. He looked at her as if no time had passed at all, as if he had only stepped out of the room to fetch a book and come back. His eyes were wide and soft and a little bewildered, and they searched her face, not for the lines, or the gray, or the twenty years. They searched it only for her.

Helena held her mouth with both hands.

A sound came out of her that she did not know she could make. "Where is Katalia?"

He said it at once, before she could cross the room. His eyes had gone past her to the door, to the hall, to the empty space where a small girl in a yellow dress should have been standing.

"Where is our baby girl?" He pushed the blanket back.

"Kontino,"

"Where is she?" He swung his legs over the side of the bed. They were thin, and they shook. "She was five. She was in the nursery. I told her to hide..." His voice cracked. "I told her I would be right back."

He put his feet on the floor. The nurse started forward. "Sir, please, you are not ready to..."

He stood.

For one heartbeat, he was upright. Then his knees folded, and he began to fall, and Helena was across the room before she knew she had moved. She caught him in her arms. He was lighter than she remembered. He smelled of soap and medicine and, under it, faintly, of the man he had always been.

She held him.

She held him as tightly as she could, with her face pressed into his shoulder and her arms wrapped around his back. He put his arms around her. They shook. He was holding on to her as if she were the only solid thing in the world.

"I am here," she said. "I am here. I am here." She did not know if she was saying it to him or to herself.

He pulled back a little.

He looked at her face, and his hand came up and touched her cheek, very lightly, with two cold fingers. He wiped away a tear. And then he smiled.

It was the same smile. It was the same sweet, crooked, helpless smile of the man she had married, the one that had always made her feel as though she were the cleverest person in the room. Twenty years of sleep had not taken it. Twenty years of grief had not taken it from her memory.

It broke her heart, and it put it back together. "Tell me," Kontino said gently. "Tell me everything."