Mafia Enemy’s Obsession (The Empire of Vows #5)

Chapter 1 Polina

Polina

I’ve been awake for twenty-six hours, and the blood on my scrubs isn’t mine.

I’ve done three surgeries back-to-back-to-back, because Moscow General’s trauma department is understaffed and overworked.

And I’m the idiot who volunteered for the double.

The first was a teenager who wrapped his car around a utility pole. The second was a construction worker who fell four stories onto rebar. The third was an elderly woman with internal bleeding from a fall nobody witnessed.

I saved all three.

That’s what I do. I save people, I wash my hands, and then I save the next one.

My name is on the surgical board more than anyone else this month, which my colleague Dr. Savin keeps pointing out as a compliment instead of a cry for help.

I don’t correct him. Complaining about the workload wouldn’t do any good.

And besides, I chose this life. Every grueling shift, missed dinner, and holiday spent elbow-deep in someone’s chest cavity. I chose this over the alternative.

The alternative is the Kozlov family business.

My cousins run one of the most powerful bratva organizations in Moscow.

Dmitri is the pakhan, now that his father has passed.

Alexei is his right hand. Their sister Sasha married a former CIA operative who runs their counterintelligence division.

My younger sister Daria and I are the only ones who stayed away from that world, but I’ve heard whispers that her ex-husband is involved somehow.

I love my family, but I built my life on the other side of a very thick wall, and I keep it there on purpose.

My mother was an outsider who married into the Kozlov name, and the organization treated her like a loose thread.

When she and my father died in a car accident sixteen years ago, the official report said the cause was black ice.

I was sixteen. I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.

So, I became a trauma surgeon. I put myself through medical school, graduated at the top of my class, clawed my way through residency, and built a career that has nothing to do with the Kozlov name or the world that comes with it.

My pager goes off at 11:47 p.m.

Trauma bay two. Incoming. Three minutes out.

I toss my cold coffee in the trash and head for the elevator. The fatigue I’ve been ignoring all night settles into my bones as the doors close, but I push it down the way I always do. There’s a body coming through those doors, and whoever it belongs to needs me to be fully functioning.

The paramedics hit the entrance at a near sprint.

Two of them are pushing the gurney while a third holds pressure on the patient’s abdomen.

There’s a fourth man behind them who doesn’t belong.

He’s built like a refrigerator, thick-necked and stone-faced, and he’s wearing a suit jacket that does nothing to hide the bulk underneath.

He’s not a paramedic. He’s not hospital staff.

Normally, family and friends are instructed to wait in the waiting room.

So, who the hell is this guy?

“Male, approximately thirty, three GSWs,” the lead paramedic rattles off as they barrel through the double doors. “One to the left shoulder, one lower right abdomen, one in the left hand. BP’s tanking. We’ve got two large-bore IVs running wide open, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”

I snap on my gloves and rush to the gurney.

And then I see his face.

The recognition is instant and absolute. It locks my hands in place for two seconds, which is two seconds I don’t have.

I know this man.

I’ve never met him, but I’ve sure as shit seen his photograph in one of the intelligence briefings that Dmitri shared with the family four years ago when the Morozov syndicate began carving into Kozlov territory.

He insisted I attend because simply being related to them could potentially make me a target, and he wanted to make sure I could identify the enemy.

I remember gawking at the surveillance photo Dmitri slid across the table.

The man in it was leaner then. His hair was cropped closer, and the scar I can see running along his right collarbone didn’t exist yet.

But the eyes were the same. Pale blue, almost grey.

Even in a grainy photograph, they stopped me.

I stared at that picture longer than I should have, and I made damn sure nobody noticed.

I never told a soul about the things those eyes did to my insides. Just looking at him sucked every speck of air from my lungs and made my stomach lurch.

And that absurd reaction repeats itself as I look down at Lev Morozov. Second son of Vadim Morozov, the pakhan whose organization has been systematically dismantling everything my cousins have built.

He’s on my table with three bullets in him, and the man in the suit jacket is standing in my trauma bay like he owns it.

“Sir, you need to wait outside,” one of my nurses tells the big man.

He doesn’t move. His attention stays fixed on the gurney.

“Now,” I add without looking up.

He meets my eyes for a beat, and whatever he sees there makes him listen. He backs out of the bay, and I turn my full attention to the man bleeding out on my table.

I know what happens to bratva men in hospitals.

I’ve seen it. A name gets entered into the system, a flag goes up, and within hours, someone shows up to finish what the bullets started.

It doesn’t matter which family, and it doesn’t matter which side.

If the wrong person finds out that Lev Morozov is lying unconscious in Moscow General, he’ll be dead before morning.

I should report this. I should follow protocol, enter his real name, file the mandatory police notification for gunshot wounds, and let whatever happens happen without my fingerprints on it.

Instead, I turn to the admissions nurse.

