9. Adrian
NINE
My shoulder was on fucking fire. By the time Nataliya found a place to stop remote enough that we could pull over without worrying about being seen, I was shaking all over. “Elias, hand me the first aid kit,” she called, and the boy passed up the box Nate had given us to use before we left. The boy hadn’t said a word since we’d gotten in the car. “Thank you. Now, eyes closed, okay?” Elias dutifully did as she said and disappeared to the backseat again. “Shirt off,” she said, focusing back on me.
It was a struggle to get the blood-wet material off, and judging by her gasp, the wound that it revealed looked worse than I’d thought. Nataliya opened the kit and dug out gauze and betadine to clean the wound. “Is the bullet still there?” I asked.
Her skin was taking on a gray color. “How would I know that?”
I leaned up. “Is there an exit wound?” I thought my back was wet, but with the adrenaline buzzing beneath my skin, it was hard to tell for sure. By her squeak, the exit wound was indeed there…and probably bleeding heavily. “It’s good,” I told her. “Better than if the bullet was still in my shoulder.”
Nataliya took a breath, found her center, and set about cleaning my shoulder up. “You need stitches,” she said.
“Sterile gauze for now,” I said. Trying to do stitches in a car was a recipe for infection. Besides, I could hardly put them in myself, and it felt like too much to ask of her when I doubted she’d ever done anything like that before. “Stitches when we get somewhere safe.”
Nataliya wrapped my shoulder in what felt like a metric ton of medical tape. I dug a clean shirt out of my bag. It hurt like hell to maneuver my arm through the sleeve, but driving around with no shirt and covered in bandages didn’t seem conducive to not drawing attention to ourselves.
“Next time, don’t get shot, okay?” she asked as she resettled in her seat. She turned the car back on and pulled back onto the road. “I know you were protecting us, but don’t put your body in front of any more guns if you can help it.”
I blinked. Then, I blinked again. How many times had I done just that over the years? “This wasn’t the first time I’ve gotten shot.”
Nataliya snorted. “What kind of argument is that?”
“Protecting people is what I’m good at.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re good at being a leader,” she said. “Anyone who sees you around your former teammates can see that. Besides, you can’t protect anyone if you’re dead, and you made me a promise. So, take care of yourself.”
I felt properly chastised. I leaned back against the seat and tried to focus on anything besides what she said and the way the dips in the road made my shoulder jolt with agony. I must have dozed off because Nataliya woke me up when she pulled off the road again so Elias could stretch. “He made it over an hour,” she said as we both watched him walk around the shoulder. “We only have an hour or so left to go.”
Thank God. “I’ll call Owen and let him know.”
Dr. Sam Mayfield was a demon sent straight from hell, I was sure of it. You’re being ridiculous, I told myself, but every time Sam made a loop and pulled the torn edges of my skin back together, I was back to cursing her in my head.
Nataliya had offered me one of Elias’s pain pills, but Sam looked at the bottle and shook her head. It could make him bleed worse, she’d said. She’d offered me Tylenol instead. Nataliya had been hovering ever since. Elias was with Owen in the kitchen, struggling through a snack. The kid had almost wailed when he was separated from his mother; it was only Nataliya’s promise that she would look after me that made him capitulate.
“Is he going to be okay?” Nataliya asked. “There was so much blood.”
“I’m fine,” I reassured her, but she never took her eyes off Sam. The reassurance would have to come from her.
Sam understood and offered her a smile. “He might be lightheaded for the next day, but everything looks okay. He didn’t lose as much blood as you think he did; your bandage kept pretty good pressure on things.” She pulled another suture tight, and I hissed through my teeth. “You’re as bad with pain as Owen is,” she teased.
Fingers threaded through mine, and I looked down at Nataliya’s hand in mine. “Squeeze when it hurts,” she said. “It helps.”
I didn’t have to ask who she’d done that for, and she was right, having her hold my hand helped me focus on something other than the stabbing pain from the sutures. Then, I remembered my other promise. “Sam, this is Nataliya Koza.”
“I know,” she said. “Owen already told me.”
“Her son has Loorer’s.”
Nataliya made a soft sound in the back of her throat. “We don’t need to worry about that right now,” she said, and it was like she had grown a second head right in front of me. When was anything ever more important to her than Elias? “Let her take care of you first, okay? Then, she and I can talk.”
Oh. The corner of my lip raised in a smile. “Are you that worried about me?”
Her expression was stormy. “You could have bled to death. Of course, I was worried.”
A few moments later, Sam stood up and took the sterile gloves off. “It’s going to scar,” she said, “and I have no idea whether you’re likely to end up with nerve damage, but I’m done.”
What was one more bit of nerve pain? My knee and my back needed another friend to keep them company. My job was sixty percent desk anyway. “Thanks, Sam.”
“You’re just lucky I know first aid,” she said. “I’m a researcher with a PhD, not a patient care doctor.”
“I know.” I nudged Nataliya in her direction. “Speaking of research?—”
Both women laughed. “You’ve emailed me before about your son,” Sam said. “You signed it ‘NK,’ right?”
Nataliya’s eyes grew bright. “You read my email.”
“I did,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t respond, but it’s hard with the amount that I get in a day.”
“I read the article you published about your vaccine. It sounded like the initial trials went well.”
