Chapter 2 Lev
Lev
I wake up to the smell of antiseptic and the certainty that I should be dead.
The ceiling is white. The walls, too. Everything in this room is white except the blood dried under my fingernails and the bruise-colored IV line feeding something warm into my left arm.
A heart monitor beeps next to my ear at a rhythm that feels too slow to belong to a living person, but here I am. Breathing. Blinking. Alive.
The details come back in pieces. A meeting at the warehouse on Taganskaya that was supposed to be routine. Frol sent me because our father doesn’t waste the heir on logistics runs. That’s what I’m for. I’m his spare, the blade he sends when the crown’s hands need to stay clean.
I was expecting a shipment dispute and walked into an ambush instead. Two of Petrov’s men opened fire before I cleared the doorway. The first round caught my shoulder. The second punched through my hand. A third buried itself somewhere in my gut, and after that, things get hazy.
What isn’t hazy is the order I gave Ruslan while I bled through my shirt in the backseat of his SUV.
“Moscow General,” I told him.
He swore at me. Called me a fucking idiot, which is the kind of thing only Ruslan can get away with. “Botkin is two miles out,” he said. “Sklifosovsky is three. You want me to drive five more so you can bleed out on the way?”
“Moscow General or don’t bother stopping.”
He drove, because he knows that I don’t give orders twice. Ruslan is the only person in my life whose loyalty I’ve never had to question, and the fact that he argued at all tells me how bad I looked. The man doesn’t argue unless he thinks I’m dying.
I probably was dying.
Not much comes back after the second red light he ran, but I remember the panels streaking overhead as someone wheeled me through a corridor, and the voice of a woman giving orders that sounded like she’d done this a thousand times.
But most of all, I remember her face. It was the last thing I saw before everything went black.
Polina Kozlov.
I chose Moscow General because it has the best trauma unit in the city.
At least, that’s what I’ll tell anyone who asks.
It’s also true, if you only count half of it.
The other half is that Polina Kozlov works there, and I’ve known her shift schedule for more than a year. The doubles are the easiest to predict.
That sounds worse than it is. Or maybe it sounds as bad as it is, and I’ve just gotten comfortable with it.
It started two years ago, when I pulled her name from my father’s intelligence files while mapping Kozlov family connections. I expected another bratva daughter coasting on the family fortune, playing house in a penthouse bought with dirty money.
Instead, I found a woman who told the Kozlov name to go to hell and built something that was all hers.
Top of her medical class. Residency in trauma surgery.
A career that saves lives instead of ending them.
She walked away from everything I’ve spent my life trying to earn a place in, and she made it look easy.
She did what I couldn’t. Got out.
Now, she’s saved my life, and the painkiller drip is making it hard to think about anything except the way she looked at me before I went under, with mesmerizing brown eyes and gold flecks near the pupils. Photographs don’t do them justice.
She also falsified my identity in the hospital system. I know this because the chart clipped to my bed says Luka Sorokin, and that’s not my name. The woman broke the law, risked her career, and lied to her own people to keep me alive and anonymous.
That kind of decision gives a man leverage. I should be figuring out how to use it the way my father taught me. Every secret is a weapon.
But I don’t want leverage over Polina Kozlov. I want something far more dangerous, and I’ve wanted it since the first time I watched her cross a parking lot from behind tinted glass and realized I’d been holding my breath.
The door opens, and she walks in with a clipboard tucked under one arm and her stethoscope looped around her neck, and every coherent thought I’ve built in the past ten minutes scatters like shrapnel.
Her scrubs are a different color than the ones I vaguely remember from last night.
Her auburn hair is pulled back in the French braid she wears on shift, the one I’ve seen from across parking lots and lecture halls but never this close.
A thin gold bracelet catches against her wrist when she flips a page on the chart.
She’s more stunning in person than two years of surveillance have prepared me for, and I’ve spent more time staring at photographs of this woman than any sane man would admit.
“Good morning, Mr. Sorokin,” she says without looking up. “How are you feeling?”
Mr. Sorokin. Not even a flinch. The delivery is flawless, and I’d almost believe she believes this is who I am, except I saw her face last night. She knows who’s lying in this bed, and she’s playing the game anyway.
Fine. I can play, too.
“Like I got hit by a truck,” I grumble. My voice comes out rough, scraped dry from the anesthesia tube. “Or fell onto some debris at a construction site. However you want to put it.”
Her pen stops moving for a second, then she continues writing. “The anesthesia can cause disorientation. It’s normal.”
“I’m not disoriented, Doctor.”
She meets my eyes for the first time since she walked in. Those brown irises with the gold near the center hold mine for two heartbeats, and the impact runs through me like a second set of bullets. Then, she drops her gaze back to the chart.
