Chapter 11 Polina
Polina
Daria’s name lights up my screen for the fourth time this week, and I swipe ignore without breaking stride.
It’s not that I don’t want to talk to her, it’s just that every conversation we have lately starts with you sound distracted and ends with her asking questions I can’t answer truthfully. The guilt of that is its own problem. I file it next to the other things I’m not dealing with and keep walking.
Before I can find something to distract myself, fate handles it for me. A gurney bursts through my emergency room doors.
The paramedics are moving fast. A second gurney follows behind the first, this one carrying a man who’s unconscious with his shirt slashed open and a pressure bandage over his left shoulder that lost the fight somewhere between wherever this happened and my ER.
I’m not the attending on either case. Dr. Savin is already rushing toward the first gurney with his gloves halfway on and his resident a step behind him.
There’s no clinical reason for me to be in this bay, so to keep out of the way, I turn toward my wing.
Then, I see the tattoo.
The first man’s forearm is turned upward while a paramedic checks his radial pulse, and the marking stops me cold.
A wolf’s head in profile, with three lines crossing the muzzle at a downward angle.
I know every detail of that symbol. I grew up seeing it on the wrists and forearms of men who stood outside our front door, drove us to school, sat at our dinner table, ate my mother’s food, and laughed at my father’s jokes.
Most of my cousins have it branded somewhere on their bodies.
It was as unremarkable to me as a family name on a mailbox. Background detail. Wallpaper.
They’re Kozlov markings. Both men.
I skid to a halt. Savin glances up from the gurney, reads something in my face, and hands off to his resident without a word. He walks over to me, already stripping off one glove.
“What happened?” I ask, keeping my voice low.
“Shooting. Industrial district.” He matches my volume. “Armed attack on a warehouse operation. One took two rounds to the torso, the second has a through-and-through to the shoulder and significant head trauma from a fall. Police are en route.” “
My eyes burn as I resist the urge to look closer at them, which would only raise more suspicion. “Are they going to make it?”
“The first one, probably. He’s stable enough to go to surgery.” He glances back toward the second gurney. “The other one… we’ll see.”
“Security needs to be notified. Flag the room.”
“Already done.” He cocks his head and looks at me more carefully. “You know them?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I just wanted to make sure we weren’t leaving the room open.”
He accepts this and gets back to work as my legs carry me to the break room.
Someone abandoned a pot of coffee on the burner long enough that the smell hits me in the doorway, dark and slightly scorched, the way it gets when it’s been sitting since the last shift change. I pour a cup anyway, sit on the couch in front of the wall-mounted television, and turn it on.
The news anchor is mid-sentence when the picture comes up.
An armed attack on a Kozlov-controlled shipping warehouse.
Multiple casualties confirmed. Investigators are on scene.
Sources indicate the assault bears the hallmarks of an ongoing territorial conflict between rival criminal organizations. Retaliation is anticipated.
I set the remote on the cushion beside me.
She doesn’t say my family’s name. She doesn’t have to. Anyone in this city with passing knowledge of how power moves through its underground architecture knows which organization the broadcast is dancing around.
Two men with my family’s tattoos are down the hall right now on my colleague’s table because of Lev’s organization.
His hands weren’t on a weapon tonight, at least as far as I know, but it’s still his father’s machine.
The syndicate that trained him, shaped him, and deploys him.
The one he has never pretended to be separate from, because unlike almost everything else about the way he moves through the world, he’s never lied to me about what he is, even if he hasn’t said it outright.
I’ve told myself that that honesty put him in a different category.
Sitting in this break room with burned coffee going cold in my hand, looking at a news broadcast about dead and wounded men who share my bloodline, I’m having a hard time making that logic hold.
I’ve known what he is all along. Every time I let him through my door, I knew.
Every late night in my kitchen, conversation that went longer than it should have, and time I let myself believe that the version of him that exists in my apartment is the complete picture, I knew.
I’ve been staring at everything around the central fact and calling it sufficient.