I watched as they started talking about the nuts and bolts of Sam’s research. The vaccine that she’d created wasn’t meant to prevent a child from being infected with Loorer’s; it was meant for a child who was already sick. Rather than stalling the disease’s progression—which was what the current treatment did—it actually had the ability to reverse some of the damage, letting the body heal and grow stronger, more able to fight the disease. It was interesting stuff, for sure, but I was more fascinated by the aura of hope that clung to Nataliya. She practically radiated with it. “He’s three years post-prognosis, right? You said he was diagnosed early.”
Nataliya nodded. “His first muscle spasm was right after his fifth birthday. Since then, I’ve tried just about everything to manage them. With the medication he’s on now, we only have one or two big spasms a month.”
“And that’s been for how long?”
“A little over a year,” she said.
“So, he’s stable. Why go looking for an experimental treatment?” Sam asked. A harsh question, but I could understand why she needed to know. “It may not be a miracle fix, and it’s still very new—we can’t guarantee that there won’t be unanticipated side effects.”
Nataliya nodded. “I’ve thought about that,” she said. “Currently, Elias is in a best-case scenario situation for living with the disease. He could carry on like this for years. He’d survive…but could you really call it living? He barely eats, he gets tired easily, and even if he doesn’t have constant spasms, he’s in pain a lot of the time. That’s not a life, especially for a little kid.” She took a breath, and it was shuddery in her chest. “I don’t want to outlive my son, but even more than that, if I’m going to lose him early, I want the life he does have to be one he can enjoy.”
Whatever Sam was looking for with her questions, she must have found it, because she broke into a big smile. “I can’t make any promises,” she said. “The trial vaccine has done wonderfully so far, but there’s no guarantee.”
“Of course,” Nataliya nodded.
“And I would need to be able to take him to a hospital for treatment,” Sam said. “I would need to have him monitored and observed for my research.”
Like a lab rat, I thought. I wasn’t wild about the idea, but at the same time, that was how medicines and vaccines were tested, wasn’t it? Researchers needed volunteers so they could know, definitively, whether what they created worked. “Is it safe?” I asked. “Even if it doesn’t work?”
Sam’s smile dimmed. “We never saw any adverse reactions before, but we’ve only just started testing it on human candidates,” she said. “There’s an inherent risk in being among the first for anything. That’s why it’s so important we’re at a hospital when we administer the vaccine.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, but Elias wasn’t my child. It wasn’t my choice whether or not to subject him to something like that…and I didn’t have to live with the consequences by being so overly cautious that I passed up what could be a miracle cure.
“I’d like to examine him first,” Sam said. “Make sure I’m not making false promises.” She reached out and took Nataliya’s hand. “I’ll do whatever I can for your son. Even if that’s just to find better medication for his symptoms so his quality of life improves.”
Tears sparkled in Nataliya’s eyes. “Thank you so much.” She looked at me, and those tears spilled over. “Thank you so much.”
The rest of the afternoon was spent settling in. Gabe and Zach would be coming in soon; Nate would touch base when things were settled on his end. So, for the time being, there wasn’t much for us to do but breathe.
And considering the burning in my shoulder, breathing was just about all I could handle.
“Adrian!” Elias called from the bathroom. Sam had checked my dressing, and I had been passing by the bathroom on the way back to the living room. I stopped and poked my head into the small space.
Nataliya was helping him to get ready for bed. She said that he normally didn’t need her, and preferred to handle things on his own, but after the stresses of the past few days, he was weaker than usual, to the point where she felt it was dangerous for him to be alone.
“What’s up, bud?”
“Come tell me a story?” he asked. “About your hero stuff?”
Nataliya was about to tell Elias no, I could see it on her face, but I cut her off beforehand. “Of course,” I said.
She eyed me. “Are you sure? You don’t want to rest?”
I smirked at her, winking obnoxiously. “I think I can handle a story,” I said. “Any practical demonstrations will have to wait a few days though.”
We went to their shared bedroom as a trio. Nataliya hovered at the door while I told him a story about one of my first days in SEAL training: I drank about a gallon of seawater during PT and threw up on the beach when it was over. It hadn’t been funny at the time, but Elias giggled at the imagery of a baby-faced me yakking up my guts.
Elias demanded I sit with him until his eyes grew heavy, which didn’t take long. When I left the room, closing the door quietly behind me, Nataliya was standing in the hallway, picking at her cuticles. “Stop,” I said, reaching out to put a hand over hers. “You’ll bleed.”
She snorted. “No more blood today, please.”
“Agreed.”
We stood in the hall, just staring at one another, for a handful of heartbeats. “I meant it earlier,” she said finally. “You can’t protect us if you’re dead…so don’t get yourself killed.”
I felt the smirk on my face before I was fully conscious of what I was doing. “You’re worried about me,” I teased softly. It wasn’t a question this time. We both knew it was true.
She didn’t smile. Instead, she looked pained. “I was,” she said and took a tentative step toward me. “I am.”
I could feel her heat against my skin, even if we weren’t touching. It was like a magnet, drawing me toward her. “I’m sorry,” I said, “for making you worry.” I reached out and cupped her cheek. “How can I make it up to you?”
She didn’t say anything—just looked up at me. I wasn’t sure who moved first, but our lips met in a kiss so soft I could have melted into a puddle. Nataliya was beautiful, smart, capable, and she tasted like sunshine. I was in so much fucking trouble.