Chapter 12 #2
“My boys paid you a visit last night.” His eyes settle on my face, on the bruising, on the cut above my brow. “Looks like they were thorough.” He folds the top of the paper bag over, unhurried. “Where are they, by the way? They haven’t checked in.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “They left me for dead, I think.”
His eyes tighten around the corners. “Is that so?”
“I’m not here about them.” I meet his gaze. “I’m here to settle the debt. I want it finished.”
He studies me for a moment longer, and then the amusement comes back, easier than before. “You expect me to believe you have the money?”
“I don’t.”
His smile widens, and he pats his knee. “Then come and sit down. We can discuss terms.”
“I’m not sitting on your lap, Kozlov.”
“Miranda.” He says my name patiently. “You came to me. That means you’ve run out of roads. We both know what I want.”
“I know what you want,” I tell him. “The answer is still no. But I have a different offer.” I hold his gaze and say it plainly. “You can have my kidney.”
The room goes quiet.
He blinks once. The paper bag crinkles under his hand.
“What?” His voice is filled with disbelief.
“One kidney. I know you have the contacts. I know how it works. I’m a nurse, after all.” My voice stays level. Everything is level now, flat and gray and very far away, like standing at the edge of something and looking down and feeling nothing. “Sell it. That clears the debt. We’re done.”
He stares at me. “You’re serious.”
“I’ve been paying you for over a year. We both know I will never be able to pay off the debt. I have nothing left to give you except this.” The word comes up from somewhere deep and true. “I’m tired. Take the kidney. We call it even.”
He looks at me the way you look at a small animal that has, against all expectation, bitten you.
“And if I put you on that table,” he says, his voice dropping, “and I don’t stop at one?”
I smile lightly, a self-deprecatory smile. “Then that’s what happens.”
He can kill me or he can let me go, but either way, this is the offer because I am not getting on my knees for him, not for any number, not for anything.
That part of me is still intact. Everything else has gone quiet, but that part is still standing, the last thing standing, and I will not move it.
Kozlov watches me for a long moment.
His finger taps once against the desk.
“A kidney from a young, healthy female.” He says it slowly, turning it over, checking it against some internal ledger. “No history of substance abuse.” He tilts his head. “That covers the principal.”
“Then we have a deal.”
The relief that moves through me is staggering. As he beams at me, I know he won’t let me walk out of here afterward. Why take one kidney when he can take two? But they’ll put me under first. I’ll be asleep before the worst of it.
I’ll close my eyes, and it will be over, and I won’t have to keep getting up and doing it again. I won’t have to keep throwing everything I have at a life that takes and takes from me and gives nothing back.
A quiet smile crosses my face.
Kozlov reaches for his phone. “I’ll have someone prepare a room.”
“All right,” I say.
I sit down in the chair across from his desk and fold my hands in my lap. The office is warm and very still, and outside the tall windows, the city goes about its business, and I close my eyes for just a moment.
I’m so tired.
It’s almost over now.
The doctor drawing my blood doesn’t seem to care about the state I am in. It’s probably not his first time in Kozlov’s office either, given how calm he is. He didn’t make eye contact when he came in. Setting his bag on the corner of the desk, he snapped on a glove and got to work.
Dark red fills the vial, steady and quick, and I’m reminded of how terrifying it was when I started out as a nurse.
Now despite the fact that this is my own blood, I’m unfazed.
It’s like every survival instinct has retreated deep inside me.
Instead, replacing it is a growing sense of anticipation, the knowing that this will be over soon, that I’ll be free.
I’m a nurse. I know what a healthy blood panel looks like. I know what they’re checking for. Organ viability. Compatibility markers. Whether I’m worth what Kozlov thinks I’m worth on whatever market he’s going to put me on.
“You’ll get the results by tomorrow morning,” the doctor says to Kozlov as he labels the vial, caps it, and then drops it into a small case. “We can proceed after that.” He snaps the case shut, picks up his bag, and walks out without looking at me once.
The door clicks behind him.
Kozlov leans back and watches me with the satisfaction of a man who has just won something and is in no rush about it. I don’t give him anything to work with. My eyes drift to the small Band-Aid pressed against the inside of my elbow.
“You—” Whatever he was going to say is cut off by a loud crash from outside.
He half rises out of the chair when the sound of something heavy hitting the floor or the wall has him reaching for the intercom. “Christopher, what’s going on out there?!”
No one replies, and Kozlov tenses. Then a voice reaches my ears from the hallway outside, and I recognize it even through two inches of solid door. My stomach drops before my brain has time to catch up with why.
The door swings open hard enough to hit the wall.
Grayson fills the frame.
His jaw is set, and his eyes are bright and wrong, too bright, the amber in them pushed toward the edges by something that isn’t amber at all. His gaze moves across the room and lands on me, and for one instant, something passes over his face that looks suspiciously like relief.
Then his expression closes.
“Get up,” he says.
I stare at him and wait for myself to feel something. I search for it the way you search a bag for keys you already know aren’t in there.
Nothing.
“How did you find me?” My voice comes out dull and strange. Someone else’s voice.
He crosses the room in four steps, grabs me by the arm, and pulls me to my feet. The room tilts hard to the left. I grab his forearm to stay upright, my fingers closing over muscle that doesn’t give at all.
“That’s what you’re going to do?” His voice is low. “You won’t take my money, but you’ll sleep with him?”
The words take a second to reach me.
“I’m not sleeping with him.” Through the numbness, a hint of anger pierces through.
“Then why are you in his office?” He looks at Kozlov over my head, and whatever expression is on his face makes Kozlov’s chair roll back six inches. “Why is she in your office?”
“I’m selling him my kidney.” No matter how hard I try to pull away, his grip is like iron.
The air goes out of the room.
Grayson turns back to me slowly. “What?”
“My kidney.” I hear how calm I sound. I find I can’t make myself sound different. “Kozlov agreed to take it in exchange for the debt.”
Grayson stares at me. The color leaves his face as he searches my expression for something. “You’re serious.”
Is that guilt in his eyes?
“Yes.”
His grip on my arm tightens. “The hell you are,” he says, fury tainting each word.
“It’s already decided.”
“It is not decided!” he snarls. “You are not giving that man your kidney.”
“You don’t get a vote.”
“Miranda.” His voice gentles. “Look at me.”
I’m already looking at him. I can’t seem to stop.