Chapter 4 Lev
Lev
Polina left twenty minutes ago to go on break, and now I’ve got a six-foot-two slab of muscle closing my hospital room door and shutting the blinds with the posture of a man who’s about to say something I don’t want to hear.
“We need to talk,” Ruslan declares.
I pinch the bridge of my nose and reply, “No, we don’t.”
He ignores me as he drags the visitor’s seat away from the window, flips it around, and drops into it backward with his forearms resting on the back. Everything groans under Ruslan’s weight because the man was built for demolition, not conversation.
“You’ve been here nine days,” he begins.
“I’m aware.”
“And you haven’t contacted your old man or Frol. Haven’t checked in with anyone.” He ticks each point off on his thick fingers. “I’ve been fielding calls from them all week. They think you’re dead.”
“Let them think whatever they want.” I reach for the water on the bedside table and take a slow sip, buying myself a second. My shoulder aches when I extend my arm, but the pain is manageable, even without the morphine. “My father hasn’t called you directly, has he?”
He presses his lips into a thin line and shakes his head. “No.”
“Then he doesn’t care enough to worry. Frol’s probably covering for me, and the old man accepted it without question because that’s how it works. He doesn’t ask about the jobs I do, he just expects them done.”
Ruslan eyes me. “This isn’t about your family.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“The surgeon.”
I set the water down. Slowly.
“Her name is Dr. Kozlov,” I correct him.
“I know who she is. What her last name means is the part that should matter to you.” He leans forward, and the seat frame creaks beneath him.
“Whatever this is, it needs to stop. You came here half-dead, and instead of focusing on getting back on your feet and reporting in, you’re lying in this bed making eyes at a Kozlov. ”
I raise my index finger and warn, “Careful.”
“I am being careful. Someone has to be. You’ve clearly lost the ability to think past your dick.”
“You don’t know what you're talking about.”
“I don’t?” he scoffs. “I’ve driven you past this hospital at least a dozen times over the past six months.
You had me pull her conference schedule in Kazan and told me it was for a security sweep.
I sat in a parking garage for three hours while you watched her walk to her car, and when I asked what we were doing, you told me to mind my business.
So don’t tell me I don’t know what I'm—”
I’m out of bed before the last word leaves his mouth.
The IV stand screeches against the linoleum as I rip away from it.
Two strides, and I’ve got him by the throat.
I drive him backward into the wall hard enough to crack the frame of the safety poster, and his skull connects with plaster.
His lower lip splits against his teeth on impact, and a thin red line runs down his chin.
Behind me, the seat clatters to the floor, and something in the IV line pops loose.
He doesn’t fight back, though he could if he wanted to.
The man outweighs me by thirty kilos with a decade of combat training that makes my violent history look like playground scrapping.
But he just stands there with my fingers digging into his windpipe, glaring at me like a man who’s proving a point by letting me prove mine.
“Her name doesn’t leave your mouth again,” I state through gritted teeth. “Not in that tone, not in any other. Understood?”
He swallows against my hand. “Understood.”
I release him and step back. Adrenaline has turned the dull ache in my gut into something that feels like getting shot all over again. I press my hand against the wound and force myself to breathe through the pain.
Ruslan touches his chin, inspects the red on his fingertip, and wordlessly wipes it on his trousers. Then, he picks up the toppled chair, drops back into it, and looks at me like nothing happened.
“Feel better?” he asks.
“Fuck off.”
“Thought so. Nine days ago, you would have shoved me for questioning an order. Tonight, you nearly broke my neck for mentioning a woman. You know what that means.”
I lower myself onto the edge of the bed and hold onto the mattress with both hands.
I know what it means.
The thing with Polina has crossed every line I swore I wouldn’t touch. I’ve spent two years telling myself the obsession was operational. That self-delusion died the moment she put her hands on me, and last night obliterated whatever was left.
I’ve never lost control over a woman. Women have always been a variable I could manage, a distraction I could indulge or walk away from, depending on whether they served a purpose.
My old man taught me that. Frol practices it.
Every woman in the Morozov orbit knows the rules: You’re either useful, decorative, or gone.
Nobody gets under the armor, and nobody changes the plan.
Polina didn’t just get under the armor. She cut straight through it without trying, and I’m not even sure she knows she did it.
I keep replaying how close she leaned in when she checked the sutures, near enough that I could smell the antiseptic on her skin mixed with her sweet perfume.
