2. Rowan
ROWAN
Blood soaks through Ivan’s shirt faster than I can press my palm against it to slow the bleeding.
Heat pours over my hand in relentless waves, slick and thick and impossible to contain. It slides between my fingers, runs over my knuckles, darkens the fabric of my sleeves. I bear down harder anyway, grinding the heel of my hand into the wound until my shoulders start to burn from the strain.
Sirens scream in the distance.
“Don’t you dare fucking die on me,” I mutter under my breath. The words come out rougher than I intend, more plea than command. It is a stupid thing to say, as if he can be bullied into surviving by force of my will alone.
The world has narrowed to this—my hand on his body, the blood refusing to stop, and the terrible rhythm of his breathing under the pressure of my palm.
His chest rises and falls in short, strained motions, his body already struggling to remember how to keep itself alive.
His eyes are open, fixed on me, but with every passing second they seem to drift farther away, the focus inside them dimming in a way I have seen too many times in the aftermath of a shootout.
Not him.
Anyone but him.
“Ivan.” I snap. “Stay the fuck awake.”
His eyes flicker, a slight uptick to the corner of his mouth.
The rest of the world could be on fire and Ivan Kuznetsov would still look like the only person in the room who already knows how it ends.
That expression has guided me for years, reassuring me, anchoring me, enraging me to the point where I have been close to raising my fist at him.
It drags me backward through years in the span of a heartbeat.
Back to a teenage boy half-starved and feral, fists split open from underground fights and petty theft, looking up at a man who should have walked past him and didn’t.
A hand extended not in kindness, exactly, but in opportunity, refined violence into something useful.
He took me from the gutters and built me into a weapon sharp enough to carve his enemies apart.
Now that same weapon is kneeling in the street trying and failing to hold his maker together.
Tires screech against the asphalt nearby, headlights flaring over us. Voices echo from somewhere beyond the wreckage as doors slam and boots pound closer. But it all blurs into background noise as meaningless static against the sick thud of my pulse in my ears.
I’m pulled back by several hands.
Paramedics drop their bags at their feet and take over.
I snarl but give them space only because they’re faster than I am.
I step back with Ivan’s blood still warm on my hands and watch the scene unfold.
My eyes never leave my Pakhan as they cut away fabric and slap on pressure dressings, moving him carefully onto an awaiting stretcher.
He grunts once, the sound low and pained when they lift him. Then he’s gone, swallowed by the open doors of the ambulance, its lights flashing across my face as it tears away from the scene, its sirens howling into the night.
For the first time in years, something cold and unfamiliar coils in my chest.
Fear.
Not the sharp twist in my gut from a gun held to my forehead or a blade pressed at my throat. This is so much deeper.
Ivan Kuznetsov isn’t just my Pakhan. He is the one who gave me purpose. A name that meant something. A gun in my hand and orders that made the chaos in my head make sense. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a father.
I’m not ready to bury him.
The hospital is a sterile fortress in the heart of the city.
Ivan is taken to an operating room in a private wing with armed guards at both ends of the hallway. None of the staff on this floor ask questions. There is no reason to when bills are easily slid into their hand to buy their silence.
I pace the hallway outside the operating theater for the six hours the surgery takes. My ribs ache from the crash, but I ignore it. Pain is background noise at this point.
They wheel him out just before dawn, still unconscious with tubes wrapped around him. I follow the gurney to the private suite and stand like a statue while nurses hook him up, adjusting the drips for pain medicine and antibiotics. They murmur updates I barely hear.
Three days crawl by so slowly, they stop feeling like time and start feeling like punishment.
I do not leave the room except to piss and scrub Ivan’s blood off my hands in the attached bathroom sink, and even then I never go far enough to lose sight of the bed for more than a few seconds.
The blood comes off in stages, first bright red swirling down white porcelain, then the darker residue caught in the whorls of my fingerprints and clinging stubbornly beneath my nails.
By the second day, the skin across my knuckles is raw from soap and scalding water.
It never feels clean.
Nothing in this room does.
The private recovery suite is expensive and quiet, cut off from the rest of the restlessness within the hospital.
Machines hum and blink around Ivan’s bed with cold, mechanical indifference, reducing his survival to numbers and sounds.
Every line on every monitor becomes another thing for me to memorize, another enemy to study.
I sleep in the chair beside his bed but never more than forty minutes at a stretch.
Every time a monitor changes pitch, my eyes snap open, and my hand goes for the gun at my hip before my brain catches up to where I am.
There is a constant grainy fatigue behind my eyes that makes everything feel slightly unreal.
Medical staff come and go at every hour.
I spend too much time staring out that window between updates, not because the view holds any real interest but because the alternative is watching Ivan lie motionless under those hospital sheets.
The first time I saw him after surgery, something inside me recoiled so violently, I had to lock my jaw hard enough not to throw up.
Ivan Kuznetsov is not supposed to look breakable.
