Chapter 33 Polina
Polina
Gunfire drags me out of sleep before the shouting does.
I sit upright so fast my stomach rolls, and for one horrible second I have no idea where I am. Then the room comes back into focus. The guest suite. Kozlov compound.
Another burst cracks through the dark, closer this time.
I throw off the blanket, rush across the room, and snatch my robe off the chair. My pulse pounds as I tie it and move toward the door, but before I can reach it, someone pounds on the other side.
I yank it open, and Dmitri is on the other side, fully dressed and armed. He looks like he hasn’t blinked in an hour.
“What’s happening?” I demand.
“Morozov men hit the perimeter before dawn,” he explains, glancing at one of his men who runs past him. “We’re still clearing the house, but we pushed them back too easily. This wasn’t a full assault. It was a message.”
I don’t need him to explain whose message. Vadim knows where his son is. Worse, he’s willing to strike Kozlov territory to make a point.
I let out a slow breath. “What do you need?”
His face changes from cousin to pakhan in the span of a heartbeat. “Boris’s men brought in a few injured. More may come if Vadim sends a second wave. The garage is being cleared for triage.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Dmitri nods once. “Good. Lock your door after me. Take the back stairs. They’ve been cleared. And Polina.”
I look up.
“Do not leave the main house unless I say so.”
He leaves before I can say anything else, and I shut the door hard enough to rattle the frame.
I pull on clean scrubs, a sweatshirt, and sneakers before I head out. The back stairs smell like coffee and gun oil. That alone tells me how bad things are.
Usually, the mornings here start with voices from the kitchen and somebody arguing over something petty. Today, the halls are full of men with their weapons drawn and barked orders. Every face I pass looks harder than it did yesterday. Nobody smiles. Nobody pretends we are not already in it.
When I reach the converted garage, Boris is standing near the roll-up door with a phone to his ear and dried blood on one sleeve. He sees me and jerks his chin toward the folding tables someone has set up down the middle of the room.
He ends the call and shoves the phone into his pocket. “Two with gunshot wounds already stabilized. One concussion. One broken wrist. Another took a knife to the thigh. We’ve got enough supplies for now, but if this turns into a longer day, I’ll need somebody on a run into town.”
I head for the nearest cabinet and start sorting gauze, antiseptic, sutures, and gloves. Thank God I took inventory of everything a few days ago. “Then let’s hope everyone behaves and stops getting stabbed.”
Boris snorts. “You’re in the wrong family for that.”
“That’s become clear.”
A young guard I recognize from the front gate sits on a folding chair with his forearm wrapped in a bloody towel. He tries to stand when he sees me.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
His mouth twitches. “You sound like Mila.”
“Then you should listen.”
He does.
Work settles me faster than anything else could.
Not because the room is calm. It isn’t. Men keep coming in and out, boots thudding across concrete, voices carrying from outside, radios hissing from clipped belts.
Somebody wheels in another table. Somebody else drags a box of bottled water across the floor.
The whole compound has gone to war footing in less than an hour, and every person in this garage knows it.
Still, a wound is a wound. Bleeding has rules. Pain has numbers. A body either needs pressure, stitches, splinting, or transport. There’s comfort in problems I can solve with my hands.
I spend the next hour cleaning cuts, checking pupils, setting one ugly wrist fracture while the patient curses at me in three languages, and warning a twenty-year-old idiot not to flirt with me while I staple his shoulder.
I’m taping fresh dressing over the last of the shoulder wound when the garage door opens again.
Cold morning rushes in, along with Boris and three more men from the perimeter.
One limps. One has blood down the front of his shirt that doesn’t seem to be his.
The third ducks his head while Boris says something I can’t hear.
Then Lev steps inside behind them.
Every part of me reacts before I can stop it.
Anger comes first. Then heat. Then that sick, helpless pull my body refuses to let go of just because my heart has better reasons.
He looks like hell. Dirt streaks one side of his face. Dried blood cuts through his brow and down his temple. His shirt clings to him in damp, sweaty patches, and seeing him walk into my makeshift clinic like he still has any right to be near me almost makes my hands shake.
Boris points at the empty chair across from my table. “Sit. She’ll handle that.”
Lev looks at me once, then crosses the garage without speaking.
I hate that my pulse jumps.
