Fire-Scarred Bratva Daddy

1. Nikolai

NIKOLAI

"Don't move."

A woman in rumpled scrubs, dark hair loose from its knot, held the nozzle level with my chest like it was loaded.

It was two in the morning, and I was three doors deep into the burn unit, counting exits the way other men counted sheep. The hallway smelled like bleach laid over something sweeter, the kind of smell that never quite leaves a place like this.

That's when the footsteps hit. They were fast, uneven, furious. I turned straight into a fire extinguisher.

"Keep your hands where I can see them."

I lifted both hands slow.

Hospitals were harder to secure than warehouses: too many doors, too many people with every right to be standing in front of any of them.

"I work security," I said.

"You work security in a hoodie, at two in the morning, outside a restricted room, with no badge showing?"

She took a step closer, the extinguisher rising another inch.

"Get on the floor. Now."

"That is not how those work."

"It'll work fine on your face."

I looked at the canister. Then I looked at her. She meant it.

I went down on one knee and held my hands open at my sides.

"On the floor," she said again, thrown that I'd actually listened.

"I am on the floor."

"Get all the way down, face down."

"I do not think that will be necessary."

Footsteps came fast from the elevator bank. A flashlight beam swung ahead of them.

"Isla? What's going on?"

A stocky man in a rent-a-cop uniform rounded the corner, breathing hard, one hand on his radio. His badge said ORTIZ.

He looked at me on one knee. Then he looked at the extinguisher aimed at my skull. He stopped like he'd walked into a wall.

"He was standing outside Reyes's door," Isla said, not lowering the nozzle an inch. "He had no badge. He wouldn't say who he was."

"I told her I work security."

"You said it. You never showed me anything."

"You did not ask before you took that off the wall."

Ortiz held up both hands, the universal gesture of a man refereeing two large dogs. "Okay. Let's just check IDs before anybody sprays anybody."

I reached slow for the laminated card clipped inside my jacket. Isla's grip didn't loosen.

Ortiz took the card and read it twice, then held it up to the hallway light like the plastic itself might be lying to him.

His shoulders came down an inch.

"He's cleared," Ortiz said. "This is Nikolai Stepanov, a private contractor assigned to eight fourteen as of tonight."

"Since when do we get private contractors on this floor with no memo?"

"That's above my pay grade. Take it up with the board."

"I intend to."

Ortiz looked like a man who very much hoped she wouldn't, at least not before his shift ended.

"Are you two good here?" he asked, already backing toward the elevator bank.

"We're fine," Isla said, not looking away from me.

He excused himself fast, radio already crackling about a jammed door on six.

Then it was just the two of us.

Isla lowered the extinguisher, only most of the way. The nozzle stayed angled somewhere near my chest.

"Nobody told the floor," she said. "Nobody told me a strange man was going to be haunting my hallway at two in the morning."

"That would be an oversight on the hospital's end, not mine."

"Convenient."

"Accurate."

"Those aren't always the same thing."

"No. They are not."

"I didn't ask you."

"You are looking at me."

That got something out of her. It wasn't quite a laugh. It was more like the sound a laugh makes when a person refuses to let it out.

She set the extinguisher against the wall, careful for someone who'd just been holding it like a weapon.

"You could have said something," she said, "before I nearly took your head off."

"You could have missed."

"I don't miss."

"No." Something in me nearly smiled at that. "I do not think you do."

She crossed her arms. Under the flat hallway light I could see the exhaustion sitting under her eyes, the kind that comes from a shift stretched hours past its edge.

Under that sat something sharper, something still fully awake.

She wasn't looking at me the way people usually did in bright light, no quick flick of the eyes toward the ruined side of my jaw and away again, no careful, too-polite refusal to see what was plainly there.

She just looked, waiting for an answer.

"My name is Nikolai," I said. "I have been hired to watch the patient in eight fourteen."

"Watching him from what, exactly?"

"From whoever set him on fire in the first place."

That landed the way I meant it to. Her arms uncrossed. The exhaustion in her face sharpened into something more useful.

"That's Dominic Reyes," she said. "I've had him three nights running, and he barely talks. Somebody set him on fire?"

"Whoever did it wants him dead before he can say why."

"How dangerous are we talking? Somebody-yelling-in-a-parking-lot dangerous, or somebody-walks-through-that-door-tonight dangerous?"

"Tonight, it is low. Next week, I could not promise you the same answer."

"I like specifics."

"So do I. I do not have many yet."

She glanced past my shoulder at the narrow window in Room 814's door, checking on him without meaning to, the way I checked exits.

"He is stable," I said. "Sleeping."

"I know. I'm the one who got him there."

She pushed past me into the room without asking. I let her.

Through the doorway I watched her check the monitor, adjust the drip, lay two fingers against Reyes's wrist for a count that took exactly as long as it needed to and not a second more.