“Your vitals are stable. Blood pressure is still lower than I’d like, but that’s expected given the blood loss. You’re on a morphine drip for the pain, and I’d recommend keeping it that way for at least the next forty-eight hours.”
“I don’t like morphine. Makes my head foggy.”
“Your head should be foggy. You had four hours of surgery and nearly died twice on the table.”
“Only twice?” I repeat with a smirk. “Must be losing my touch.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. She kills it before it becomes anything, but I see it, and I take note of it. Not as leverage. As proof that the woman behind the professional mask has a sense of humor that she’s choosing not to share with me yet.
“I’m going to check your incision sites.” She sets down the clipboard. “This might be uncomfortable.”
She pulls the blanket back and lifts the edge of my gown.
The second her fingers touch my skin, every nerve ending in my body fires at once.
Cool and careful, she peels back the bandage on my abdomen, and I have to actively remind myself that she’s examining sutures, not doing what my dick wants her to be doing.
I watch her face while she works. Total focus. Her brow pulls together just barely, and that lower lip catches between her teeth for half a second before she releases it. My cock stirs despite my medically dulled senses, and I can’t stop the grunt that makes its way out of my throat.
She has no idea what she just fucking did to me in that half a second.
Her fingertips graze the skin below the incision, and my abdominal muscles clench under her touch. She glances up, probably to see if she’s hurting me. She’s not. At least, not the way she thinks.
“The abdominal wound is healing well,” she explains. “No signs of infection. I’ll want to monitor the liver involvement closely over the next few days.”
“How closely do you plan to monitor me, Doctor? Because if it’s anything like this right here, I don’t mind at all.”
The look she gives me should probably scare me, but it does the opposite. Her chin lifts, and her gold-flecked eyes narrow, and for a second, I get a glimpse of the Kozlov fire underneath that fancy title. My pulse spikes harder than the morphine can suppress.
“I monitor all my patients with the same level of attention, Mr. Sorokin.”
“I doubt that.”
She tugs my gown back into place with a crispness that tells me I’ve gotten under her skin. Good. Her fingertips brush my hip on the way, and even though it’s accidental, it gets my blood pumping even harder.
“Your hand will require physical therapy once the wounds have healed. I’d recommend gentle range-of-motion exercises within two weeks.”
“And the one in my stomach?”
“The bullet nicked your liver. I repaired the damage, but you’ll need to stay off your feet for at least a week, preferably two. No strenuous activity, no heavy lifting, and absolutely no leaving this bed without my say-so.”
I hold eye contact and let the corner of my mouth pull up. “Well, if you insist on keeping me in bed, Doctor, who am I to argue?”
A flush creeps up the side of her neck, and watching it spread is the most satisfying thing that’s happened to me since I woke up in this room.
She clears her throat and says, “I’ve restricted access to your room. Your brother is your only approved visitor.”
“My brother?”
“The man who brought you in. He identified himself as your brother.”
There’s no way she believed that Ruslan, the man with a face like a cinder block, is related to me, and I seriously doubt he claimed to be, but again, I’ll play along. “Right. My brother.”
“Is there anyone else you’d like me to add to the list?”
“No. Just you.”
That lands where I want it to. She holds perfectly still before making a note on the chart.
I watch the way her fingers squeeze the pen.
Those same hands spent four hours inside my body last night, pulling metal from my organs, and stitching me back together.
The thought of what else her hands could do runs through my mind before I can stop it, and another grunt works its way out.
“You saved my life,” I tell her.
“That’s my job.” She shrugs.
“Perhaps. Though I suspect that wasn’t an easy decision on your part.”
The pen stops. She stills, and I see her weighing how much to acknowledge. When she speaks, her voice is even. “You were brought into my emergency room with life-threatening injuries. I treated you. That’s the beginning and end of it.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” She picks up the clipboard and heads for the door.
I should let her go. Close my eyes, let the morphine pull me back under, and figure out how to explain my absence to a father who measures everything in blood.
But my father isn’t here. She is.
“Doctor.”
Her hand rests on the door handle. She doesn’t turn around, but she doesn’t leave, either.
“Thank you.”
Two words. That’s all I give her. Not because I don’t have more, but because I learned early that the right amount falls somewhere between silence and a speech.
She hesitates just briefly before pulling the door open and walking out.
I lean back against the pillow and stare at the ceiling. My shoulder is throbbing, my gut feels like someone took a blowtorch to my insides, and my hand aches every time I flex my fingers.
None of that matters.
Polina Kozlov was given the choice between saving my life and staying loyal to her family, and the woman I’ve been obsessed with for the past two years chose me.
She’ll come back. She has to. I’m her patient, and she’s too good at what she does to hand me off.
And when she does, I plan to make that blush happen again.