Chapter 16 Daniil #2
Lex remains in the shadow of the threshold, giving me the space he knows I will not surrender and guarding a perimeter only he understands. He is the last face my enemies see when they misjudge me. Tonight, he is the guard dog outside my pain.
“Daniil,” Arkady calls, nodding at the head of the bed. “You stand there. Keep talking to her. Keep her awake if you can until we are ready.”
I plant my elbows on the rail and lower my face to Naomi’s.
Her eyes are half-lidded. Her skin has lost its color.
I speak anyway, because silence feels like defeat.
“Do you remember the morning in the library,” I murmur, mouth close to her ear, “when you pretended not to doze on the sofa while I read reports? You told me my voice could read grocery lists and still hold a crowd.”
Her mouth tips, a ghost of a smile. “I lied,” she whispers, a papery tease that keeps her here with me.
“Liar,” I chide, grateful for the scrap. “You begged me to read you my most boring audits.”
“Never,” she breathes.
“Always.” I brush a kiss to her knuckles and look her straight in the eyes. “I love you.”
Her lashes tremble. Her lips shape the words back for me. The sound that escapes is quiet, but it steadies my spine.
An anesthesiologist leans in. “We are going to help you sleep, Naomi,” she explains with a professional calm that feels like a hand on the shoulder. “Count for me.”
I don’t let go. I press my forehead to Naomi’s and recite each number with her. “One. Two. Three.”
“Four,” she whispers.
“Five,” I answer.
“Six.”
Her hand slackens on seven.
A nurse eases my fingers free. I resist, then make myself obey because Arkady is already cutting, and this is where my presence turns from devotion to interference.
I straighten, wipe at my cheek, and miss.
The blood on my hand paints a rough line across my face.
Lex is suddenly at my side with a towel.
He offers it without looking at me. I accept and drag the coarse fabric over my palms until they are raw.
The doors bump me back into the corridor as the team lifts drapes and places equipment in a neat circle. Arkady’s voice becomes a rhythm beyond the glass. Numbers rise and fall. The steady beep on the monitor stutters, then stabilizes. Every sound in that room becomes a metronome for my heart.
I plant my back against the wall outside the OR and slide down until I am sitting on the tile like a man who has run out of decisions.
The world contracts to the size of a windowed door.
Inside the glass, hands move with a mechanical grace.
My jaw aches from clenching. My knuckles split open along old scars I didn’t know had cracked.
The towel goes dark red in my lap. I look down and only then realize I’m shaking.
Lex and Timur take positions near me like living statues.
Timur’s forearms are painted with Naomi’s blood to his elbows.
He wipes them with steady strokes and doesn’t bother with the sink until the second towel is soaked.
Lex stares through the glass with a soldier’s gaze that has learned to live outside fear until fear has a job again.
“She will live,” Timur asserts. He doesn’t lace it with hope. He says it like a report he has verified with his own eyes.
“She will,” I answer.
Lex nods once in agreement.
“Find out how Viktor breached the gates,” I order without lifting my gaze. “Full audit. I want to know every footstep and every open door. If a guard blinked, I want his blink on tape.”
Lex makes a note on his phone. “Already in motion.”
Timur folds his towel, each edge meeting the next. “I will have the blood taken out of the foyer before she comes home,” he adds in a practical and protective tone.
“She is coming home,” I echo, and the promise scrapes the back of my throat.
For a moment, I close my eyes. I’m not a man who meditates or prays. But tonight, my head tilts back, and I breathe through memories that try to drown me.
Sasha’s ring sat in my palm while sirens painted long bars of blue and red on ruined concrete.
Grief cracked me open and poured something black into the hole.
That darkness taught me to run an empire without letting any woman near the throne.
Then Naomi smiled at me. She didn’t ask for a crown.
She asked for the truth. I didn’t know how to give it.
So, she took it out of me, one hand on my chest, and one hand on a boundary I had drawn in blood.
If fate demands another woman from me, it will take me first.
The OR door whispers as a nurse slips through.
She carries a bundle of blood-soaked gauze as if it is a newborn.
She sees me, startles, masks it with training, and disposes of the bundle in a marked bin.
Her eyes soften when she straightens. “We are making progress,” she informs me, her voice quiet enough that it doesn’t carry to the waiting room down the hall.
