Chapter 39 - Polina
Polina
Two days after the assault, the compound settles into something close to normal. The men have traded raised weapons for holstered ones and coffee.
Frol is in Kozlov custody somewhere on the east wing. I don’t ask where. Tony has been in the conference room since yesterday morning, coordinating the absorption of the Morozov organization’s legitimate holdings and the quieter, less documented elimination of everything else.
As head of the local police, Boris handles the details with the competence of a man who has done this before and will do it again. Dmitri manages all of it from his office with the door mostly closed, and the compound runs the way a compound runs when the hard part is over and the paperwork begins.
I spend the morning doing what I do. One of Boris’s men has a cracked rib that I strap and send back to bed with instructions he probably won’t follow.
A young soldier has a hand laceration, and he squeaks the entire time I irrigate the wound and then looks mortified about it once I’m done.
I tell him it’s involuntary and not a character flaw, which seems to help.
Ruslan’s arm is the one that takes real work.
The field dressing that got him through the operation did its job and no more, and by the time I get a proper look at the wound, I already know it needs more than I can do at a folding table in the garage.
Dmitri clears one of the ground floor offices.
The space is imperfect but workable, and I’ve operated in worse.
The free clinics I interned at for a while were a shit show, so I mean it when I say I’ve operated in far worse, and I tell myself that while I’m setting up, because the improvised conditions are not the part of this that makes me uneasy.
What I haven’t operated in, in all my years in trauma surgery, is conditions where the patient’s best friend stands in the corner and holds the lamp.
Lev doesn’t volunteer. I ask him, because I need the light and I need it steady, and he’s the only person in this building Ruslan will tolerate close enough.
He takes the lamp without a word and positions it exactly where I need it and doesn’t move for the next ninety minutes.
He schools his face the entire time. Only once, when I dig into the deepest part of the wound and Ruslan lets out a pained sound through his teeth, does something in Lev’s expression give way for a second before it seals back up.
He’s terrified. He’d rather take a bullet than watch this, and he’s holding that lamp without a tremor anyway.
When I close the last layer of sutures and strip my gloves, I glance over at him. He’s looking at Ruslan, not at me.
“He’s going to be fine,” I tell him.
He nods once. “I know.”
He doesn’t know. He was afraid, and now he’s not, and he’ll never say either of those things out loud. I leave him to his own version of relief and go wash my hands.
The family meeting happens at four in the afternoon.
Dmitri calls it with the whole extended family present, and I sit between Daria and Mila with my hands in my lap while the room arranges itself by instinct around the table.
Lev takes a chair at the far end, which is where someone sits when they’re not sure they’re supposed to be sitting at all.
Ruslan, who absolutely should not be out of bed, is somehow in the doorway with his bandaged arm in a sling, refusing a chair.
Dmitri speaks for twenty minutes. He covers the operation, the outcome, the current state of the Morozov territories, and what comes next for the organization. Then he addresses Lev, and the room goes quiet, as if everyone has been waiting for this very moment.
“What you gave us, and what you did to end this, won’t be forgotten,” Dmitri says. “There’s a place here for you, if you want it.”
Lev lifts his chin and replies, “I want it.”
The room breathes. Not fully, not yet, because trust takes longer than one conversation, and everyone at this table knows it. But the shape of it is there now, and shapes become real things eventually.
Alexei, across the table, says nothing, but he gives Lev a single nod.
Dmitri turns to me last. “The question about your parents stays open. I’m going to find every answer there is to find, and I’ll give them to you when I have them.”
I swallow around the tightness in my throat. “Thank you.”
It’s not resolution. It’s the promise of resolution, which is all any of us can offer each other right now, and I decide it’s enough for today.
That night, I go looking for Lev.
He’s not in the conference room, not in the kitchen, and not in the corridor outside my room where he sometimes stands when he can’t sleep. The sound of the shower running carries through the closed bathroom door, and I knock once before I push it open.
The bathroom is heavy with steam. Lev is in the shower fully clothed, sitting on the floor of the tub with his back against the wall and the water running over him. He’s looking at his hands.
I don’t say anything. I step out of my shoes, shrug off my cardigan, and open the shower door.
He looks up when I step in with him.
“Move over,” I tell him quietly.
He does, and I sink down beside him and let the water soak through my clothes. We sit there for a minute like that, shoulder to shoulder, and the water runs over both of us, filling the silence with its patter.
Then I reach for the hem of his shirt.
