28. Isla
ISLA
I had been awake for three hours by the time I heard the deadbolt turn, and somewhere in that third hour I had stopped being scared and started being something else entirely.
I noticed the exact moment it happened: fear had kept me upright on the couch, phone in my hand, refreshing a screen that had nothing new to tell me. Somewhere around hour two, that fear had curdled into something with much sharper edges, and by hour three it had a name.
I was furious.
I had spent the first hour running through hospital scenarios out of pure habit, the same triage instinct that never fully switched off even when the patient in question was the man I actually loved.
By the second hour I had my phone open to Matvei's number twice, thumb hovering, before I told myself that calling him would only prove how frightened I truly was.
The apartment stayed exactly as quiet as it always did after midnight, the refrigerator humming, the street outside gone still, nothing to listen to except my own pulse and the particular silence a locked door makes when nobody is behind it.
By the third hour I had stopped pretending the fear was really about his safety at all.
The door opened at last, and there he was, whole and steady and completely unhurt, stepping into the apartment like a man returning from an ordinary errand instead of whatever he had actually spent the last five hours doing.
He should have looked like something had happened to him.
Some part of me, the nurse part, the part that had spent three years bracing for the worst version of every scenario, had already built the story where he came home bleeding and I got to be furious and terrified and relieved all at the same time, three feelings that at least made sense stacked together.
I had rehearsed exactly what I would say to that version of him, the bleeding version, the one who needed me exactly like every patient before him had. I had no rehearsal at all for the version currently standing in the doorway.
Instead he looked fine. Not a scratch, not a limp, nothing to explain where five hours had gone.
That was the part that broke something loose in my chest. He was fine, which meant he had chosen this. Not an accident, not an ambush, not anything that had happened to him.
Just a decision. His.
"You're back," I said, and heard how flat it came out, flatter than I meant it to, flatter than anything I had ever said to him before.
"Isla." He stopped just inside the door, reading my face with the same wary precision he read every room he ever walked into, and whatever he saw there made him go very still. "I can explain."
"Can you?"
"I found something. Real intelligence, a name and a location tied to the man who attacked the ward. I did not plan to be gone this long."
"You didn't plan to tell me you were leaving at all." I stood up from the couch, and my legs felt strange under me, unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion.
"I woke up at midnight and you weren't here. No note, no text, nothing."
"I made a decision quickly, and I did not want to wake you to explain it."
"That's not the same as not wanting to wake me. That's not wanting to tell me at all."
He did not answer that immediately, and the delay itself told me more than any actual answer would have.
"Where did you go?"
"To see a man named Kirill. A contact from years ago, someone with ties to Kovalenko's organization."
"Alone."
"Yes."
"Did you tell Matvei?"
His jaw worked once before he answered. "No."
"So you went alone, at night, to confront someone connected to the people who tried to kill a patient in my hospital two days ago, and you told exactly nobody where you were going.
" I kept my voice level, because if I let it climb even one degree I was not sure I would be able to bring it back down. "Is that an accurate summary?"
"Yes."
"Good. I like accuracy."
"Say something else, Nikolai."
"I do not know what you want me to say."
"Try honest. That would be a first for tonight."
I walked past him into the kitchen, mostly because I needed my hands to be doing something that was not shaking, and filled a glass of water I had no intention of drinking.
He followed me as far as the doorway and stopped there, like he understood on some level that crossing it right now would cost him something.
"The intelligence was worth the risk, Isla. I found a name." He held my eyes, steady, waiting for me to argue back.
"A former demolitions contractor, likely the man who trained whoever attacked Reyes. That is not nothing."
"I know it's not nothing." I set the glass down harder than I meant to. "That was never the part I was angry about."
"Then explain it to me. I do not understand what you actually want from me right now."
"I want you to understand that this was never about the intel." I turned to face him properly, and something in my chest finally cracked open all the way, three hours of sitting with it giving way at once.
"I don't care how good the information was. I care that you decided, alone, in one afternoon, that going and getting it mattered more than telling me you were leaving."
"I have spent six years solving problems alone. It is the only method I have ever fully trusted."
