Chapter 37
CHAPTER 37
VIKTORIA
A rtem lay at my feet, bloody and broken.
I stood over him, my heart pounding like a drum as reality crashed around me. He had promised he would let me out, and he kept his word.
They had shot him—twice—and still he came for me, because he said he would.
Now I had a choice.
I could help him—save him the way he saved me—or I could run.
My freedom hung there, tantalizingly close, but the taste of it was overwhelmed by gunpowder and the metallic bitterness of his blood.
Blood spilled protecting me.
The house had descended into complete chaos. Men shouting at each other in Russian and English, occasional gunfire punctuating their threats. This was my chance to disappear.
Or I could stay.
I could help save the man who had shoved me into that tiny closet so I would be safe while he gunned down intruders like a demon unleashed from hell.
The voice in my head screamed at me to run, but my heart had already decided.
My knees buckled, and I dropped to the floor, pressing my trembling hands against the wound on his side.
I had no idea what I was doing, but I'd seen enough movies to know that the last thing you wanted was for someone who'd been shot to bleed out.
"Help!" I screamed as the Russian voices grew closer. "I need help back here now!"
My pulse roared so loudly in my ears that everything else seemed muffled. Artem looked ghostly pale. The world moved in slow motion, yet somehow I still couldn't catch up. It wasn't until someone grabbed my shoulders and yanked me away that I realized I wasn't alone anymore.
Three men surrounded him, and I tried to claw my way back. What if they didn't know what they were doing? Who were these men? What if they were the enemy?
"Hey." A man with impossibly sharp cheekbones and midnight blue eyes seized my shoulders and slammed me against the wall hard enough to snap me back to reality. The pounding in my ears gave way to a dull, persistent ringing. "Do you want to help him?"
"What?" I could see his lips moving, but the words weren't registering.
"Do you want. To help. Him." Each word punctuated like a bullet.
"He saved me," I said, as if that answered everything.
"Yes, he fucking did. Now, do you want to help save him? I need your help, but if you're just going to be hysterical, you can stay here and cry about it."
"No," I said, the shock finally receding. "I need to help."
"Good." He gave me a curt nod. "Stay right here and do exactly what I tell you."
He turned his back before I could say anything else, and I noticed the room had filled with more men, one of them calling out that the house was clear. Some resembled Artem, all wearing expressions that mixed worry with merciless determination.
This was his family. It had to be.
Someone brought in a stretcher, and two men who looked the most like Artem lifted him onto it with practiced precision.
"Get on top of him," the sharp-faced man barked at me.
"What?"
"No questions. Just fucking do it," he snapped.
Another man—built like a tank—lifted me effortlessly and positioned me on the stretcher, kneeling over Artem's unconscious body.
"Put pressure here with your hands," the first man ordered, grabbing my blood-slicked hands and positioning them where he wanted them. "Really lean into it."
Artem's hot blood seeped from the wounds, warm and thick against my fingers. I pressed down with everything I had, desperate to keep his life force from escaping.
"Keep your hands exactly where they are. Move your knee. It's going to feel wrong, and trust me, it's going to hurt Artem like a motherfucker. But it's going to keep him alive."
"What?" How could he want me to cause this man more pain?
"Put your knee on that wound and press down. As much pressure as you can. We need to keep his blood in his body where it belongs."
I nodded, silently apologizing to Artem as I drove my knee into the wound on his side. When he didn't even groan in protest at the pressure, tears filled my eyes, blurring my vision.
With my hands pressing into his blood, I could feel the faint beat of his heart and his slow, shallow breaths.
They were weakening, but they were still there.
As long as I could feel that rhythm, he was with me.
"Hold on," one of them commanded as they rushed the gurney out of the bedroom. The men didn't slow down for a second. Even when they reached the stairs, they wordlessly lifted the stretcher and kept moving with grim efficiency.
“Take him to the kitchen,” the man who’d taken charge ordered the men, who wasted no time heading in that direction.
"How long until we get a doctor?" I demanded, never releasing the pressure on his wounds.
"No doctors," he said as he kicked open the door to the kitchen.
"What do you mean, no doctors? He needs a surgeon and blood or he's going to—" I couldn't make myself say it. I had wished for it so many times before, but now I was physically ill at the thought of it.
"“Someone find the fucking first aid kit,” he directed the men, ignoring me. “The good one."
The men carrying the stretcher maneuvered it into the kitchen, where they unceremoniously swept everything off the massive island counter with a crash of breaking dishes and scattered utensils.
"He needs a hospital," I screamed, hot tears streaming down my face. I refused to move my hands to wipe them away.
"No hospitals," the man repeated, his tone leaving no room for argument. "Don't worry, I've got him. I'll stitch him up as good as new."
"Are you a doctor?" I demanded as they transferred Artem from the stretcher to the kitchen island that had been transformed into a makeshift operating table.
"No, but my wife made me watch a lot of Grey's Anatomy . It doesn't look that hard."
"What?" I screeched. If I hadn't been holding Artem's blood in, I would have clawed this man's face off until they took us to a real hospital.
"Calm down. I was a field medic in Spetsnaz. I've pulled more bullets out of more bodies than most surgeons." He said it so casually, it was almost more terrifying.
After scrubbing his hands in the kitchen sink and pulling on latex gloves he grabbed from the medical kit, he had me move my knee while he cleaned and packed the wounds. I watched his every movement like a hawk, looking for any mistake—not that I would recognize one. But his hands moved with quick, precise motions. His movements were strong and confident, which reassured me that he had done this many times before.