He lowers himself into the chair and says nothing. I say nothing back. Around us, the room keeps moving. Somebody groans from the far table. A radio crackles. Boris barks for more clean towels. None of it matters once I step in front of Lev and tip his face toward me.
The cut starts just above his eyebrow and runs into his hairline. Not deep, but ugly. He must have taken a glancing blow from something metal.
“You’re lucky,” I comment.
He scoffs and replies, “That’s one word for it.”
I wet a pad with antiseptic. “Hold still.”
I press the gauze to the cut, and he sucks in a breath through his teeth.
My hand is steady. I’m proud of that, because the rest of me is a mess.
He sits there with his knees spread and his shoulders squared and his face inches from mine, and I can smell his cologne under the blood and smoke on his clothes.
The familiar scent cuts through every defense I’ve erected around myself.
I want him.
That truth is vile. It is humiliating. But it’s also there.
His eyes stay on my face while I clean the wound. I keep mine on the cut because that’s safer than his mouth, safer than his eyes, and much safer than remembering exactly how those eyes look when he loses control.
“Were you outside all night?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Did you know they were coming?”
“We expected movement soon. Not this soon.”
I set the bloody gauze aside and reach for fresh. “Your father does enjoy dramatic timing.”
Lev gives a humorless laugh. “That he does.”
I should leave it there.
Instead I ask, “Did he come himself?”
“No.”
“Coward.”
His mouth moves like he wants to say something and thinks better of it. Good. I don’t need comfort from him. I don’t need agreement. I need him to sit there and let me fix his face so I can forget, for one minute, that he ruined my life.
My fingers brush his temple as I part his hair to see the full cut. His breath changes. Only slightly, but enough for me to hear it.
His gaze drops to my mouth for one awful second. Heat curls low in my stomach, fierce and immediate, and I nearly miss the edge of the wound because I am too busy remembering what he tastes like.
I step back half an inch. “You’re going to need six stitches.”
“You’ve had knives in my ribs, doctor. I think I can trust you to stitch up a cut.”
I don’t answer. If I do, I’ll say something reckless.
The needle passes through the skin cleanly. Lev doesn’t flinch. He just watches me work, silent now, with that same unbearable focus he used to bring into my kitchen, into my bed, into every room that ever felt too small once he entered it.
I tie off the second stitch and tell myself not to think about his hands.
By the time I finish the third, my throat feels tight, and my pulse has moved between my legs. I cut the thread and reach for the antibiotic ointment.
“This will bruise,” I tell him.
“I’m devastated.”
I smooth the ointment over the cut, then place a small dressing above his brow. My fingers linger against his skin for one fraction too long, and his hand closes around my wrist.
I freeze.
Around us, the garage keeps going. Men talk. Boris swears. Metal clangs somewhere near the back wall. None of it reaches me past the heat of Lev’s hand on my skin.
He looks up at me, and his face has gone stripped bare in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times.
“I need to ask you something.”
I have to clear my throat before I can answer, “I know what you’re going to ask.”
His grip around me loosens, but he doesn’t let go. “Polina.”
“Yes,” I blurt out, because there’s no point dragging this out. “I’m pregnant.”
For a second he just stares at me.
Then his face changes.
I’ve never seen Lev Morozov look broken before. Furious, yes. Possessive. Cold. Amused. Wrecked with want. I have seen all of that. This is different. This is something giving way right in front of me with no effort made to hide it.
He stands so quickly the chair legs scrape against concrete. “Polina, I—”
“I’m keeping the baby.” I pull my wrist from his hand. “You don’t get a vote in that decision.”
His throat works once. “I wasn’t going to tell you otherwise.”
“No? Then this is the first easy thing we’ve agreed on in weeks.”
Pain moves across his face. Good. Let it.
He tries again. “Are you all right?”
I almost smile at the question. It is so absurd, so late, so cruel by accident that it nearly makes me lose my footing.
“No,” I admit. “But that has very little to do with morning sickness.”
He goes quiet.
For one dangerous second I want him to reach for me. I want him to break every rule I’ve put in place and drag me against his chest and tell me I am not doing this alone. I want every selfish, impossible thing that would make me hate myself even more.
Instead I step back.
The tears are already there, hot and close and humiliating. If I stay another second, he’ll see them.
So I turn away, walk past Boris, past the folding tables, past the men who know better than to stop me when my face looks like this. I make it to the side door with my spine straight and my breathing steady.
Then I push outside and keep walking before Lev can see me cry.