-Emily-
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Ivan makes a startling reappearance. It is like watching some terrible possession; the man in front of me – this lethal, knife-wielding stranger, fingers damp with Molly's blood and eyes dark – softens rapidly, reverts, transforms back into the Ivan who smiled his way through unspeakable acts of manipulation and span with me through the streets of Red Square. The bloodlust simmers and stills. The hunger in his expression is replaced with grey-faced terror.
It matches my own.
I feel myself undergo a similar transformation: a plug is pulled, the anger and adrenaline drains, a new fear solidifies in my stomach. Millie is on her hands and knees, skin glistening like wet white stone and mouth open in an exclamation of agony that is beyond sound, beyond vocalisation, so strained it tips into silence. Her fingers contract at their joints: she grips the concrete with such force I see little beads of blood at her cuticles, the crescents of taut skin at the base of her nails cut on the gravel. I watch her for a small eternity, shock-stunned. Realisation dawns. I am caught in this snapshot of time; fixed by an unseen taxidermic pin, behind my display glass, held down, helpless, Molly lying glaze-eyed on a sheet of red glass and Sherlock motionless, Trisha's killer gone, Ivan Yakovich stock-still, experiencing an identical self-paralysis.
Millie takes a shuddering inhalation, and then she looks up, her eyes wide and wild and utterly animal.
I am granted the luxury of motion once more.
I'm at her side, kneeling down, my hands on her shoulder, her arms, her skirts, warm and saturated with blood. She grips my wrists. I wrestle with panic. Panic is fatal; it is a gunshot, a dart, a shot of venom that hits the bloodstream and floods the senses with a wonderful, terrible toxin, a poison, rendering the body incapable and the mind irrational. For the sake of the dying woman on the alleyway floor, I cannot afford to be pierced by panic. Ivan is kneeling beside me now – I can see his shadow in my peripheral vision, smell the cologne, the blood – and there's a brittle clatter. The ivory knife is abandoned, tossed to one side. I succeed in laying her down. He tears her skirts at the waist. I clear a space. He rapidly unlaces the corset. Together we prepare this pavement theatre.
Millie makes another inhuman noise, her back arched – and then without warning she sighs, softens, and slips out of consciousness.
I slap her across the face with as much force as I am capable of delivering.
Ivan flinches as if I have struck him. He recoils from me, just as Millie's eyes open. She moans something wordless. I glance down. While my knowledge of childbirth is somewhat lacking, I know that there is far too much blood, an excess, to the point where I can watch it run in black rivulets in the cracks of the brickwork, following a geometric path to the drainage system in the street. I sit back, hopeless and helpless.
"I don't know what to do." I can taste copper on my tongue. "I don't know what to do."
There's no response. I look to Ivan, desperate in my desolation – and then I stop. He's doubled over, clutching the fabric of her skirt in his fists: the material is sopping, and I can see the blood gathering between his fingers. It falls in a stilted spattering of scarlet. He draws it out. At first, I think this is some panic-induced nervous breakdown, but then he turns his face to me, and any hope of co-operation is dashed to paper pieces. Conflict is a violent understatement: it is the expression of a mind torn in two, caught in a vicious tug of war, ripped clean down the middle. I see terror. I see lust.
"Ivan."
He drops the fabric. Millie's blood runs down his wrists. He looks at them, looks at her – glorious in her own gore, glossed with red as if dipped in molten ruby – and then turns back to me, wild-eyed. I am witness to warfare: a bloody struggle between Ivan and Trisha's killer, John's Iris, Aika's Howaito shi; I see it all in a grim cycle of want and hatred and fear and desire, and, as the first crystal droplet of sweat beads on his forehead, I begin to establish a victor.
"Помоги мне."
I translate the Russian. Help me. He doesn't give me chance to answer: he reaches forwards suddenly, mechanically, a puppet jerked by strings, for Millie. His fingers brush the red streaks of her thigh. I see the want in his eyes, the aching arousal – then he snatches his wrist back and grips it in his hand like some wild animal. He withdraws again, holding his head, keeping his thoughts contained, preventing his skull from bursting. I consider speaking, but decide that it would do more harm than good. Ivan continues tearing himself apart. Millie continues dying. I sit dumb and mute; a silent spectator, prey to panic.
There's a sharp, sudden intake of breath, and then Ivan tips his head back. He closes his eyes. His shoulders slacken, his arms fall loose and wet at his sides. I sense the defeat of one entity, only, at this moment in time, I'm not quite sure which. I don't know who is kneeling opposite me. It is a Russian roulette.
The pause continues for another minute – all the while Millie drifts further and further from reach – and then he looks up.
I could sob with relief.
He's broken, exhausted with his war against the part of his mentality that so frequently takes control, and yet Ivan, my Ivan, the Ivan with the self-awareness, is still there. The lust continues simmering behind his pale eyes, but it is a controlled fire; it is contained, and he is functioning. He swallows thickly, and then looks at me. Our eyes meet.
We turn back to our mutual interest.
