Chapter 28 #3
“She’s stable. The doctor will speak with you.”
Stable. The word helps. A little.
He turns to me then, like he’s only just remembered I’m here. “You don’t have to do this.”
I look at him—at the way he’s trying to dismiss his own need for support before it has a chance to exist.
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
For one second, the mask slips.
He looks tired enough to break my heart. Then he nods once and leads me toward the elevator.
We ride up in silence.
When the doors open onto the private floor, I see them immediately. More men. Security. A nurse at the station pretending not to stare. A doctor in scrubs speaking in low tones to one of Aleksei’s people. This whole wing feels like it has already rearranged itself around his family.
Aleksei speaks briefly to the doctor, too low for me to hear, and I stay back where I am, near the windows, feeling like I’ve stepped into a place too intimate and too dangerous all at once.
Then he turns and motions me forward. His mother’s room is at the end of the hall.
I slow at the threshold. Inside, the room is too bright.
She is propped up in bed, paler than she should be, an IV in her arm, but awake. Her hair is brushed back from her face. The oxygen cannula at her nose makes something in my chest tighten painfully.
When she sees Aleksei, her expression changes immediately, softening.
He goes to her at once, all the hard edges gone, and takes her hand with a gentleness I have only seen in glimpses before. “Mama.”
Her fingers curl weakly around his. “Alyosha.” Her voice is thin, but smiling.
I stop just inside the room, suddenly aware that I may be intruding on something sacred.
Then his mother’s gaze shifts. To me.
And even half-sick, half-drugged, she notices everything.
Her eyes move from my face to Aleksei’s hand still holding hers, then back to me, and something like quiet understanding settles in them.
I have the absurd urge to straighten my clothes like I’m meeting royalty. Instead, I just stand there and try not to look as rattled as I feel.
Aleksei glances at me over his shoulder.
“This is Zatanna,” he says.
Not my assistant. Not a colleague. Just my name.
His mother looks at me for a long, assessing moment. Then, with the faintest smile, “So you’re Zatanna,” she says. “Hello, dear. My name is Daria. Welcome to our house.”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
Not because I’ve forgotten how to speak, but because there is something about the way she says my name that makes me feel suddenly too visible. Not judged exactly. More like recognized, and I’m not sure what she’s recognizing.
Aleksei’s mother, Daria is pale against the hospital sheets, the lines of illness too new on her face, but her eyes are sharp. Softer than his. Warmer. And still much too observant.
I manage, “Hi.”
Brilliant. Absolutely dazzling.
Her mouth curves faintly, as if she can hear exactly how stupid I think I sound. Then she coughs, a small, dry sound that makes Aleksei turn back to her immediately.
He adjusts her pillow, checks the water, murmurs something low in Russian that I don’t understand but somehow know is meant to soothe.
The whole room shifts around him. He isn’t the man from the jet or the villa or even the office.
He’s quieter here. Tighter. Careful in a way that makes my chest ache.
His mother touches his wrist weakly. “I’m fine,” she says, though clearly, she is not.
He doesn’t argue. He just nods like he’s humoring her.
After a moment, he straightens and says, “I’m going to speak to the doctor again.”
I nod quickly, because apparently, I am now the kind of woman who ends up in hospital rooms with mafia heirs and has no idea what to do with her hands.
“I’ll stay,” I say.
His eyes meet mine for one second. Just one. Then he steps out.
The room goes quiet.
Not awkwardly at first. More like everything is exhausted. The monitors hum softly. The IV drips. Outside the door, footsteps pass in the hall. I move closer to the bed, unsure whether I should sit, stand, vanish into the wall, or somehow transform into someone better suited to this.
His mother watches me the whole time. “You make him nervous,” she says softly.
I blink. “I’m sorry?”
Her smile deepens the smallest bit. “It is refreshing.”
I have absolutely no idea what to say to that. Luckily, I’m saved from answering by the door opening again.
I turn, expecting Aleksei. It isn’t him.
The man who walks in is older, tall, and carries himself with that effortless kind of menace rich men and violent men both seem to perfect. His suit is immaculate. His hair silver at the temples. His face…
My stomach drops. He has Aleksei’s mouth.
