Aria’s POV
She was breathing.
That was the only thing I let myself register at first, kneeling in the wet grass beside her, my hands hovering uselessly over a body that looked too small and too still to belong to the woman who’d stood in Romanov’s study demanding her own survival.
“She’s alive,” one of the guards said, fingers pressed to her throat. “Pulse is weak, but it’s there.”
Romanov crouched on her other side, his voice sharp and controlled even as his jaw betrayed the tension coiled beneath it. “What happened to her?”
“No visible gunshot wounds,” the guard said, running practiced hands along her ribs, her skull, the back of her neck. “Looks like blunt trauma. Possibly a fall, possibly worse.”
“Get her inside,” Romanov ordered. “Now.”
They moved her carefully, and I followed
