7. Nina #3
He only looks at me for one long second, then turns back to the doctor.
Doctor Mirov cuts through Luka’s coat first, then his shirt.
The fabric parts under the scissors, black cloth peeling away from blood-slick skin. I look at the wound because that feels safer than looking at the rest of him, which is stupid, because the wound is horrific.
There’s blood everywhere.
Across his shoulder, down his upper arm, smeared over his chest where the shirt clung wetly to him. The bullet hit high, near the outer part of his shoulder, and the skin around it is torn and ugly. I press my hand over my mouth.
Luka barely flinches.
He sits upright on the edge of the bed, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere on the wall beyond the doctor. His control is obscene. Inhuman. The doctor cleans the wound, and Luka’s only reaction is a slight tightening of his fingers around the edge of the mattress.
My gaze betrays me and drops lower.
His torso is not what I expected, though I don’t know why I expected anything else from him.
He is lean but powerfully built, broad through the chest and shoulders, his stomach hard beneath streaks of blood, muscle shifting under his skin every time he breathes.
There are scars too. More than one. Thin pale lines across his ribs.
A rougher mark near his side. A small round scar low on his abdomen that looks old and cruel.
A map of violence I’ve never been allowed to read.
I look away quickly, ashamed of noticing his body while he is bleeding. Then I look back because I’m terrified he will disappear if I don’t keep him in sight.
The doctor injects something near the wound. Luka’s expression does not change.
“Local anesthetic,” Doctor Mirov says, mostly to me, I think.
I nod as if I understand anything beyond the fact that Luka’s blood is drying on my hands.
Yelena appears beside me with a damp cloth. “Here,” she says gently.
I look down. My hands are a mess.
Red between my fingers. Red under my nails. Luka’s blood on my palms, on my wrist, a smear near my thumb where I must have touched my face without realizing.
I take the cloth. “Thank you,” I whisper.
She cups my cheek briefly with warm fingers. “You’re safe now.”
I almost ask her if that is true. Instead, I nod.
Behind us, footsteps pound down the corridor.
I turn just as my brother appears in the doorway.
Misha Hale fills the room with the kind of presence that usually makes people straighten before they know why.
He is thirty-nine now, sixteen years older than me, and still built like the angry teenage boy who decided the world was not allowed to touch his little sister without permission.
Tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, with our father’s strong nose and our mother’s brown eyes, though his are harder than mine.
There is always something restless about him, something coiled beneath the surface, as if even when he stands still, he’s preparing to move.
His dark coat is open over a black shirt. His hair is wind-tossed, his jaw shadowed, and his eyes go first to Luka’s shoulder, then to my bloodstained hands, then to my face.
“Nina,” he says. One word.
Everything inside me cracks. “Misha,” I breathe.
He crosses the room in three strides and pulls me into him so hard I almost lose my balance. His arms close around me, warm and crushing and familiar, and for the first time since the first shot rang out in the garage, I let myself shake.
His hand comes to the back of my head.
“You’re hurt?” he asks against my hair.
“No.”
“Look at me.”
I pull back.
He grips my face gently but firmly, turning it from side to side, scanning for injuries the way he used to check my knees when I fell as a child.
“I’m not hurt,” I say. “It’s not my blood.”
His eyes flick to Luka.
Luka’s watching us now, bare to the waist, blood streaked across his skin while Doctor Mirov works a pair of forceps into the wound.
Misha’s face tightens. “What happened?” he asks.
Luka answers before I can. “Garage breach.”
Misha’s jaw clenches. “Who?”
“We don’t know yet.”
The doctor moves. There’s a small, wet sound.
I nearly gag.
Luka’s fingers tighten once on the mattress. That’s all.
Doctor Mirov drops the bullet into a metal tray. The sound it makes is tiny.
But I’ll hear it for the rest of my life.
Misha’s arm stays around my shoulders. “You were supposed to protect her.”
The room goes very still.
Luka looks at him. “I did,” he says. His voice is flat. Cold. Unapologetic.
And he’s right. The blood on him proves it.
Misha looks at the wound again, and something in his expression shifts. Misha doesn’t soften easily in rooms like this. But the fury changes shape, forced to make space for the truth.
Luka took the bullet for me.
“He did,” I say quietly.
Both men look at me.
I hate that. I hate the weight of their attention, hate the ache in my throat, hate the way my voice trembles even though I’m trying so hard not to fall apart in front of them.
Misha’s arm tightens around my shoulders, his fingers pressing hard into my coat as if the thought has struck him at the same time it strikes me.
Luka says nothing.
Then Misha turns me toward the door. “Come,” he says.
I look up at him. “What?”
“Out.”
“I’m fine.”
“I did not ask if you were fine.” His voice isn’t loud, but it has that edge in it, the one I remember from childhood. The one that means he’s done negotiating with the world.
I glance back at Luka.
He’s already looking at me.
There’s blood on his chest. Blood on his arm. Blood on the white sheet beneath him. But his eyes are clear, fixed on mine with an intensity that makes it impossible to tell whether he wants me to stay or go.
For one stupid second, I want him to say something.
But he doesn’t.
Misha’s hand closes gently around my wrist, and this time I let him lead me out.
The hallway outside feels too warm after the medical room. Too quiet. The estate stretches around us in polished marble and dark wood, beautiful and enormous and full of shadows I no longer know how to ignore.
Misha does not stop until we are far enough away that Luka cannot hear us.
Then he turns to me. At my loose hair. My pale face. The dried blood on my hands. The shake I cannot quite control.
His expression changes, and for a moment he isn’t Luka Kazan’s oldest friend or a man who knows too much about violence.
He is just my brother.
“Misha,” I say softly.
His jaw works once.
Then he says, “You have to leave your job.”