The First Job #2
The city fell away behind us. The buildings grew smaller, the streets darker, and then we were in a part of town I didn't recognize—industrial, abandoned, the kind of place where no one would hear a scream.
Viktor pulled up to a building that looked like a warehouse but smelled like antiseptic. Men came out to meet us—not guards, but men in white coats, carrying a stretcher. They took Mikhail from the car, and I watched them carry him inside, his blood on my hands, my clothes, the seat of the car.
I sat in the back seat and listened to my heart slow down.
The door opened. Aleksander slid in beside me.
"You could have died."
His voice was quiet. Almost gentle. But there was something underneath it—something that sounded like anger, or fear, or both.
"I didn't," I said.
"You don't get to risk yourself. Not for them. Not for anyone." He turned to face me, and the grey of his eyes was dark, storm-dark, the color of thunderheads. "Do you understand?"
"Then what am I here for?"
The question hung in the air between us. The car was silent—Viktor had stepped out, closing the door behind him, leaving us alone in the dark.
Aleksander looked at me for a long time.
"For me," he said.
The words landed like stones in still water. Rippling. Expanding. Filling every corner of the car, every corner of my chest.
"For you," I repeated.
"You're not a soldier. You're not a medic for hire.
You're not a tool I use and discard." He reached out—slowly, giving me time to pull away—and touched my face.
His palm was warm against my cheek, his fingers rough with calluses.
"You're mine, Monika. You have been since the night you pulled that bullet from my side.
I just didn't say it out loud until now. "
I should have pulled away. I should have opened the door and walked into the night and never looked back.
But I didn't.
I leaned into his touch instead.
"I don't belong to anyone," I said.
"No," he agreed. "But you belong with me. There's a difference."
His thumb traced my cheekbone. Once. Twice. A whisper of touch that sent shivers down my spine.
"Tonight, you did something remarkable," he said. "You kept your head when everyone else lost theirs. You saved a man's life while bullets were flying. You didn't flinch." He paused. "I've known men who've been in this life for decades who couldn't do what you did tonight."
"I told you. I grew up on a farm."
"Farm girls don't apply tourniquets under fire."
"Maybe this one does."
He smiled. It was a small smile, barely a curve of his lips, but it reached his eyes. The first time I'd seen that—the first time his smile looked like something other than a crack in a stone wall.
"Maybe this one does," he repeated.
He dropped his hand. The warmth of his palm lingered on my cheek, and I pressed my fingers to the spot, trying to hold onto it.
"We should get you home," he said. "You need to clean up. Change your clothes." He glanced down at my jeans, dark with Mikhail's blood. "Those are ruined."
"Blood washes out."
"Not all of it."
He opened the door and stepped out. I watched him walk around the car, his figure silhouetted against the headlights, and I thought about what he'd said.
For me.
Not for the money. Not for the family. For him.
I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know what it would cost me.
But I knew, with a certainty that sat in my bones like a fever, that I wasn't going to walk away.
Viktor drove me home in silence.
The city was waking up—the first hints of grey light in the sky, the first cars on the road, the first sounds of a new day. I watched the familiar streets pass by, the diner where I'd first met Aleksander, the corner where I bought groceries, the stoop where I sometimes sat when I couldn't sleep.
My apartment building looked smaller than I remembered. Less like a home and more like a way station. A place I passed through on my way to somewhere else.
I got out of the car. My legs were stiff, my jeans stiff with dried blood, my hands stiff with the memory of pressure and gauze and the feel of a tourniquet tightening.
"Monika."
I turned. Viktor was standing by the car, holding something out. A towel. Clean, white, folded into a neat square.
"For your hands," he said.
I took it. Our fingers brushed, and I saw something in his old eyes—something that looked like respect.
"You did good tonight," he said.
"Thank you."
"The old man—" He stopped. Corrected himself. "Aleksander. He doesn't say things he doesn't mean. When he said you were his... he meant it."
"I know."
"Do you?" Viktor tilted his head. "Because I don't think you understand what that means. In this world, being his means being protected. But it also means being hunted. Everyone who wants to hurt him will look for you first."
"I've been hunted before."
"By coyotes and foxes. Not by wolves."
He got back in the car and drove away. I stood on the sidewalk with the towel in my hands, watching the taillights disappear around the corner.
The wolves are coming, I thought.
But so am I.
Upstairs, I stripped off my clothes and stood under the shower until the water ran cold. The blood swirled down the drain—Mikhail's blood, not mine—and I watched it go, thinking about how easy it was to wash away the evidence of violence.
But not the memory. Never the memory.
I dried off and put on clean clothes—sweatpants, a sweatshirt, the things I wore when I wanted to feel small and safe. I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling, and I thought about Aleksander's hand on my face.
For me.
I thought about Gabriel's kiss in the snow. Nathan's finger on my collarbone.
And me, caught in the middle, trying to survive.
But surviving wasn't enough anymore.
I wanted something else. Something I didn't have a name for.
I closed my eyes and slept without dreaming.
When I woke, the sun was high, and my phone was buzzing with a text from an unknown number.
Dinner tonight. 7 pm. Don't be late.
I didn't ask who it was. I already knew.