Chapter 13
Alina
I don’t realize it’s Dominik’s blood on my arm until he lets me come up for air again.
I push up on my elbows so fast my head spins. He’s still kneeling over me. His jaw is clenched, and the lines around his mouth are tighter than usual.
“Were you hit?” My words tumble out sounding stupid and too small for the moment.
He nods once. “Ribs.”
An unexpected jolt of concern hits me. He’s hurt.
Seeing my eyes go to the spreading stain in the dark fabric of his jacket at his side, he says, “Probably just a graze. I’ve had worse.”
“That’s not comforting.”
Petrov appears on our right. “Two down,” he says. “And they took one with them—dead or bleeding. East is clear. We should move before any locals call it in.”
“Already did,” Viktor says. He kneels, removes his vest, then peels off his tee. Shoving it into my hands, he says, “Press that on him. Hard.” He tips his chin at Dominik’s side, the gap between the front and back of the vest that was left unprotected.
“I—” I reach without thinking and pause because my hands are shaking.
Dominik unfastens his own vest to slip it off, then flips his jacket open. The shirt underneath is dark already. When I press the balled-up fabric into the wound, he inhales through his teeth quietly, giving away how much it truly hurts.
“I’m fine,” he says.
“You’re not fine,” I snap at him. “You were shot! You’re bleeding.” My voice is high with worry and fury, and I hate it. This is completely different from the last time he was bleeding, back when I busted his nose.
It hits me then. Dominik shielded me with his body. Not the vest he put on me, not the car, and not with a flimsy promise but with his own damn body.
The deal we made for my week, and my brother’s life, was supposed to make me feel purchased, like a disposable object, and instead I feel…kept.
“Archer,” I say, because I’m a fool who still hopes for the best. “Was he—?”
“He wasn’t here.” Dominik’s gaze snaps to mine, cold now. “He sent them.”
The words land heavy on my heart.
“He sold you out,” I whisper.
“He sold out your location and your safety too,” Dominik says, and the edge of his voice startles me more than the gunfire did. “Which is why he’ll have to pay with something that hurts.”
“You said you’d let him live.”
Dominik’s hard, determined eyes find mine. “I said I would let him keep breathing as long as you held up your end of our bargain.” The look in them does something to me that I don’t have a name for. “I don’t break my word.”
“And tonight?” My throat tightens. I thought by tonight that Archer would be safe.
He considers the question, blood soaking the cloth under my hands.
“Tonight,” he finally says, “you prove to me that I wasn’t a fool for trusting you too.”
His words shouldn’t warm me, but they do, glowing like a match held too close to my palm.
The breath that leaves me is shaky. I hate him for being an honorable mobster. I hate Archer for making his honor cost Dominik his blood.
What the hell was my brother thinking? Why has he done this to me?
“We need to move,” Viktor says, urgent but contained.
“Send the Pakhan an update,” Dominik orders Viktor, referring to his brother by his official title.
“What should I tell him?” the bald man asks, looking from me to his boss. It’s a question that makes me think that these guys are loyal to Dominik, not Gavriil, which is somehow comforting.
“Everything,” Dominik answers, as if that’s the only option.
After that statement, his men surround us, hustling us back into the car.
“Keep pressure. You’re doing good,” Petrov tells me as he flanks my left.
I keep my hand firm over the wound while Dominik pretends to be steel. His lips are too pale. The lips I kissed last night before we traded promises and he made me scream his name. He’s not showing it, but I can feel his pain in the way his weight leans against my side when we hit the back seat.
The doors slam, and the vehicle speeds off. The driver throws us into reverse then spins us forward with a smoothness that tells me he’s had practice with high-speed chases.
“Route B,” Petrov says from the radio behind us. “Five minutes to the tunnel. No sirens yet, but they’re on their way.”
“Doctor?” Viktor asks from the passenger seat.
“Yelena,” Dominik says. His voice is gravel now.
“Are you sure?” Viktor asks, maybe the only time I’ve ever heard him question his boss’s orders.
“Yes,” Dominik replies. “Yelena’s hands don’t shake.”
Yelena. This is the first time I’ve heard the doctor’s name, and for some reason, I think I hate her for being so vital to him.
“On it,” Viktor answers, phone to ear. “Fifteen minutes, maybe twelve.”
The car goes over a bump, Dominik grunts in pain, and I lose my grip for half a second.
