Extended Epilogue Nico
We have the Santoro child.
I don’t respond immediately. I set down my whiskey and study the photograph pinned to the wall of my private office.
Dr. Katerina Sokolov.
The photo was taken two years ago, outside Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
She’s caught mid-stride in the late afternoon sun, still in her scrubs, her dark hair pulled back in a practical ponytail. I trace the curve of her cheek.
She’s beautiful in that effortless way some women have by just existing in her own competence. She’s looking down at her phone, completely unaware she was being photographed.
Completely unaware she’s been watched every day since.
It’s been two years, three months, and sixteen days since Katerina Sokolov saved my life.
I’d been driving too fast on a wet road.
It was stupid of me, but I’d been angry about a deal gone wrong and I lost control.
The car flipped three times before slamming into a concrete barrier. I should have died.
But then she was there.
I don’t remember much from those first moments—pain, the taste of copper in my mouth, the smell of gasoline, and burning rubber. But I remember her voice.
It was calm and authoritative. Telling me to stay still and keep breathing, that help was coming.
She pulled me out of the wreckage with strength I wouldn’t have expected from someone her size. Put pressure on the artery in my leg that was pumping blood onto the asphalt.
Stayed with me by talking to me, keeping me conscious until the ambulance arrived.
Then she rode with me to the hospital and scrubbed in on my surgery even though her shift had ended hours before.
She checked on me every day during my recovery.
When I first saw her face clearly, I thought an angel had been sent to save me. I learned everything about her after that.
Dr. Katerina Sokolov, thirty-two years old, trauma surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian. She’s one of the best in the city despite her age.
She’d done her residency at Johns Hopkins, graduated top of her class, and turned down positions at every major hospital in the country to come back to New York.
She volunteers at free clinics in her limited spare time and mentors medical students. Hell, she even works double shifts when the ER is short-staffed.
She saves people. It’s what she does. It’s who she is at her core.
And I became obsessed.
Not in the way normal men become interested in beautiful women. This was something that took root in my chest the moment she put her hands on my bleeding body and refused to let me die. She’d touched me. Saved me. She was mine in a way she didn’t even know yet.
But Katerina Sokolov is untouchable.
She’s a Bratva princess. Nikolai Sokolov’s fucking cousin, though she keeps herself carefully removed from the family business. She made it clear years ago that she wanted nothing to do with organized crime.
She’s a doctor. She saves lives. She doesn’t take them.
The Bratva apparently respected that, and in turn they protect her. They let her live in her ivory tower of hospitals and medical conferences and noble intentions. Unfortunately for me, this means I couldn’t just approach her or ask her to dinner like a normal man pursuing a normal woman.
So I watched from a distance.
I learned her routines and where she lived. I found out where she went for coffee, a small place three blocks from the hospital that knew her order by heart.
I know she takes her coffee black with one sugar. I know she’s left-handed. I know she listens to 2000s rap music when she studies medical journals.
I have photographs covering one entire wall of this office.
Katerina leaving the hospital after a long shift.
Katerina at the coffee shop, laughing at something the barista said.
Katerina jogging in Central Park on Sunday mornings.
Katerina at a charity gala, stunning in a black dress that made every man in the room stare.
I know everything about her.
I pick up my phone and make a call to my lieutenant. He answers on the first ring.
“Send the message,” I tell him. “Tell them we have the child, and we’ll only negotiate with Dr. Katerina Sokolov. No one else. She comes alone to the location we provide, or they never see the girl again.”
“And if she refuses?” my lieutenant asks.
I look at Katerina’s photograph, studying those intelligent dark eyes and that determined set to her jaw, like she’s carrying the weight of the world and refusing to buckle under it.
“She won’t refuse,” I say with certainty. “Not for a child’s life.”
I know what drives her and what she values most. She’ll come. She’ll walk into this trap willingly, believing she can save an innocent child.
“Once she’s here,” my lieutenant says carefully, “what do we do with her?”
I take a drink of whiskey, savoring the burn. My eyes never leave Katerina’s photograph.
“Once she’s here,” I say quietly, “she’s mine.”
TO BE CONTINUED.