7. Nina #2
Then I’m shoved into the back seat, hard enough that I hit the opposite door.
Luka follows immediately, folding himself in after me with a controlled violence that would have seemed effortless if I hadn’t seen the wound. The door slams. The car lurches before it is fully closed.
I twist toward him at once. “Your shoulder.”
He leans back against the seat, jaw clenched, one hand pressed hard to the wound. In the dim interior, he looks paler than he should.
Too pale.
“Luka.”
His eyes open.
I don’t even realize I’m touching his face until his gaze drops to my hand.
My fingers are shaking against his jaw.
He looks at me for one long second, and in that second the garage, the gunfire, the blood, all of it falls away just enough for something worse to slip through.
He could have died, and that thought terrifies me.
The car speeds up, tires screaming as we tear out of the garage through a service exit I did not know existed. Behind us, another shot cracks, distant now, swallowed by concrete and distance.
I press harder against his shoulder because I don’t know what else to do.
He inhales sharply.
“Sorry,” I say, voice breaking.
“Don’t be.”
“Don’t be sorry that you got shot?”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That is not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
“Then stop speaking.”
His mouth curves faintly, impossibly. “You first.”
I almost cry. I almost laugh.
Instead, I press my forehead to the side of his good arm for one second, just one, because my body needs proof that he’s still here, warm and solid and infuriatingly alive.
His hand comes to the back of my head.
Blood, danger, and everything between us forgotten for half a heartbeat.
Then his phone rings.
He answers with his good hand.
I cannot understand all of what he says, but I understand the tone. Cold. Commanding. A man already shifting from victim to predator.
His eyes turn toward the black window as the city blurs past us.
When he ends the call, the car is silent except for the engine and my breathing.
“Who was that?” I ask.
His gaze stays on the window. “Security.”
“What happened?”
“A breach.”
“A breach?” My voice rises. “That was not a breach. That was people shooting at us.”
His eyes return to mine. There’s something in them now that makes the air in the car feel thinner. “It wasn’t random,” he says and falls silent. There’s something he’s not telling me.
“Take him to the hospital,” I say the second the car clears the service exit.
My voice sounds wrong, thin and panicked. Not like me at all.
Luka’s sitting beside me in the back seat, his head tipped slightly against the leather, one hand pressed to his shoulder while blood seeps between his fingers and darkens the side of his shirt.
He looks pale in the passing streetlights, but his eyes are open, bright, furious. Not frightened. Not even close.
Apparently being shot is just another scheduling inconvenience for him.
“No hospital,” he says.
I stare at him. “You have a bullet in your shoulder.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you speaking like I told you there’s traffic?”
His mouth tightens. “Because there’s no hospital.”
I twist toward the driver. “Take him to the hospital.”
The driver’s eyes flick to the rearview mirror and immediately away, which tells me everything I need to know about whose orders matter in this car.
Luka’s voice lowers. “Nina.”
“No,” I snap. “Don’t Nina me. You’re bleeding all over the seat.”
“It’s an armored car. It has seen worse.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It was not meant to comfort you.”
I press my palm harder against the wound, and he inhales once through his nose, short and controlled.
At least he is still capable of pain.
“You need doctors,” I say.
“I have one.”
“At a hospital.”
“At home.”
I stare at him. “You have a doctor at home?”
His eyes slide to mine. Even shot, even bleeding, even with half his shirt ruined and his jaw clenched against pain, he manages to look mildly bored by my shock.
“I have many things at home,” he says.
I laugh. It comes out closer to a broken breath. “Of course you do. Why did I ever think otherwise?”
He gives me a somber look.
The car cuts through the city, then turns away from the main roads into wider, quieter streets.
The buildings thin. Gates get higher. Trees begin to appear, black against the bruised evening sky.
I keep my hand on Luka’s shoulder the entire time, though my palm is slick with blood now and my stomach rolls every time I look at it.
I want him to do something human. Curse. Sweat. Admit it hurts. Tell me he is scared. But Luka Kazan only sits there in the dark, bleeding through his shirt, giving short instructions into his phone in Russian while the car speeds toward wherever men like him go when hospitals are too public.
When the gates finally appear, I forget to breathe for a different reason.
I’ve heard about his house from Misha, though my brother never calls it a house. He calls it the estate, usually with the tone of someone describing a military compound that happens to have chandeliers.
He wasn’t exaggerating.