But those men in my OR won’t allow that tonight. They’re thirty meters down the hall, and there’s no comfortable distance I can put between myself and what they mean.
I finish my shift the way I always finish hard shifts: By doing the work.
A laceration that takes eleven stitches and my attention for nine minutes.
A pediatric consult two floors up that requires me to translate a complicated procedure into language a frightened mother can absorb.
Discharge paperwork. A phone call with a specialist who talks too fast and has to be slowed down twice.
A family in the waiting room who needs me to look them in the eye and mean what I say.
My hands do what they’ve been trained to do. My mouth produces the right words in the right order. Nobody looks at me sideways, and I’m grateful, because I don’t know what they’d find if they looked too carefully tonight.
Savin catches me near the elevator as I’m pulling on my coat.
“The shoulder wound is out of surgery,” he announces. “He’s going to make it.”
“And the second one?”
He tilts his head in a way that doesn’t require words. “Still in the OR.”
“Thank you for letting me know.”
He watches me button my coat. “Go home, Polina. Sleep.”
“That’s the plan.”
The drive home is twenty-three minutes. My phone sits in the cupholder the entire way, and I glance down at it at every red light. Lev hasn’t texted. He has no idea that I’ve carried this information alone through the back half of a shift.
I pick up the phone at the fourth red light.
I know what I’d say. I drafted it in my head after I left the break room.
This isn’t working. I think we’ve both known it for a while.
I don’t see this ending well for either of us.
Clean. Direct. The kind of ending that doesn’t leave room for negotiation, because I know if he starts talking, I’ll let him.
If I let him, the conversation will go somewhere I don’t have the defenses for tonight.
I know how to end things. I’ve done it before.
When the light turns green, I set the phone back in the cupholder and drive.
I don’t call. I stare at the road and don’t call, and I decide I’ll think about what that means when I have the energy to be honest with myself about it.
Tonight, I don’t.
My building comes into view at the end of the street.
I park and sit in the car for longer than necessary, watching a couple walk their dog past the entrance, the ordinary rhythm of a neighborhood at night going on without any awareness of what I’m carrying.
I finally get out, pull my coat closed against the cold, and walk toward my door.
I freeze when I get to my doorstep.
A package is there. Not large, wrapped in brown paper with my name across the top in handwriting I’d recognize anywhere.
No shipping label or postage, which means someone brought this here.
Either Lev or someone he trusts enough to know my address, and either of those things puts him within a few steps of my front door today, while I was at the hospital.
I look up and down the empty street before I pick it up, bring it inside, and set it on the kitchen counter to peel back the paper.
A book. Old, judging by the yellowing pages and the texture of the cloth cover. I turn it over carefully and open it to the title page. Principles of Operative Surgery. 1947. First edition.
Six weeks ago, on a night when the conversation drifted the way it sometimes does between us, Lev asked me what I’d want if I could have anything that served no practical purpose.
I thought about my mentor’s copy of this book.
How it lived on the shelf in his office behind his desk, and how I stood in front of it during consultations, the way you stand in front of something in a museum.
Not to read it, just to be near it. I told Lev that, and I remember thinking immediately afterward that it was an odd thing to share.
A small, white card is tucked inside the front cover, filled with his handwriting, neater than the notes he leaves when he’s in a hurry.
For the doctor who saves everyone but herself.
I read it twice, then I carry the book to the couch and sit with it in my lap.
I don’t know when he sent this.
That’s the thing I keep circling. He could have left it this morning, before anyone knew about the attack on my family.
He could have found this book weeks ago on an unremarkable afternoon, remembered what I said, tracked down a first edition because that was the specific version I mentioned, and had it waiting on his kitchen counter for the right moment to send.
Or he sent it tonight because of what his family did to mine.
If he sent it before, he’s the man I’ve let myself believe he is. Someone who listens when I speak, who holds onto details I’ve already forgotten sharing, and who does something kind without needing me to notice.
But if he sent it after… well, he’s his father’s son, after all.
I don’t know which is true, and I’m not sure which one is worse.