9. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
We had made it to the hospital in under fifteen minutes, Isla white-knuckled in the passenger seat the whole way and Ortiz already waiting for us at the entrance with a transfer plan half assembled.
I was nine minutes into moving Reyes from the eighth floor to the twelfth when every plan I had built around that transfer became irrelevant in the nine seconds it took the hallway lights to switch from white to red.
Lockdown. Full building, every exit sealed, every elevator frozen between floors until security cleared it section by section.
My first thought was tactical, because tactical was the only kind of thought that had ever kept anyone alive on my watch.
Reyes was already inside a locked room with two of Ortiz's men and a door that would hold against anything short of a truck. Secure. Accounted for.
My second thought was Isla, down the hall at the nurses' station a minute earlier, and nobody could tell me where she was now.
I moved fast down a hallway that had gone strange and empty, every door either locked from the inside or standing open on a room with nobody in it. Voices came muffled through the walls, low and tense, the particular hush of an entire building trying not to draw attention to itself.
A guard I recognized from the front desk stood frozen near the elevator bank, radio pressed to his ear, repeating the same phrase into it.
Nobody knew the trigger yet. Nobody knew anything yet, which in my experience was the most dangerous stretch of any lockdown, the gap between the alarm and the answer.
I checked in with Ortiz's men before I moved another step, three short words through the door of Reyes's new room.
Status. Hold. Confirmed.
One of them answered through the frame without opening it, exactly the way I had trained every man on my rotations to answer. "We are secure in here. Go find your nurse."
He had not meant it the way it landed. I did not correct him. There was no version of the sentence I could have said back to him that would not have given away more than I was ready to explain in a crowded hallway during a lockdown.
I found her outside an on-call room near the north stairwell, one hand braced against the frame, arguing with a security guard twice her size about whether she was allowed to check on a patient two floors down.
"Isla."
She turned so fast her hair caught the emergency lighting, red and strange across her face. "Nikolai. What is happening?"
"Lockdown."
I took her by the arm, gently, the way I would have handled something that might shatter if I gripped it wrong.
"I do not know the cause yet. Inside. Now."
She did not argue, which told me more about how frightened she actually was than anything she could have said out loud.
The on-call room held a narrow bed, a chair, a small desk with nothing on it, and a window with security mesh bolted over the glass. I pulled the door shut behind us and threw the lock, then checked it twice, the same way I checked every lock I had ever trusted my life to.
"How long does this usually last?" she asked, already pacing the short length of the room.
"It depends on the trigger. An hour. Longer, if security is being thorough."
"Longer meaning what, exactly?"
"Meaning we should sit down and let them do their work instead of guessing at it."
We did not sit down. She kept pacing, and I kept watching her pace, cataloguing the tremor in her hands that she was trying and failing to hide from me.
"Reyes is secure," I said. "Two men on the door, a room that will hold. Whatever this is, it is not about him specifically, not yet."
"You don't know that."
"No. I do not. I am telling you the version that will let you breathe easier for the next hour, because the truth is I do not know anything yet, and you standing here shaking will not change that."
She stopped pacing at that, staring at me with something caught between anger and relief that I had finally said something honest.
"That's the most honest thing you've said to me in days."
"I have been honest with you. Selectively."
"That's not the same as honest."
"No." I sat down on the edge of the narrow bed, because my legs had decided the conversation required it even if the rest of me had not. "It is not."
She sat beside me anyway, closer than the small room strictly required, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off her skin through the narrow space between us.
Somewhere down the hall, a radio crackled through a door left open a crack, security calling floors clear one by one, methodical, slow, the kind of slow that stretched two hours into something that felt like a held breath.
Neither of us said much for a while. I counted the seconds between radio updates out of old habit, and she sat close enough that I could feel her doing the same kind of counting in her own way, watching the door instead of the window, waiting for the same all-clear I was.
"Does it ever stop? The counting, the watching every exit like it might close on you?" she asked eventually.
"No."
"Not even now?"
"Especially now. It is worse now, if I am honest with you. There is more to lose than there used to be."
She looked at me for a long moment after that, like she was deciding whether I had meant to say it out loud at all.
I had not, not really, and yet I found I did not want to take it back either.
"I keep thinking about the first night," she said, quiet, looking at her own hands instead of me. "You on your knees with an extinguisher in your face."