"Because the last time you let someone else carry part of a plan, three of your men died and you lived. I know pieces of it from Matvei, and I pieced together the rest myself, kneeling in front of you at that kitchen table the night you finally let me see all of it."
"That has nothing to do with tonight."
"It has everything to do with tonight. You would rather risk your life alone than trust someone else with a piece of it, because trusting someone else is the thing that went wrong the last time."
"Then try something else for once. Trust me enough to at least tell me you're about to go do something dangerous, even if you don't ask my permission first."
"I did not want you to spend the evening frightened for me."
"I spent the evening frightened for you anyway, Nikolai. The only difference is I spent it not knowing why." I pressed my palm flat against the counter, needing something solid under it.
"You didn't spare me anything tonight. You just made sure I found out after instead of before."
"I am here. I am unhurt."
"That's what makes this worse." I said it plainly, same as I said everything, and watched it land on him exactly as hard as I meant it to.
"If you'd come home hurt, at least I could have understood it as something that happened to you. This is something you did. You looked at telling me the truth and you looked at chasing danger by yourself, and you picked the danger."
He did not have an answer ready for that, which was rare enough on its own to genuinely startle me.
"I am a nurse," I said, quieter now, because some things did not need volume to land.
"I have spent three years learning exactly how to treat a burn. I know how deep to clean one, how much skin can heal and how much cannot, when a scar is going to fade and when it is going to stay forever."
"I am good at it, Nikolai. I am good at treating things that hurt."
"I know that."
"I can treat any burn you will ever let me near." I felt my own throat tighten around the words, surprising myself with how much they cost to say out loud. "Every single one, no matter how bad, as long as you actually let me see it."
"But I can't treat a man who won't let me all the way in."
"That's not a burn. That's not something gauze and time can fix."
"That just leaves me standing outside a door, wondering if you're going to come back through it in one piece."
"This isn't new either. Two nights ago I told you I loved you, and you couldn't even give me one word back."
"Now you can't even tell me you're leaving the apartment. I'm starting to see a pattern, Nikolai, and I don't like what it looks like from here."
"That is not the same thing."
"Isn't it?"
He said nothing to that either, and by now his silence was starting to feel deliberate.
"Isla."
"Say something else, then. Tell me I'm wrong."
He opened his mouth, and for one second I actually thought he might. Something moved behind his eyes, some argument assembling itself and then losing its nerve halfway through.
He closed his mouth again without a single word coming out of it.
The silence went on long enough to stop being a pause and start being its own kind of statement, the loudest thing either of us had said since he walked through that door. I stood there and let it stretch, because I was done filling silences for both of us tonight.
"Nikolai."
Nothing.
"You have nothing."
He looked at me for a long moment, something raw and unguarded moving across his face that I had only seen once or twice before, and then he looked away first, which he never did, not with me, not with anyone.
He reached for his keys on the counter instead of reaching for me, instead of reaching for a single word that might have changed anything about the next five minutes.
I watched his hand close around them, watched him decide, again, that motion was easier than staying still inside whatever this actually was.
"Where are you going now?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to, all the fire from a minute ago suddenly used up.
He did not answer that either. He stood there with the keys in his hand, looking at me like he owed me something enormous and had no idea how to hand it over.
I thought about the on-call room, lockdown lights bleeding red across the walls, the two of us locked in together with nowhere else to go and nothing to do but finally tell each other something true.
He had told me then that he was being honest with me selectively, and I had hated the word even as I understood exactly what it cost him to say it out loud.
I had been scared that night too, more scared than I had ever let myself be before him, pacing a narrow room while a lockdown ran its course somewhere beyond a door with security mesh bolted over the glass.
Even then, with no idea what was actually happening on the other side of that wall, I had still believed, all the way down, that whatever this was between us would hold.
I did not believe that tonight, not the same way, not with the same certainty.
For the first time since that lockdown, standing in a kitchen with a glass of water I had not touched and a man who could not make himself speak, I genuinely did not know if this was something we came back from.
This was not something I could read like a chart, or diagnose like a fever, clean and certain and answerable by morning.
I only knew that I was still standing here, waiting for an answer that was not coming, and that some part of me had already started bracing for what came after waiting like this finally ran out.