On the evening of the fourth day, I’m standing at the window watching snow dust the rooftops when I hear the sheets shift behind me. Drifting down over the city and muting everything beyond the glass, Moscow looks almost peaceful from up here.
I turn and find Ivan’s eyes are open. For half a second, I simply stare at him in disbelief, my mind stalling out as it tries to catch up to what I’m seeing. His face is drawn with pain, skin pale under the muted light, but his gaze is clear.
There is irritation in the set of his mouth too, as if unconsciousness has inconvenienced him.
“Report,” he rasps.
Relief hits me so hard, my knees almost buckle.
It slams into my chest with enough force to hollow me out, and for one dangerous second I have to lock my spine in place before I actually do collapse. I cross the room in three strides, stopping at the foot of the bed because getting any closer feels like I’m invading his space.
“We were hit leaving Malyshko’s compound. Two shooters in an ambush. Both of them are dead.” My voice sounds rougher than I expect, scraped raw by days of underuse and too little sleep and not enough fluids.
He studies me for a long beat. Even drugged and wounded, he still has that way of looking at me that feels like I’m being assessed. “The reason?”
Wordlessly, I reach into my jacket and pull out the folder I found at the scene and hand it over.
It has been with me since the night of the ambush, folded against my chest through sleepless hours and a dozen calls I barely remember making to our syndicate.
The edges are bent now, the cover creased deeply in a few places.
There is dried blood crusted along one side, dark and ugly against the paper.
His blood.
The sight of it turns my stomach in a slow, unpleasant roll.
Ivan takes it, his movements weaker than usual, slower.
He opens the file and begins reading. From where I stand, I can’t see the pages anymore, but I don’t need to.
I know exactly what’s on them. His expression doesn’t change much, but I see the moment he finds her name by the slight tightening around his mouth and the way his fingers curl around the edges of the paper.
He sets the documents down in his lap and then looks up at me.
“I’ll find who sent them,” I say.
The promise leaves my mouth before I fully think about it because there was never going to be another answer.
Not from me. Whoever orchestrated the ambush and dug up Sofia’s existence thought they could use my Pakhan’s relative as leverage against him.
They thought wrong. I will find them. And when I do, there will not be enough left of them to bury.
Ivan studies me for a long moment before saying, “No.”
I frown. “But—”
He exhales slowly, the sound thin and pained, as if even that much effort irritates him. “Bring her home.”
For a second, I just stare at him. “She’s safe in Italy.”
His gaze pins me in place. “Clearly, not anymore.”
I open my mouth to argue and find that I can’t.
Because he isn’t wrong.
Sofia’s information in anyone else’s hands is already a dangerous problem.
For this much to have been gathered, documented, and then handed off to a pair of assassins sent after Ivan is something else entirely.
It means her existence is no longer a secret.
Someone found her and decided she was relevant enough to gather intel on for whatever purpose. That alone changes everything.
Whoever found her needs to be hunted down, but he’s right about the order of priorities.
If her cover is compromised, then Italy is no longer a safe place for her to be kept.
Our first objective has to be moving her into protective custody before the same hands that armed those shooters reach for her directly.
“Effective immediately, Sofia returns to Moscow,” he says.
I nod once, the motion automatic. “I’ll send a team to Italy. She’ll be under strict rotations the second her plane lands. Enforcers only.”
I’m already moving the pieces by the time the words leave my mouth.
Rotating shifts, restricted access at the estate.
That will be how we keep this contained.
Any outside whisper of her being at the estate, let alone existing, will only complicate things further.
Ivan’s gone to great lengths to keep her away from the public eye.
Now that she will be back in Russia, she will be kept behind a perimeter so tight, she won’t be able to sneeze without at least three of our men hearing it.
His eyes lock on mine, unblinking. “The moment her plane touches down on Russian soil, you will be her guard.”
For one rare moment, I do not answer immediately.
Me?
Not a rotation or a detail specifically put together for this task alone… he wants me? What sense does that make? A bodyguard assignment would be time wasted with someone like me. I’m far more valuable elsewhere.
Hunt the men responsible for nearly killing him, trace the leak and tear apart the network that unearthed her, that is useful. Guarding a sheltered woman pulled from a university in Italy because someone finally learned of her existence is not.
“There are far more useful things for me to focus on than babysitting, Pakhan.” The protest comes out quietly.
Ivan does not look away. “You are the only one I trust with this, Rowan.”
My jaw hardens.
While he doesn’t mean for it to feel this way, this job feels less like an assignment and more like a leash being placed around my neck as a punishment. The order hangs between us with no room left to argue.
I stare at him, at the man who pulled me from nothing and made me into something feared and useful. The man who has never once asked me to do something he did not believe I could accomplish.
Every instinct in me reaches for resistance.
Every instinct in me obeys anyway.
I nod only once. “Yes, Pakhan.”