Chapter 2 #2
I would tell him to go fuck himself, but at the moment I’m more interested in staying conscious.
They get me upright and half carry me toward the street, boots splashing through dirty water while gunfire fades into the distance behind us. Whoever took the shot either missed his second chance or never got one.
Good.
Amateurs would have aimed center mass and prayed. This was meant to finish me.
It should irritate me more than it does, but right now all I can think about is the woman in the rain. The one I lost seven months ago. The one who looked down at me like an angel from heaven. The one who should not have been here and yet was.
“Stay with us,” one of my men snaps.
I nearly laugh.
As if I have ever done anything else.
They carry me all the way to the curb where the car screeches into place, black and gleaming under the rain. The rear door is yanked open. I’m shoved inside. I lean back against the leather and bare my teeth as one of the men tears open my shirt.
Hands probe my side. A flashlight cuts across blood-slick skin.
“Hold still.”
“I am still,” I growl.
“Like hell.”
The car lurches forward, and pain pulses hot and rhythmic beneath the pressure on my ribs. My shirt is peeled back farther. Fingers spread over the wound, searching.
Then: “It grazed him.”
Another voice, tighter with disbelief: “What?”
“Bullet track across the lateral side. Tore through skin, maybe muscle, but didn’t bury. He’s bleeding, but it’s a graze. Barely fucking kissed him.”
I close my eyes for a moment.
Relief is not what I feel.
Annoyance, perhaps. A cold, simmering fury that someone was bold enough to try. But beneath that, lower and stranger, the image of her still lingers. Rain silvering her skin. That soft smile. The impossible calm of her face in the middle of gunfire.
“Pakhan,” Yuri says hoarsely from the front. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what happened?”
I open my eyes again and stare at the blood on my hand. “Yes.”
Attempted assassination. A failed one.
But that is not the truth I sit with in the darkened car, rain racing over the windows while my men pack gauze against my side and bark updates into their phones.
The truth is quieter. Less rational.
I should have taken that bullet deeper than I did. I know angles. I know luck. I know the difference between a miss and a mercy. And though I say nothing, though I would never gift sentiment to a room full of armed men, the thought settles inside me with unnerving certainty.
My angel saved my life.
The emergency entrance glows harsh and white against the rain.
By the time the car stops, I’m already tired of the smell of blood. The copper sting of it clings to the back of my throat and mixes badly with antiseptic and wet leather and the sharp, chemical bite of the dressing one of the men pressed to my side in the car.
The rear door opens, and cold air rushes in.
Then a familiar voice cuts through the rain. “For fuck’s sake.”
Dry. Annoyed.
I look up as he strides toward the car beneath the awning, coat unbuttoned, dark hair touched at the temples with silver of his own, his mouth already flattened in a line that promises judgment.
He’s tall. Broad. Expensively dressed in the kind of understated way that costs more than most men’s rent.
Not one of mine, but no less dangerous for it.
The oldest friend I have. The only man alive who can look at me bleeding in the back seat of an armored sedan and seem more inconvenienced than alarmed.
Some of the hospital staff at the sliding doors spot him and immediately find urgent reasons to be elsewhere. One nurse pivots so fast she nearly loses a clipboard. An orderly disappears down a side corridor. The young man at reception suddenly becomes fascinated by a printer.
My mouth twitches despite the pain.
He notices, of course. His gaze drops to the blood soaking through the towel at my side, then to the men around me, then back to my face. “What did you do now?”
“Good evening to you too.”
He leans down, one hand braced on the doorframe, eyes sharp and unimpressed. “If you’re lucid enough to be sarcastic, you’re lucid enough to answer the question.”
“I got shot.”
“Yes, I gathered that from the blood. I was hoping for something marginally more detailed.”
Behind him, a pair of nurses are whispering to each other in urgent little bursts while pretending not to stare. They’ve recognized him now, which means they’ve recognized me too, or at least recognized enough to know they want no part in whatever this is.