My palms are slippery. I tear at the hem of my dress without thinking to rip off a long strip of floral fabric.
The tearing sound is loud and indecent in the enclosed space, the same as it was the night he ripped my shirt.
I press it over Viktor’s tee and tie the ends, layering pressure on pressure.
Dominik looks down. The corner of his mouth twitches up like he’s thinking about my ripped shirt as well.
“You missed your calling as a nurse,” he teases. The jab pokes harder at the stark contrast between my skills and the legendary doctor I’m about to meet.
“Shut up,” I tell him, because if I don’t make a joke I may start crying again and I refuse to do that in front of him again in this lifetime. The tear I shed during the photoshoot feels like it was years ago.
Dominik leans his head back and closes his eyes.
A vein jumps in the line of his throat, quick but steady.
I can’t stop seeing the place where my mouth would fit if I were a different woman in a different story and there weren’t rules made of blood between us.
I only agreed to belong to him at night for a week, not in broad daylight in a vehicle full of his men.
The driver races through a yellow light, sliding us closer together. My hip kisses his thigh. His hand comes over mine, pressing my torn dress into the wound, and I feel the strength in that hand like an argument I would willingly forfeit.
“Don’t die before we get you to your miraculous doctor, Yelena,” I say, and it comes out with less snark than I intended.
Instead, it sounds like I’m twelve-years-old again, bargaining to fulfill all my hopes and dreams in the dark because I thought if I were a good girl my prayers would actually be answered.
Back when my mother was still alive, so the apartment smelled like cheap coffee and the comfort only unconditional love can provide.
“I’m not dying,” Dominik says calmly. “I have plans for the next week that I refuse to miss.”
“Funny.”
“True.”
The tunnel yawns ahead and swallows us. The noise changes and so does the air. I stare at the ads on the tile panels as we fly by and fixate on a smiling woman selling something stupid, so I don’t have to look at the blood on my hands.
“She knew,” I say out loud before I can stop myself.
“Who?” Dominik asks.
“My mother,” I reply. “She would’ve known. About Archer. About the way he looks at money like it’s going to save him from himself.” I blink hard, feeling my eyes start to sting. “She would’ve known he wouldn’t come today.”
Dominik doesn’t pretend to give me false comfort. “Then she would have known that he will come now that he’s afraid.”
“And what do you do when you’re afraid?” I ask him. It feels like a wrong question, and I ask it anyway. Maybe because I need to believe he has that emotion too, that he isn’t only made of hard stone and sharp knives.
“Fear makes me more efficient,” he says.
I huff a small breath that might be a laugh if you squint. “Of course it does.”
We climb out of the underworld and the city, the sun breathing down on us again.
The SUV changes lanes twice and then peels off into a narrow alley and slides through a half-open garage door that might be a delivery entrance for a business.
It shudders down behind us immediately, and the sound of the city cuts off abruptly.
There’s a thin woman waiting in the light beyond the first bay, her sleeves pushed to her elbows, dark hair knotted at the nape of her neck. She’s the kind of pretty you only notice if she wants you to. Yelena, I assume, the doctor whose hands don’t shake.
“Put him on the table,” she says, referring to the metal table under a surgical lamp. She’s brisk, with an authoritarian Russian accent, like the female version of Gavriil. “Jacket off. Don’t touch anything you didn’t bring in. Then, get out of my way.”
Petrov and Viktor move like they’ve done this before, which conjures an image I don’t like.
They take Dominik under the arms, and he rises with his jaw clenched, weight lightened just enough to say he’s letting them.
He doesn’t look at me as they guide him up on the table.
He doesn’t have to: his hand finds mine for half a second, squeezes once—I’m here; so are you—then lets me go.
“Out,” Yelena says to the men before pointing a steel chin at me. “Wash until you scrub off a layer of skin with soap and hot water. Then you may help. If you faint, I will let you crack your head to teach you a lesson.”
“I can’t—” I begin and then realize I can at least try because I do want to help. I just don’t want to make it worse.
Yelena jerks her head at a sink. I do as she instructed, scrubbing away the blood until my skin goes pink and my nails don’t have a speck of visible or microscopic dirt underneath them.
“I thought you were smarter than this, Dom,” I hear her say in a hushed tone.
The shortened version of his name makes their relationship sound more intimate.
They’re lovers. Or were at some point. I’d almost bet my last penny on it.
That’s why Viktor questioned Dominik’s decision to have her patch him up.