The gates are black iron, high and severe, set between stone pillars with cameras tucked into places most people would never notice.
Two guards step out before we even stop, weapons visible beneath dark coats.
The car rolls through after a brief exchange, and the driveway curves inward through an avenue of winter-dark trees.
Then the house appears.
No. Not house. It’s a freaking mansion, probably where Batman lives.
It rises at the end of the drive like something built by a man who wanted privacy more than beauty and somehow got both. Pale stone, tall windows, sharp rooflines, wings spreading out on either side, all of it lit from below so the building seems to glow against the night.
I press my bloodied hand tighter against Luka’s shoulder and stare.
I’ve wanted to see this place for years. Not that I’d ever admit that out loud.
Misha used to mention it casually. Dinner at Luka’s. Meeting at Luka’s. Stayed at Luka’s until dawn. As if Luka’s home was just a place men went to drink vodka and discuss business, not a fortress on private land with more security than most embassies.
I was never invited.
Misha always said it was not a place for me.
At the time, I thought he meant because I was too young.
Now, as the car pulls up at the front entrance and two armed men move toward us before the engine cuts, I understand he meant because it is Luka’s world without the corporate mask.
And I have arrived in it with his blood under my fingernails.
The car door opens. Cold air rushes in.
Luka starts to move by himself.
I grab his good arm. “Don’t even think about pretending you can walk normally.”
His eyes cut to mine. “I can walk.”
“You were shot.”
“In the shoulder.”
“Do you think specifying the body part makes it less insane?”
One of the guards reaches in to help. Luka gives him a look so lethal the man freezes.
I give the guard a look of my own. “Help him.”
The guard hesitates for exactly one second, glancing between me and Luka like he is trying to decide which death will be faster.
Then Luka says, through his teeth, “Fine.”
That’s when I realize how bad it must be.
He lets the guard take some of his weight as he steps out of the car.
I climb out after him, legs shaky, dress wrinkled, hands red. The front doors open before we reach them, and warm golden light spills down the stone steps.
A woman stands in the doorway.
For one bizarre, disorienting second, the sight of her makes everything feel less real.
“Luka,” she says.
I know her. Yelena Kazan.
Luka’s mother.
I met her years ago at one of Misha’s birthdays, then again at a charity dinner where she kissed both my cheeks and told me I had my mother’s eyes.
She’s warm where Luka is cold, rounder at the edges where he is all hard lines, with silver-blonde hair pinned loosely at the nape of her neck and soft brown eyes that make her look as if she belongs near a fireplace, not at the entrance to a fortress full of armed men.
She’s wearing a cream cardigan over a dark dress, and somehow the sight of it nearly undoes me. Something in her seems to fracture as she takes him in, and I feel like an asshole for behaving so rudely through the car ride. As if he hadn’t quite literally saved my life.
Her gaze moves from Luka’s shoulder to my hands.
Then to my face.
“Oh, Nina,” she says softly.
That’s what almost makes me cry.
I try to speak, but nothing comes out.
Luka’s voice cuts through the moment. “Not here.”
Yelena steps aside immediately. “The doctor is ready.”
Inside, the estate is even more overwhelming.
Marble floors, dark wood, tall ceilings, oil paintings, thick rugs, the faint scent of wax and smoke and something warm from the kitchen.
It should feel like luxury, but with men moving quickly through the corridors and Luka leaving a thin trail of blood behind him, it feels less like a home and more like the most beautiful war room in Moscow.
They take him down a corridor to a room that looks like a private study until one of the bookshelves opens into something far more clinical.
I stop at the threshold. A medical room. Fully equipped.
White cabinets. Stainless trays. Bright overhead lights. Monitors. Cabinets with glass fronts. A narrow bed already prepared. A man in blue gloves stands beside it, sleeves rolled to the elbow, face calm in the way doctors are calm only when things are very bad.
“Mr. Kazan,” the doctor says.
“Doctor Mirov,” Luka replies, as if he has arrived for a routine checkup and not with a bullet lodged in his shoulder.
The doctor’s eyes move over the wound. “Sit.”
Luka sits.
That alone tells me the pain is worse than he is admitting.
Yelena touches my arm gently. “Come, darling. Let them work.”
But I cannot move. “I’m staying,” I say. My voice sounds small, but I mean it.
Luka’s head turns. Our eyes meet.
For a moment, I expect him to order me out. I almost want him to. It would be easier to be angry than to stand here and watch.
But he doesn’t.