“Luka Sorokin,” I tell her. “Construction accident. Got in the way of a nail gun and fell off a ladder at a work site.”

She frowns. “Those are bullet wounds, Dr. Kozlov.”

“It was an accident,” I repeat. “Log it.”

She does as I ask, even if she doesn’t look happy about it. We’ve worked together long enough that she understands I have my reasons, even if I don’t want to share them.

My pulse is running about forty beats faster than it should be.

I just falsified a patient’s identity. I just delayed a mandatory police report.

If this comes out, I’ll lose my medical license, and that’s the best-case scenario.

The worst case involves a prison cell or a shallow grave, depending on whether the cops or my family finds out first.

I don’t have time to think about that right now. His blood pressure is dropping, and if I don’t get him into surgery in the next five minutes, my little act of treason will be for nothing because he’ll be dead.

“Prep OR three,” I order. “Call Dr. Melnyk for anesthesia. Hang O-negative now, run his blood type STAT, and have four units ready the second we have a match. That room needs to be sterilized and ready in three minutes.”

My team is as good as it gets. They don’t ask questions when I use that voice, and I use it now because the alternative is letting them hear the tremor I’m swallowing.

We get him into the operating room at 12:09 a.m. I scrub in, and the world outside stops existing.

This is the thing nobody understands about surgery.

When I’m at the table, nothing else matters.

Not my family. Not his family. Not the fact that I just committed a felony for a man whose father is trying to destroy everything my cousins have built.

There’s just the work.

The shoulder wound is a through-and-through. The bullet entered below the clavicle and exited cleanly, missing the subclavian artery by less than a centimeter. If it had nicked that vessel, he would have bled out in the back of whatever car brought him here.

The wound on his hand is worse. The bullet fragmented on entry, and I spend forty minutes chasing pieces through the muscles and tissue beneath. He’s lucky he didn’t lose a finger. I say lucky, but luck has little to do with it. At the risk of sounding cocky, I’m just that good.

Better than whoever shot him, thank goodness. They knew what they were doing, but it’s tough to be accurate in the heat of the moment. These weren’t warning shots. Someone wanted this man dead.

The abdominal wound is the one that almost kills him. The bullet tore through his lower right quadrant, nicked his liver, and lodged against the posterior wall. His blood pressure bottoms out twice while I work, and both times, I think I’ve lost him. Both times, I get him back.

Four hours. Three bullets on a stainless-steel tray. More blood in the suction canisters than I want to count. By the time I close the final layer of sutures, my shoulders ache, and the muscles in my forearms burn.

He’s alive because of me. And he’s a secret I can never take back.

My surgical team files out, and I stay behind to review the monitors. Heart rate holding. Blood pressure stabilizing. Oxygen saturation climbing. Everything is heading in the right direction, which should make me feel better. It doesn’t.

I pull down my mask and look at him. Really look.

He’s taller than I remember. Six-one, maybe, with the kind of build that comes from training for function, not vanity.

Lean through the hips, broader through the shoulders, and the muscle is dense and earned.

His hair is longer than his father would probably approve of, almost black, and pushed back from his forehead with dried sweat.

Blood is smudged against the wolf skull tattooed on his inner left forearm, and the ink is faded enough to tell me he got it young.

He’s beautiful, and that’s not a clinical observation.

I’m still staring at him when a nurse pokes her head through the recovery room door.

“Dr. Kozlov? The man who came in with him is asking about his condition.”

“Tell him the patient is stable and resting. Once we’ve moved him to the ICU, he can receive friends and family, but for now, his brother is the only approved contact.”

She nods and disappears. I know the man in the suit jacket isn’t his brother. But whoever he is, he brought Lev here, and keeping him close and everyone else far away is the only play I’ve got.

I restrict access to his room, keeping it as private as possible.

No resident rotations, no student observers, and no one on his chart who doesn’t need to be there.

The restrictions would be standard for gunshot wound victims, but since I fudged his paperwork, he shouldn’t be afforded them.

All I can do is hope nobody looks too hard at a construction worker who needs this level of security.

Then, I return to his room.

I check the IV drip, adjust the monitor leads, and examine the bandages for bleed-through. I find none. These are all things the nurses can handle, but all things I’m doing anyway because walking away from this room feels impossible, and I don’t have the energy to unpack why.

I’m just about to leave again when his eyes open. Not all the way. Just enough. The pale blue irises I remember so well find me through the haze of anesthesia and painkillers, and I watch recognition flash through them before they close again.

He knows who I am.

He knew before the drugs pulled him back under. He knew, and he didn’t flinch. He didn’t reach for a weapon or look upset or call out the name of someone who could save him from the woman standing over his bed.

Now he’s gone again, back under, and I’m standing alone in a hospital room at four in the morning with a man I should have let die but didn’t.

I’m not sure which one of us will pay for that first.