Millie is shivering now, violently, as if her very skin is trying to shift from our touch. Her eyes lose their focus intermittently, and she keeps turning her head on the pavement, searching for something we can't see. She gasps every two minutes; I presume the intervals of heightened struggling mark the commence of contractions and, with each tense, the concrete is painted anew with diluted blood. Ivan is on the cusp of relapse – the control he is maintaining is taking a physical toll on his person: I see it in the trembling of his fingers, the way his jaw has locked, the sheen of sweat cutting through the gore on his forehead. He holds her down. I can only reassure her, tell her to stay awake, carry on. They are hollow words.
Time doesn't seem to progress. Millie opens her mouth to call out, only to be silenced by a new wave of pain: she chokes, asphyxiating on oxygen, nears blackout, forces herself to remain in this cyclical state of suffering. I feel warmth beneath my knees. The process repeats. It is ongoing.
I look down at her – colourless lips, sweat, drug-induced malnourishment, endless agony – and I make up my mind.
I'll keep it quick. I'll do it before Ivan has chance to react, and I'll stopper the suffering. It'll be swift and as painless as I can make it: a well-placed twist, jaw spun over shoulder, internal crack, shift of vertebrae. I lean forwards. Her eyes beg me to commit.
I'm reaching for her neck when I see it – it's half-masked by the blood, half-concealed, but it's there, it's real, and it marks a finish line. I abandon my mercy kill and spin around to face Ivan.
"Call an ambulance here. Now."
He hesitates, unwilling.
"Do you want her dead?" I pause. I process my poor choice of words. "Don't answer that."
"They will take her."
"Good. Make the call." He doesn't move. "Ivan, I can't do this. You can't do this. You killed the one woman who could." When he opens his mouth to contradict me, I cut across with, "If you love this woman, you make that call. If you don't, she's going to die, and so help me god I will break your neck before you can enjoy her here. Don't speak. Get your phone."
Ivan looks on at Millie without hope, and then reaches into his pocket. He taps the screen three times. The phone rings dully. I hear the catch of the receiver, then the tinny familiarity of: "Emergency. Which service do you require?"
Ivan explains as best he can with his broken vocabulary, and I turn to Millie. She's panting, straining at her invisible confines, back arched off the concrete and arms outstretched, as if caught mid-flight and pinned down on the pavement. I beg her to keep going. She doesn't hear me. Without warning, the contractions overlap and seize her spine in two clenched fists: her lips part and she screams, the sound of the dying. It is utterly unmistakable. There's a clatter as the phone is dropped mid-call. I feel useless, inefficient, touching her arms for the sake of doing something, holding on for self-grounding. Ivan begins to sob: he holds his skull as if re-living the past, sinks to his knees by her head. I am fascinated by his hand on her neck, the other palm-down on the pavement. The pain in parting is red and loud. I see grief.
There's a stifled moan, a full-bodied heaving – and then a new wash of blood and water and warmth, and then it is over. Suddenly, shockingly over. There is a baby at my knees; scarlet, skeletal, inhuman. I scream something incoherent at Ivan, who is dragged from his mind and back to the hellish reality.
We move as a dysfunctional unit: he tosses me his knife, I cut the thing fixing this parasite to Millie. I don't want to touch it. I don't know if it is alive. I can see the notches of its spine. Ivan looks at me, at it, and then takes a fistful of his shirt and pulls the fabric over his head. His chest is very white in the dark. For one, terrible second, I think London's White Iris Killer has made a startling reappearance and is undressing in preparation for a sick sort of consummation – but he simply balls his shirt and lifts the inhuman thing up, moves it away from me, keeps it contained.
Millie looks up at me, hazy and blood-spattered, and studies my face.
"Where is he?"
"Who?"
The words slip and slur in her mouth. "Sherlock."
I glance up. Sherlock hasn't stirred.
"He's gone to get help," I lie.
"Tell him there's a pain in my chest," she says, softly. "I think it might be–"
She stalls, then inhales sharply. I move forwards. She makes a small, choked noise of exclamation, as if she can't quite believe the sensation in her chest, and then she stills. She doesn't blink again.
I press two fingers to her neck. "No, no–" I look up. "Ivan." The scream stings. "Ivan–"
The mourning wail of the ambulance is my only response. Ivan's head jerks up. Blind with desperate panic, I turn to Millie and begin the chest compressions, in vain, convinced the pressure I am exerting will snap her glass ribs in two and pierce the heart that has ceased to beat. I see blue lights reflected in the blood on the floor. Ivan is standing, clutching the red bundle of cloth and skin like a lifeline, fevered, looking down at Millie's body. He opens his mouth. The ambulance volume peaks. Doors slam. I hear the rattle of stretcher wheels.
Slowly, and with the stilted movements of a man in agony, he extends his arms. The crush of material is held out to me. I see dark hair. I press down on Millie's chest once, twice, three times – and then I stop. I sit back breathless.
Footsteps sound on the street outside.
Unwillingly, I take the warm weight from Ivan. He makes a noise that is half sob, half moan of anguish, and then he bends down and retrieves his knife. It shakes violently in his grip.
By the time the first wave of paramedics round the corner – greeted by a massacre; Millie blue-lipped and glass-eyed, me wearing her blood like a pair of red gloves, Molly dead, Sherlock knocked beyond the reach of consciousness – Ivan Yakovich has slipped back into the network of black backstreets he came from.
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