He lets me pull it over his head, heavy and dripping, and I set it aside before I turn to face him.
He watches me, stripped of everything that isn’t exactly what he feels, and he lets me unbutton his trousers and coax him upright and out of the rest until the water is hitting his bare skin instead of wet fabric.
I shed my own clothes without drama. When I’m done, I press my mouth to the scar on his ribs, right over the place where I put in six sutures on a night that now feels like it happened in a different life.
He makes a sound dragged out of him by forty-eight hours of barely holding on and the permission to finally let go.
“Come here,” he mumbles, drawing me to my feet before he kisses me with a gentleness that contradicts everything about the last two days.
I flatten my palms against his chest and feel his heartbeat as I think about how many times I almost didn’t get to do this again.
He turns me carefully and settles my back against the tile, and his hands cradle my face like he’s holding something he nearly lost. The water runs warm over us both.
He kisses me slowly, with none of the desperation that used to drive us, and the difference is enough to bring tears to my eyes.
He works his way down my neck, my shoulder, and back to my lips, and his hands move over me like he’s relearning every part of me.
He’s taking his time in a way he never has.
Even without saying it aloud, neither of us is trying to escape this, and there’s no war waiting on the other side of the door.
I reach for him and find him already hard, and when I wrap my hand around his length, the breath he pulls in sounds like relief.
“That’s my good girl,” he says against my temple, low and barely audible.
I draw my brows together and pull back just far enough to look at him. “You know I hate that.”
He holds my face in both hands. His thumbs travel along my cheekbones.
“I call you that because of what you are to me. You’re the only person I’ve ever needed to take care of.
When I look at you, everything in me goes quiet and says, mine, protect her, keep her.
Not because you need protecting. Because you are everything I want to protect. That’s what it means when I say it.”
The tears spill before I decide to let them, and he doesn’t mention it because his eyes are doing the same thing, and neither of us says a word about it.
I answer by pulling his mouth back to mine.
He hauls me against his hard chest and pins my back against the wall, lifting me off my feet.
I wrap my legs around him, and when he pushes inside me, we both suck in a breath.
We stay there, foreheads together, with the water running between us, breathing the same air.
Then he inches in deeper, taking his time.
He drags his hands from my face to the tile above my head for leverage, and even then he brings one back to my jaw like he needs to feel me.
I run my fingers through his wet hair and hold on.
Every stroke pulls something out of me I’ve been holding since the radio went quiet and I stood in that triage station convinced I was about to lose him.
I cry. He does too. The water covers both of us, and neither of us looks away.
When I come, it arrives quietly, rolling through me in slow waves rather than snapping, and I bury my face against his neck and let it move through me. He follows with his lips at my temple and my name in his mouth, and for a long time after, neither of us moves to separate.
Eventually, he turns off the water and wraps a towel around me before grabbing one for himself. Then we both end up on the bathroom floor with our backs against the tub, towels pulled around us and quiet settling over everything.
I stare at the floor for a while, finding the words.
“I haven’t forgiven you,” I admit. “For what you knew about my parents and didn’t tell me. I want you to understand that. I don’t know if I ever fully will.”
“I understand,” he concedes, closing his eyes as though he’s bracing for impact.
“I spent so long looking for that answer,” I continue.
“I tracked down witnesses when I was a teenager. I pulled police reports until I understood the system well enough to know they’d been altered.
I stopped asking out loud because asking too loudly was dangerous, but I never stopped.
And you sat across from me and listened to me talk about it, and you held the answer the whole time.
” My voice doesn’t break. I won’t let it.
“That’s the thing I keep coming back to.
Not even the secret itself. The fact that you watched me carry it. ”
He doesn’t try to defend himself. He takes the full weight of it, which is the only version of this I could have accepted.
“I know,” he says again, and this time, the two words carry everything they need to.
“But I love you.” I make myself look at him when I say it, because it doesn’t mean anything said to the floor.
“And I’m choosing to build a future with you.
Not because it’s easy and not because everything is resolved.
Because our child deserves parents who chose each other despite everything.
And because, as it turns out, you are the only person in the world I want beside me in this. ”
Lev stares at me, mouth slightly open, and then he gets up on his knees on the tile in front of me. He rests both hands on my stomach and lowers his head and touches his lips gently to the place where our baby is growing, and he stays there for a breath, then two, then three.
When he looks up, his face is covered in tears again.
“Your mother,” he says to our child, “is the bravest person I’ve ever known.”