He straightens and glances toward the entrance where another staff member has just stepped out, seen us, and very visibly reconsidered his life choices.
Then he sighs. “You always terrify my staff.”
I ease myself out of the car with more grace than comfort, one hand pressed hard to my side. “That sounds like a failure in hiring.”
“It’s not a hiring problem,” he says, falling into step beside me as my men close ranks around us. “It’s a you problem.”
“Then it remains not my problem.”
That earns me the ghost of a smile. Barely there. Gone fast. It’s the closest thing to warmth he’s likely to offer while I’m bleeding on his entrance pavement.
He holds the door open anyway. “Room three,” he says to the nearest nurse without breaking stride.
She blinks. “Dr. Sava—”
“Now.”
That’s all it takes. She vanishes.
He glances at me. “If you bleed on my floor, I’ll charge you for it.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“And yet you keep showing up shot.”
“I like your hospitality.”
One of my men snorts under his breath. Another immediately stops when my friend cuts him a look.
We push through double doors and into a private treatment room with dimmer lighting, cleaner finishes, and none of the frantic public mess outside. Money buys many things. Privacy buys the rest.
My friend shuts the door behind us and finally turns to face me fully.
The irritation in his expression doesn’t hide the assessment underneath.
He takes in my pallor, the tension in my shoulders, the wet shirt stuck to my skin, the blood on my hands.
The old bastard looks me over like he’s searching for structural damage in a building he reluctantly values.
Then he exhales through his nose. “Sit down, Viktor.” He says my name low and clipped and unimpressed, like I’m fifteen again and have tracked mud through his mother’s house after a fight by the river.
I lower myself onto the edge of the bed. Every muscle in my side pulls hot and mean in protest, but I don’t make a sound. I unbutton what remains of my shirt and peel the torn fabric away from the dressing. Blood has glued part of it to the skin. That will be unpleasant in a moment.
Across from me, he pulls on gloves with brisk efficiency.
He’s a surgeon now, at least officially.
Has been for years. A very good one. Brilliant, cold, relentless.
He could have made a fortune in a dozen private systems and instead built this place into something far more useful.
People come here because they trust the medicine.
People avoid asking too many questions because they trust him even more.
“You look terrible,” he says.
“I was under the impression silver foxes were in fashion.”
He cuts the towel away from my side and I hiss as cool air strikes the wound.
“That line probably works better when you’re not leaking.”
“Be kind. I’ve had a difficult evening.”
“You got shot.”
“Yes, that’s usually how difficult evenings start.”
He presses gently around the wound, and pain knifes through me. I brace one hand behind me on the mattress and keep my jaw locked.
“Graze,” he says after a moment. “Lucky.”
I say nothing.
Lucky is not the word I would use.
He studies me for a second longer, as if he can tell there’s a thought I’m not sharing. Then his gaze drops back to the wound. “Entry line is shallow. No retained bullet from what I can see, but I’ll confirm with imaging before I indulge your martyr complex.”
“I don’t have a martyr complex.”
He raises a brow.
I say, “I have excellent survival instincts.”
“That must be why people keep trying to kill you.”
One of my men shifts near the door. “We should sweep the place.”
My friend doesn’t even turn his head. “If someone was stupid enough to come here after him, they would already be dead.”
That settles that.
He reaches for saline and gauze and starts cleaning the wound.
I go very still. It burns viciously, an ugly raw heat that spreads under the skin, but he has known me too long to warn me gently or apologize for pain.
His hands are precise, firm, familiar. Not tender.
Never tender. He has patched me together before.
Stitched me in quieter rooms. Reset a finger on the hood of a car once while telling me in great detail what an insufferable bastard I was.
We are beyond bedside manners with each other.
“You always scare your staff,” I say after a moment.
He snorts softly. “You’re blaming me for that now?”
“I’m trying to distract myself while you pour hellfire into my ribs.”