"I remember it clearly."
"You didn't flinch. Not once. I've thought about that more than I probably should."
"I did not have anything left in me to flinch with, that night. That came later."
"What changed?"
I looked at her, at the red emergency light catching the line of her jaw, and understood I had run out of good reasons to keep answering that question with silence.
"You," I said. "You changed it."
She did not say anything clever back. She simply reached over and put her hand against my chest, flat, deliberate, right over the place where the shirt hid the worst of what the fire had left behind, and she did not pull away.
"Nikolai."
My name in her mouth sounded like something I had never once heard it be before, and every careful rule I had built around this exact moment burned off in the same nine seconds the lockdown lights had taken to turn red.
I kissed her before I decided to. She met it like she had been waiting exactly as long as I had, one hand fisting in my shirt, the other still flat against my chest like she needed to feel my heart working overtime to believe any of this was real.
I did not angle my arm away this time. I did not think about it at all, which was its own kind of miracle, six years in the making.
She pulled back only far enough to look at me, checking, the way she checked everything, and whatever she found in my face seemed to settle something in her completely.
"Is this a mistake?" she asked, breath already unsteady.
"Almost certainly."
"Good." She pulled me back down to her. "I would hate for this to be easy."
There was nothing careful about what happened after that, nothing measured, none of the control I had spent six years building into every corner of my life.
Her hands found the hem of my shirt and did not hesitate.
Mine found her just as fast, learning the shape of her in the low red light like a man memorizing an exit he intended to use again and again.
She did not make a moment of it, no pause to weigh what this would mean once the door opened again. She simply met me exactly where I was, urgent and half-guarded and entirely present, and that was precisely why it worked when nothing careful ever could have.
Afterward, in the narrow quiet that followed, she lay with her head against my shoulder and her palm still resting flat against my chest, over the worst of the scarring, the raised ruin of skin that had cost me a brother, and a version of myself I had never quite gotten back.
She did not flinch. She did not ask. She did not say anything at all, just let her hand stay there, warm and steady, like the scar was simply one more fact about me worth knowing rather than a wound that needed managing around.
I had let exactly two people touch that part of me in six years, and one of them had been a surgeon.
"You are staring at the ceiling," she said eventually, her voice gone soft and unguarded in a way I had not heard from her before.
"I am thinking."
"About?"
"About how long I have been telling myself this would never happen, and how wrong I apparently was to believe it."
She propped herself up on one elbow to look at me properly. "For what it's worth, I've been telling myself the same thing since the fire extinguisher."
"You have terrible instincts."
"You're one to talk." She traced one finger lightly along the edge of the scar, not clinical this time, not a nurse cataloguing damage, just a woman learning a shape she intended to keep learning. "This doesn't scare me, if that's what you're waiting to find out."
"I was not certain what I was waiting for."
"Now you know."
I let myself lie still under her hand a moment longer than I strictly needed to, memorizing it the way I memorized everything I did not want to lose track of.
The PA system crackled to life somewhere above us, flat and mechanical, announcing the all-clear across every floor of the building in a voice that had no idea what it was interrupting.
We both went still at the same moment, the easy warmth of thirty seconds ago replaced by the fast, silent choreography of two people who had done this kind of scramble before, just never together.
A knock hit the door before either of us had managed more than a shirt and a held breath.
"Occupied," I called, my voice landing flatter and steadier than I had any right to expect from myself.
"Security sweep," a voice answered through the door. "Just confirming the room's clear."
"One moment."
Isla was already yanking her scrub top down and smoothing her hair with both hands, and I found myself almost smiling at the sight of her trying to look like a woman who had spent the last several minutes doing paperwork instead of falling apart in the best possible way.
By the time the door opened, we were both fully dressed and standing at a careful, professional distance from each other, doing a very poor impression of two people who had spent the last two hours doing absolutely nothing at all.
The guard on the other side gave us both a look that suggested he was not remotely convinced, glanced once at the narrow, rumpled bed, and had the good sense to say nothing about it.
"All clear," he said instead. "You're free to go."
I looked at Isla. She looked back at me, and something passed between us that had nothing to do with the lockdown and everything to do with what had just happened between us in this room.
Whatever came next, and I had no illusions that it would be simple, I found I was no longer interested in pretending this had not happened.
"After you," I said, and held the door.