His father.
He stops just inside the room and lets his gaze sweep over me slowly, taking in everything with one glance. The smile that follows is polished and wrong.
“Well,” he says. “What do we have here?”
The words are light. The tone is not.
His mother’s face changes instantly. Whatever softness was there before hardens into something weary and guarded.
The man steps farther into the room, all smooth confidence and cold interest. “You must be the new one.”
I don’t answer. Mostly because every instinct I have is suddenly telling me not to.
He looks amused by my silence. “Pretty, too. That is unfortunate.”
My pulse starts to pound. Before I can decide whether that was an insult, a threat, or simply the kind of sentence a deeply evil person says for sport, another voice cuts across the room like a blade.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Aleksei.
He’s in the doorway now, and the shift in him is terrifying. Not loud. Not dramatic. Worse. Every line of him goes still and dangerous at once, his attention locking on the older man with the kind of focus that promises blood.
The older man turns slowly, smile widening by a fraction. “Alyosha.”
“Don’t call me that.”
The room suddenly feels too small for both of them. Too charged. Too full of old damage.
Aleksei moves inside without taking his eyes off the man. “You were told to stay away from her room.”
“I was concerned.”
“No, you weren’t.”
His father glances at the bed, at his wife, then back at me, as if assessing where everyone stands in some game only he understands. “I came to see your mother. I did not realize you’d brought company.”
The last word lands on me like something sticky.
I resist the urge to step backward. Aleksei notices anyway, and steps between us.
The motion is so automatic, so total, that it takes my breath for a second. He doesn’t even look at me while he does it. He just places his body there like a wall, like the decision was made before anyone else caught up.
His father sees that. And smiles.
That smile is the worst thing I’ve seen all day.
“Ah,” he says softly. “Now I understand.”
Aleksei’s voice goes flat. “Get out.”
His mother says, weak but clear, “Enough.”
All three of us look at her.
She’s pushed herself slightly upright in the bed, breath shorter now, but her eyes are sharp with something that makes all the male violence in the room feel briefly childish.
“I am ill,” she says. “Not dead. I will not have this at my bedside.”
The father’s smile fades. Not completely. Just enough.
He looks at her for a moment, then back at Aleksei. Then, to my growing horror, back at me.
“You should be careful,” he says.
The words are addressed to me, but they’re really for his son.
“I was,” Aleksei says, stepping forward one pace. “Until you walked in.”
Something moves in the elder man’s face. Annoyance, maybe. Or pleasure at getting exactly the reaction he wanted.
He adjusts his cuff. “This isn’t over.”
“No,” Aleksei says. “It’s not.”
For one bright, terrible second, I think he’s actually going to hit him in front of his mother, the doctor, God and everybody.
Instead, his father gives me one last long look, turns, and walks out as if he owns every hallway he enters.
The door closes behind him.
Silence.
Heavy. Immediate. Still vibrating.
I realize only then that I’ve been holding my breath.
Aleksei doesn’t move for a few seconds, staring at the door like he can see through it. His shoulders are rigid. His hands flex once at his sides.
His mother exhales slowly. “Alyosha.”
That pulls him back. He turns to her at once, the fury smoothing down enough to let him be her son again. He goes to her bedside, takes her hand, lowers his head briefly.
I stay where I am, heart still racing, trying to process the last three minutes and failing. Then his mother looks past him to me.
There is apology in her face. And warning. Both, somehow, at once.
I finally understand what Aleksei meant when he said his father likes possession. Because the man didn’t have to touch me to make me feel claimed by the danger of this family.
Aleksei turns then, follows his mother’s gaze, and sees my face properly. The rage that comes back into his expression is different this time. He crosses to me in two strides and lowers his voice. “Did he say anything else to you?”
I shake my head once. “No.”
But my voice sounds thin even to me.
His eyes search mine, scanning for damage he can’t punch his way out of. “He won’t come near you again,” he says.
The certainty in it should reassure me.
Instead, it makes the hospital room, the private floor, the men in the hall, the whole shape of his life snap into focus all over again.
This is real. Not exciting-book dangerous.
Real dangerous.