Chapter 26
PAVEL
I was going to catch shit from my family for kicking out the wives, especially when they were having fun.
Damien was going to be particularly pissed at me for rushing his wife.
The glare she gave me promised her husband's anger as she carefully peeled Alina from the couture wedding dress that I wasn't supposed to see.
Yeah, all of them were going to get shit from their wives and they would all happily pass that down to me.
Still, Damien and the others would have been far more pissed if I allowed them to stay, given my condition.
Not only could I not protect them, but I also didn’t want them freaking out over the amount of blood that was seeping into my shirt under my jacket.
There was only so long I could keep it hidden.
They had all seen their own husbands bleed, hell, a few of them were responsible for that blood.
I knew they weren't weak or squeamish .
None of them would faint at the sight.
But they knew I'd been on a mission with their husbands.
If they spotted my condition, then they would have worried about what might have happened to their men.
Kostya had explained once or twice that an annoyed wife was a pain in the ass, but far better that than a freaked-out wife.
A sentiment I didn't understand, but which Artem had wholeheartedly agreed with.
The moment the women left, I turned to Alina. "I ordered food. Wait for the guards to knock with the room service."
She nodded as she swapped the robe for the T-shirt and yoga pants I had given her for the girls' visit. I would have complained, but those pants hugged her ass in a way that made gods weep and reminded me of the first time I laid eyes on her.
And I had more pressing matters to attend to.
I headed to the bathroom, carefully pulling off my suit jacket.
The shirt underneath was soaked with blood. It was already sticking to the wound and drying around the edges. Taking it off was going to hurt like a bitch.
A sharp gasp at the door made me turn.
Alina stood there, her eyes wide and the color draining from her face.
Something close to concern flashed across her face.
It must have been the blood loss.
There was no way she was worried about me.
In time, maybe .
But for now, she didn't see me as a lover but rather as a jailor.
If that was what it took to protect her, then I would be her monster.
"Babygirl, you shouldn't see this. Go back to the other room. I'll be out in a moment, and we'll have dinner," I said, turning back to the mirror.
She didn't move, her gaze locked onto the blood.
"You're hurt."
"It's just a scratch."
It wasn't.
The bullet had only grazed me, but it cut deeper than I had originally thought.
Nothing vital was hit, but I was bleeding a lot, and I would be left with a brutal scar that would mar the tattoos I had covering my side.
The annoyance at the ruined art was almost as bad as the pain itself. That piece had taken forever. It was slow and excruciating. Not only the tattooing itself, but the itching afterward was brutal. Now it was ruined.
Coming home to my fiancée covered in blood was not how I wanted the night before our wedding to go.
I had intended a quiet night where we talked, and I told her what our lives together would look like. I would give her the rules she was expected to live by and the new freedoms she would have as my wife.
The gunfight had been…unexpected.
The Colombians were proving to be more of a threat than Damien had led me to believe.
They should have barely had enough men or firepower to be anything other than an inconvenience .
After they kidnapped Yelena, Damien had all but wiped them out.
The ones who terrorized Alina should have been barely more than low-level street thugs.
Last time any of us had dealt with them, they weren't even on our radar. They ran some poker rooms and Solovyov had tried to steal a gun shipment from us using their muscle.
That firefight resulted in a bonfire that I thought wiped most of them out.
It didn't.
Either they had funding I was unaware of, or something else changed.
They were different now—better organized, better funded.
Something about their power structure had been altered, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
Their sudden discipline, their influx of cash—it was a serious problem that had me considering calling Roman in again, despite how pissed Gregor had been when he learned I used him to kill Solovyov.
Satan himself would love to get his hands dirty, and it had been too long since I had seen my favorite unhinged cousin.
Gregor and Artem weren't going to like it.
They loved Roman like the rest of us did, but there was something in him that we had all grown out of in our teenage years.
We all had a darkness to us.
We were unafraid of death or pain, and we took what we wanted .
Roman was in a league of his own.
Blood spill was a sport to him, a game to be played with either a surgeon's precision or reckless abandon.
He had this wildness to him, this untamable core that made him…unpredictable.
Both Artem and Gregor could appreciate Roman's skill and passion for his work, but that wild unpredictability made him a liability.
They would get over it...eventually. I had no issues pissing off my cousin and brother if it meant getting rid of the Columbian threat and keeping my girl safe.
Besides, after the way Roman took care of Solovyov, I owed him a drink.
The immediate crisis, however, was the wound bleeding through my shirt. I needed to focus on that first.
Alina ignored my command and stepped into the bathroom.
I watched her reflection, frozen, not wanting to spook her as she reached for the buttons on my shirt.
She hesitated, her hand floating in the air between them as her rich brown eyes met mine in the mirror.
I didn't stop her.
When I didn't move, she pressed further and started working on the buttons of my shirt.
It was the first time she had touched me willingly.
The first time she initiated any kind of contact.
Fitting, I thought darkly, that both of our hands were soaked in blood.
Still, every time her fingers brushed my skin, I savored the contact.
She peeled the shirt from my shoulders .
I clenched my teeth to stifle the yelp ripping up my throat as she pulled the soaked fabric from my wound.
She hissed when she saw the wound, and I closed my eyes, waiting to hear the disgust or the reprimanding tone from her.
I braced myself for even worse.
What if she mocked my pain? What if she said I deserved it?
I had earned the injury by protecting her.
Avenging the life those assholes allowed her father to steal from her.
I could tell her that, but to what end?
The only thing that would've come of that would be to make her aware of a threat that would be taken care of long before she had to face it.