“The bullet missed the iliac crest. There is no organ damage we can see. The bleeding is significant, but controllable. Dr. Levin is meticulous.”
She hesitates. I hear what she will not say. Complications are greedy. They can bloom without invitation.
“Tell him I am here,” I request.
“He knows,” she assures. “He asked me to tell you that he will not leave that table until he is certain she will wake in your bed and not in his morgue.”
The breath that leaves me is sharp. “Good.”
She nods and vanishes back into the light.
I push up from the floor and pace the length of the corridor because stillness begins to chew at the edges of my composure.
The walk is not long. Ten steps down. Ten steps back.
At each turn, I pass the window. At each pass, I count the monitors: heart, oxygen, blood pressure, the soft green rise of numbers that mean she still fights.
I know by now how to hear bad news in the pitch of a machine.
None of the tones triggers that wolf inside my ribs.
Another nurse emerges, this one in pink sneakers that squeak. “Sutures underway,” she relays. “Vitals improving. We have given two units. She is responding.”
My spine loosens a fraction. My fists unclench enough that I feel the sting where the skin cracked. The towel in my lap has dried stiff. I don’t pick it up again. I don’t want more blood on my hands than I already carry.
Arkady appears at last in the window, his shoulders straight, and his eyes above his mask, finding mine as if I am inside his field of vision as much as the table in front of him. He gives a small nod. A surgeon’s nod that says nothing extra and everything I need.
The knot in my chest loosens, not all the way but enough to permit air. I look through the glass at Naomi, the woman on the table, who made me remember that power means nothing if it doesn’t shelter those you love. Then I turn my eyes to Lex.
“We owe Arkady.”
“We will pay him,” Lex replies. “But he prefers the kind of currency that does not get audited.”
“We will pay him in continued silence and new machines.”
A nurse opens the door only as wide as her shoulder and slips out. “She is stabilized,” she reports. “Dr. Levin is closing. You can see her in recovery when we move her. She will be under for a while.”
I swallow against the stone in my throat and nod, slow once. “The baby?” I ask.
“The baby is okay, too.” The nurse gives me a small, true smile, then disappears again.
The double doors ease open at last. They roll her out on a bed that swallows her, white sheets tucked tight around her form. Her eyelashes rest like small commas on her cheeks. Her skin is warmer than it was. I place my hand over hers and release the breath I’ve been holding.
Arkady pulls down his mask and exhales in a way that lets me see his age for a moment.
“It went well,” he informs, his tone precise.
“No organ damage. No bone involvement. The blood loss looked dramatic because of the cut vessel, but it is under control. She needs rest, antibiotics, and monitoring. No guarantees until morning. But if I were a betting man, I would not wage against her, or the baby.”
“You always were smarter than that,” I reply, a rough edge of gratitude breaking through. “You get whatever you ask for. Equipment. Staff. A weekend on the lake where nobody knows your name.”
He snorts softly, which passes for laughter here. “All I ask is that you don’t drag another person through my doors tonight.”
“That problem is solved,” Lex notes.
“Good,” Arkady concludes. His eyes glance at the blood on my shirt. “You can shower here. I’ll have a nurse bring you clean scrubs.”
Lex angles his chin toward the staff locker room down the hall.
I look at Naomi once more. I refuse to let the past overwrite the present. “Do not move her from recovery without me,” I insist.
Arkady inclines his head. “We would not dare.”
I force my feet to carry me to the locker room. The water runs rust-brown before it clears. I stand under it until the floor swirl loses all color and heat crawls into my bones. I pull on a set of fresh scrubs a nurse gave me, then return to the corridor with wet hair and skin scrubbed nearly raw.
I take the chair beside Naomi’s bed like a throne I never asked for and lace our fingers together, refusing the space that separates sleep from waking.
Machines hum around us. Lex sinks into a chair against the far wall with a line of texts running under his thumb.
Timur dozes upright, his chin tucked, a watchdog even in rest.
Arkady stops in the doorway once, glances at our small kingdom of stubbornness, and leaves us to it.
I lift Naomi’s hand to my lips and press a steady kiss to the place where her pulse stutters. “I’m here,” I murmur. “And I will be here when you open your eyes. Viktor is gone. You and I, we still have a life to build.”
Her breathing deepens, then smooths.
When morning drags itself toward the city, I intend to watch it crawl into this room and find us both still holding on.