Her fingers trembled against my stomach when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, and the look on her face when she realized I knew what was happening between us won’t leave my fucking brain.
Fuck, the woman nearly brought me to my knees with just that fucking look alone.
I keep picturing myself grabbing her wrist and pulling her onto the bed.
Spreading her out on these shitty hospital sheets and finding out if the rest of her runs as hot as that one patch of skin on the back of her hand.
Putting my mouth on the racing pulse in her throat and feeling it hammer against my tongue while I slid my hand between her thighs and watched her come apart.
To hear the sound she makes when she stops holding back, because I know she’s holding back.
It was written all over her, like she was physically bracing herself against what her body craved.
That fantasy has looped nonstop in my head.
I’ve been hard more times in the past week than I have any right to be in a hospital bed, all because of her.
The way her scrubs pull across her hips when she bends over a chart.
The faint scar on her index finger I want to press my mouth against for no reason I could justify to anyone, least of all myself.
But I didn’t touch her. She would have let me, and that would have made me the same kind of man my old man is. Someone who takes what he wants because he can. I refuse to be that person. Not with her.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Ruslan says, pulling me back to the present. “You wouldn’t listen anyway.”
“You’re right.”
“But I will tell you what I see.” He rests his hands on his knees and meets my eyes.
“A man who has never once put anything before the job. Not a woman, not a friendship, not his own neck. In the space of nine days, that man is gone. If your old man finds out about her, she won’t survive the week.
You’ll go down with her, and I’ll follow for letting it happen. ”
I let his words sink in.
Ruslan is never wrong about the things that matter. His loyalty doesn’t come in the form of telling me what I want to hear. It comes as truth, followed by walking into the fire behind me.
“Are you finished?” I ask.
“Are you going to hit me again?”
“Maybe.”
The ghost of a smile crosses his busted lip.
“Then no.” He stands and straightens his jacket.
“Call Frol. Report the shooting. Get ahead of this before someone gets sent to find out why you’ve gone quiet.
If one of those men walks through that door and sees a Kozlov woman at your bedside, nobody leaves this building breathing. ”
He heads for the exit and pauses at the threshold. He glances back at me over his shoulder, and for the first time tonight, his face isn’t guarded or confrontational. It’s something closer to understanding.
“For what it’s worth, I get it. She’s the first real thing you’ve wanted. That’s not nothing, Lev. Just make sure it doesn’t get us all killed.”
He walks out and pulls the door closed behind him, and the soft click carries more weight than the argument that preceded it.
I sit alone in the quiet and look at the cracked poster frame. Guilt should be eating at me right now. The man has stepped in front of bullets for me. He’s driven through ambushes, lied to soldiers twice his rank, and never once questioned my judgment before tonight.
Violence is the only language my world has ever respected, and I speak it fluently.
My old man raised me on it. Every lesson, test, and bit of approval I’ve earned came through my fists or the barrel of a gun.
Frol got the title and the recognition. I got the jobs nobody cared to acknowledge and the quiet nod afterward that meant I’d bought myself another week of being useful.
But tonight, I didn’t hurt Ruslan because he challenged me. I hurt him because he reduced Polina to a threat assessment, and something in my chest rejected it before my brain could intervene.
That’s new, and it scares the hell out of me. I don’t know if it’s evolution or just a different breed of self-destruction.
My phone vibrates on the bedside table. Frol’s name fills the screen.
You missed the meeting with Father. Where the fuck are you? He’s asking questions, and I’m running out of answers. Call me. Now.
I read it twice and set the phone face-down.
I haven’t told anyone I’ve been shot. I haven’t reported the ambush or given up the names. In my world, that silence either reads as incompetence or betrayal.
Calling Frol would be the smart move. Feed him a version that keeps Polina out of it.
He won’t believe it, but he’ll sell it because that’s what we do for each other.
We’ve traded covers since we were teenagers, even when we resented each other for the roles we were born into.
Frol resents me for being the one our old man trusts with the ugly work.
I resent him for being the one our old man trusts with everything else.
We’ve managed to keep the family running even though neither of us got the version of our old man that we needed.
I pick up the device and stare at his name.
I could make the call, smooth this over, buy a few more days, and extract myself before anyone connects me to the woman down the hall.
Instead, I put the phone back down and think about how Polina reacted when I grazed her hand. The way she bit down on nothing to keep quiet and walked out of this room with her chin lifted, begging herself not to turn around.
My old man can wait.
She can’t.