“That sounds like your problem.”
I smile despite myself.
He catches it and shakes his head. “You know, most men your age take up golf.”
“Most men my age are dull.”
He laughs then. A short, startled sound, like the amusement got past his guard before he could stop it. It changes his whole face when it happens. Briefly. Enough to remind me why women used to lose their minds over him before he became married to medicine and impossible standards.
Then it’s gone, and he’s all business again.
“What happened, Viktor?”
“Someone took a shot from the roofline.”
“At you.”
“Yes.”
“Anyone see the shooter?”
“Not clearly.”
“Anyone dead?”
“Not yet.”
He nods once, as if that tracks with the laws of the universe. Then he tapes fresh gauze over the cleaned wound and steps back. “I want imaging. I want blood work. I want you under observation for a few hours.”
“No.”
His expression hardens at once. “Yes.”
“I have somewhere to be.”
“You were just shot.”
“I’m aware. I was there.”
“Viktor.”
That tone. The one that used to freeze me in place before I was old enough to match him snarl for snarl.
I meet his eyes. “Tonight matters.”
“Tonight,” he repeats flatly. “Your son’s rehearsal dinner.”
I don’t answer. I don’t need to.
His mouth twists with something halfway between disbelief and resignation. “Of course it is.”
I adjust the edge of the gauze taped over my side and reach for the clean shirt one of my men has already produced. The fabric is crisp, dark, expensive. Dry. Useful.
He watches me pull it on with the expression of a man who knows he’s losing an argument and is deeply offended by it.
“You’re coming,” I say, fastening the first button. “Right?”
He gives me a long look. “As if I’d miss the spectacle.”
That gets the faintest curve from my mouth. “Good.”
“I’ll be there,” he says. “Though I reserve the right to leave the second someone starts crying over floral arrangements.”
“That narrows the evening to the first ten minutes.”
He snorts softly.
I button the shirt the rest of the way, fingers steady despite the ache pulling along my ribs. The wound burns, hot and mean, but manageable. Irritating more than disabling.
He steps closer, straightening the collar for me with brisk annoyance, like he resents the fact that he knows exactly how I prefer it to sit.
“You should go home,” he mutters. “Lie down. Take the painkillers I know you won’t take.”
“And yet here we are.”
“And yet here we are,” he repeats darkly.
He smooths the front of the shirt once, then steps back and studies me.
“Color’s better,” he says.
“I’m touched by your concern.”
“Don’t be. It’s medically inconvenient when you bleed out before I finish yelling at you.”
I almost answer, but my mind slips for half a second.
Rain. A pale face lifted over me through the storm. Dark eyes, soft mouth.
That impossible, almost-sad smile.
For one treacherous second, I can feel it again. The strange calm that cut through the gunfire when I looked up and saw her. Seven months gone, and still my body recognized her before my mind did. As if it had been waiting all this time.
My angel. The woman from the plane. The one I searched for longer than I care to admit.
The one who vanished before I could keep her.
And tonight, in the rain, I saw her again.
“Viktor.”
I blink and drag my attention back. My friend is watching me too closely.
“There it is,” he says quietly. “That look.”
“What look?”
“The one that means you’re about to become everyone’s problem.”
I take my jacket from Yuri and slide it on carefully over the fresh bandage. “You give me far too much credit.”
“No,” he says. “I give you exactly the right amount.”
He’s still watching me when I settle the jacket on my shoulders and button it.
“Whatever’s in your head,” he adds, “try not to turn the rehearsal dinner into a crime scene.”
“No promises.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
He exhales once through his nose, already defeated by the shape of the night to come. Then he jerks his chin toward the door. “Go get your imaging done before you swan off to family obligations and bad decisions.”
I start for the door.
Behind me, he says, “And, Viktor.”
I glance back.
“If you rip those stitches tonight, I’ll let it hurt on principle.”
I smile briefly. “I’d expect nothing less.”