She came back out and pulled the door until it clicked.

"He's still stable," she said. "It's your turn to tell me something useful."

Something shifted across her face while she waited for my answer. Protectiveness sat where the suspicion had been a minute before.

To the rest of the world she might be clipboard efficiency and professional calm, but she belonged to her patients the moment they came under her hands.

"He's mine until seven," she said. "If somebody's coming for him, I want to know what that looks like before it happens, not after."

"That is the idea."

"How long is this assignment of yours?"

"Until it is finished."

"That's not an answer."

"It is the only one I have tonight."

She studied me a moment, weighing whether to push, then decided, for now, not to.

"Then you should have introduced yourself," she said, "instead of standing outside his door like a burglar."

"I did not expect a nurse to be capable of dismantling me with a fire extinguisher."

"I've dismantled bigger men than you with a lot less."

I believed her. Her feet were planted, her weight balanced evenly between them.

She'd learned somewhere along the way that size didn't decide a fight, only how much work the smaller person had to put in first.

She held out her hand, then seemed to remember what she'd just been aiming at me, thought better of it, and offered it anyway.

I shook it. Her grip was firm, no hesitation in it at all.

"Isla," she said finally, like I'd earned the information. "I'm Isla Chen. I'm charge nurse on this floor for the next five hours."

"Understood."

"Which means for the next five hours, you don't so much as breathe near that door without me knowing first."

"I said understood."

"You say a lot of things very calmly for a man who almost got hit with a fire extinguisher."

"I have been hit with worse."

I hadn't meant to say it quite like that. I watched her catch the shape of what sat underneath the sentence, six words doing more work than I'd intended.

She didn't ask. That surprised me more than the extinguisher had.

Most people, once they got a crack like that to look through, could not help themselves. She just filed it away, the same efficient motion I'd watched her use on the extinguisher, and let it go.

"Are you going to report me?" she asked. "Assault with a fire extinguisher."

"Attempted assault. You never pulled the pin."

"Give me time."

"I plan to be careful around you."

"Coffee machine's on four," she said instead. "It's terrible, but it's hot. If you're going to haunt my hallway all night, you might as well not be miserable doing it."

"I am rarely miserable."

"You looked ready to put me through a wall five minutes ago."

"That was not misery. That was respect."

"Was that for the extinguisher, or for me?"

"I have not decided yet."

"Let me know when you do."

That earned the almost-laugh again, the one she seemed determined not to let all the way out. She turned back toward the nurses' station. The extinguisher stayed forgotten against the wall.

I watched her go. Then I crossed the hall and put the canister back on its bracket myself.

Leaving it on the floor felt like leaving evidence of something I didn't have a name for yet.

The bracket held it snug, exactly where it belonged. I straightened it twice before I let myself walk away.

I went back to my post outside Room 814, where the monitor kept its quiet rhythm and the hallway settled back into its hum of fluorescent light and distant elevators.

Nothing about the night looked any different than it had an hour ago.

I was the only thing that had changed.

For the rest of that shift, I made my slow circuit of the hallway: stairwell, service elevator, the fire door by the supply closet, same as always.

Except now I found myself listening for the sound of her voice at the nurses' station before I let my shoulders come down.

It wasn't a useful habit. It told me nothing about Reyes, nothing about the men who wanted him dead, nothing that would keep either of us safer before sunrise.

I kept doing it anyway, the same way a man checks a lock he already knows is closed, out of habit more than doubt.

She had looked straight at the ruined side of my face under lights that hid nothing, and she had not flinched.

It wasn't the quick reflexive stutter most people couldn't help, or the studied blankness of people trying too hard not to react, and she had looked at me instead the way she looked at the extinguisher bracket, the exit signs, the hallway itself, one more fact in the room worth noting, nothing in it to flinch from.

I had spent six years building a life around the certainty that nobody would ever get close enough to try, six years being long enough to feel sure I was right about it, and long enough that being wrong, even once, felt riskier than it should have.

Down the hall, a printer hummed to life at the nurses' station. A cart wheel squeaked somewhere past the corner. They were ordinary sounds, the kind that meant nothing on any other night.

Tonight I catalogued them anyway. I filed them next to the extinguisher bracket, the exit signs, the sound of her voice.

It was one more habit I hadn't decided to start.

I still had a job to do. There was a witness three days into recovery, a man with more enemies than he'd admitted to anyone yet, and no real proof any of them knew where to find him.

That job hadn't changed in the last twenty minutes. I had, some small, stubborn part of me shifting position without any intention of shifting back.

Somewhere on the other side of the ward, a phone rang twice and stopped. A voice I already knew answered it on the second ring, low and even, already back to work.

I found myself smiling at the sound of it. That hadn't happened in longer than I could easily remember.

I made myself stop. Then I went back to counting doors, because counting doors was the one thing in this hallway I still understood.