An annoyed wife was far better than a freaked-out one.
"I don't want you to see this. Leave. Now." I tried to keep my voice strong, but the blood loss was making the room spin and I felt cold and tired.
"Where is the first aid kit?" she asked, ignoring my demand. I'd enjoy punishing her for that… later.
I gestured with a nod of my chin, growing more impressed by the second at her calm demeanor. Brows furrowed with determination, head slightly tilted as she focused, and not once did she look away squeamishly.
She ordered me to sit on the edge of the tub.
I had to hold back a grin at her cute, authoritative tone.
I'd play along for now and remind her who I was tomorrow .
Digging into the cabinet, she dragged out the large paramedic bag. In my world, a basic first aid kit with gauze and Band-Aids didn't cut it.
I had everything I needed to avoid hospitals—drugs, suture kits, and proper surgical supplies.
Anything that required IV medications or blood, I'd have to call Mikhail to come patch me up.
This shouldn't need a field medic, just a steady hand with a needle and thread.
She bit her lip as she washed her hands while surveying the supplies and the wound. "I suppose I'd be wasting my breath telling you to go to a hospital."
I raised an eyebrow. "What do you think?"
"I think there is a large gash in your side, and most of your blood is pooling on the floor."
"Hospitals ask questions I am not prepared to answer. You don't have to be here, I can?—"
"Well, it's going to need stitches." She talked over me with a resigned sigh. "I'll prepare what's needed."
She tore open the suture packet with her teeth.
Under normal circumstances, that shouldn't have been sexy.
But fuck, it was.
My little kitten was a bit of a savage.
I knew she had a primal side, but I had been sure it only came out when she was backed into a corner, or she was pinned under me.
This was new, and I'd have to find a way to bring it out of her that didn't require a bullet. Maybe a shallow stabbing would suffice?
Alina worked methodically, gloved hands preparing my wound, cleaning it, and removing any stray debris with the tweezers.
Her touch was surprisingly gentle, a lot better than Kostya's heavy-handed butterfingers.
"Do you want something for the pain?" she asked, eyeing a bottle of morphine.
"No, I want to stay clearheaded."
She met my gaze in the mirror and nodded. Then she touched the wound, and a flash of pain blinded me for a second as I sucked a breath in through my teeth.
"Maybe just an aspirin," I said and reached for the bottle.
"No, aspirin will thin your blood and make it harder to clot. You already lost too much."
"Careful, someone might think you care."
She met my eyes in the mirror again and raised her eyebrow at me.
"Someone has to pay for my grandmother's fancy new place."
Why was her attitude so fucking hot?
"Ready?"
This time, I gave her a nod and braced myself.
She slowly and precisely began stitching my flesh closed. Her small hands were so delicate, so dainty that I barely felt the stitch or even the pull of the thread through my skin.
The pressure of the fingers splayed on my back, the soft whoosh of her breath against my skin, were far more noticeable than the bite of the needle.
My skin was oversensitive, but not for the needle. For her .
"Where did you learn how to do this?" I couldn’t imagine where she would have picked up this particular skill set.
She sighed, her eyes closing for a moment before she reopened them and focused on my back.
"My grandmother. When her dementia got really bad, she started falling. There wasn't any money for frequent emergency room trips, so I watched hundreds of YouTube videos and learned how to care for her myself."
Fuck.
I had not expected that.
I thought she was going to tell me she thought about being pre-med or binge-watched some medical drama. Hell, I almost expected a little hint of her fire with a quip about me keeping her locked away so she'd been practicing on the guards.
I didn't expect heart-wrenching honesty.
She really was an incredible woman.
Too bad she hated my guts.
Not for the first time, I wished we had met under different circumstances. One where I could take my time, woo her with affection, attention, and then teach her to love the chase as much as I did.
Or anything where I had the luxury of time.
When she was finished, she tied off the sutures.
"I need to clean up," I said as she reached for a bandage.
Her hand stopped just over the bandage, hovering there for a moment, and I stared at it, wishing she would lay it back on my skin.
Instead, she pulled her hand away and nodded.
"When you are done, I will bandage the stitches. "
Then she was gone.
I quickly washed at the sink and followed her out of the door, needing to know where she was.
When I joined her in the dining room, she already had dinner set up.
The shift from the bathroom's intimacy to the dining room's formality was jarring. Here, with proper place settings and polite distance between us, the moment we'd shared seemed almost like a dream.
The mood felt strange—tense, yet… intimate.
I opened my mouth maybe a dozen times to say something as she picked at her pasta.
I just didn't know what to say. How did I start a genuine conversation that wouldn't remind her what I was, and what led her here?
How did I show her I may be a monster, but there was more to me than blood, knives, and bleeding wounds?
Tomorrow, we'd be married.
Alina would be my wife, and I didn't know how to speak to her.
I should tell her that these past few weeks had been some of the best of my life.
That coming home to her was the highlight of my day, every day. I should tell her I'd begun craving her company, and I'd do anything in my power to make her happy.
I should've said something to show her I may be a monster, but I was her monster.
That I had become obsessed with earning one of her elusive smiles.
That the idea of her carrying my child, of capturing even a piece of what my brothers and cousins had, filled me with something unfamiliar.
Hope.
It was strange and uncomfortable at first, but I had grown accustomed to it, and now I was afraid I'd miss it if it disappeared.
The hope was for us.
Hope for our future.
Hope wasn't something a Russian mafia enforcer like me ever allowed myself.
It was a luxury I refused to afford.
Hope was a fleeting thing.
It was addictive, and I wasn't sure I'd survive the withdrawal.