"I'll stitch this up now, but first we need to save as much of his blood as possible. If we need more, I have two donors on standby."
"Not it, Mikhail," called one of the men setting up lights around the island.
"Kostya, if I need your blood to save your brother, I'm taking it. You can volunteer it and take the needle like a man, or I can slit your throat and drain you like a pig. The choice is yours." Mikhail's voice was deadly calm, leaving absolutely no room for negotiation.
Other than his first name, I didn't know this man, but I was beginning to like him.
My eyes never left his bloody hands. He may not have been a real doctor, but his medical training was evident in every movement. A field medic, clearly a good one.
Dima had once told me about his time training as a field medic. It wasn't because he had any intention of going into a war zone, he'd said, but if war came to him, it was important to treat his men well enough that they survived long enough to get someone more qualified. That looked like what Mikhail was doing—packing and binding each wound so Artem no longer relied on my small, shaking fingers or my knee to keep him alive.
After several tense minutes, Mikhail had each of Artem's wounds—the one in his upper arm close to the shoulder, and the deeper one on his side—stabilized.
Even before pressing his wounds to staunch the bleeding, I already knew where they were. I had watched each of those bullets tear into his body on the monitor in the panic room.
At first, it hadn't felt real, watching Artem on the small screen wearing nothing but gray sweatpants, stalking through the halls, shooting men in the head like it was an action movie.
James Bond could never.
Artem hadn't even looked like himself. Usually, he was cold and distant, but still human. The man I watched was pure ice—showing no emotion, no hesitation, no empathy.
At least not until he encountered the man who had joked about raping me.
Artem shot him in the neck and left him to suffer. He'd done that for me—to protect me and inflict pain on someone who would have hurt me.
"I need to remove the bullet close to his shoulder now," Mikhail said, his voice pulling me back to the present.
The kitchen had transformed into a battlefield hospital. Bright lights had been set up, surgical tools laid out on clean towels, and what looked like a bag of blood hung from a coat rack someone had dragged in.
"You." Mikhail pointed at me. "Hold this retractor. Don't move it, don't flinch, don't even breathe funny. Just hold it exactly where I place it."
I nodded, both terrified and strangely calm now. I would do whatever it took to keep Artem alive.
Mikhail worked for hours. He patched the wound in Artem's side first. I flinched at the way the blood-stained bullet clinked in the metal surgical dish.
"Hand me that suture kit," he ordered, and with my bloody hands, I carefully picked up the plastic container that held a needle and thread, making sure not to touch the sterile equipment inside.
Mikhail worked diligently, barking orders at everyone else but using a softer tone when he spoke to me. I wondered if he could tell I was in shock, or if he simply didn't like screaming at women.
"Talk to him," Mikhail said as he began suturing Artem's side.
"What?"
"Talk to him. I don't know what the deal is between you two, but I know he cares about you, and right now, he needs a reason to live. I'm doing everything I can, but I need him to want to pull through. So for the love of God, talk to him."
"He doesn't?—"
"He does, and you know it. Look, if I was in his place right now, the only thing that would stop me from walking toward the light would be my wife's voice. So talk to him."
Talk to him. What was I supposed to say?
"Hey," I said, lacing my fingers through his as I moved to sit near his uninjured shoulder. "Thank you. I...I watched everything. That panic room you shoved me into has a monitor connected to the security system. I saw it all."
"Keep going," Mikhail urged, his gloved hands steady as he worked.
"You know, you were kind of hot," I said, surprising myself with a nervous laugh. "Those gray sweatpants left nothing to the imagination as you prowled those halls."
"Ew," one of the others said, followed by a sharp "ow" when someone—maybe Kostya—hit him.
I didn't take my eyes off Artem's face.
"You are so brave. I didn't think people could actually do things like that outside of action movies." My voice cracked. "I don't understand why you did it. Why not just stay in the panic room with me? Why did you have to go out there and take on all those men by yourself instead of waiting for backup?" There was an edge of anger that crept into my tone. I didn't care. I needed to know.
"That's right." One of the other men spoke up, their comment dripping with sarcasm. "Nag him. That will definitely help."
"It will," Mikhail said without looking up from his work. "Since you're single, cousin, and no one gives a fuck if you come home each night, let me explain something to you. A woman only nags you when she loves you. She only gets mad when you do dumb shit like catch a bullet if she wants you to live."
"That—" the other man started to argue, then snapped his mouth shut.
"You keep talking to him, sweetheart. If he's smart, he'll fight like hell to live. If not, then he wasn't strong enough for you anyway."
There was something disturbing in Mikhail's eyes and I would swear he saw through me completely.
I closed my eyes and brought my forehead down, pressing it to the back of Artem's hand.
"Artem, I need you to wake up. I need you to come back to me," I whispered, my lips brushing against his skin. "Who's going to protect me if you aren't here? I don't have anyone else."
I love you.
The words were there, burning on the tip of my tongue, but I wouldn't say them. Not yet.
The first time I told Artem I loved him, it was going to be because I was sure.
It would be after he had healed and we had come to some compromises about the life I wanted with him.
I wouldn't be his caged pet, but I would be his.
And I wanted the first time I told him I loved him to be because that was all I felt, not because I was terrified of losing him before I had the chance to really know him.
"Please," I whispered in his ear, close enough that only he could hear. "Come back to me. I need you."
Something changed in that moment, I felt it in my soul.
The realization crashed over me with the force of a tidal wave.
I really did love him.
I loved his strength, his determination, his unwavering dedication to those he cared about.
I loved that he had walked into hell for me without hesitation.
His hand tightened around mine, so slightly I might have imagined it.
But I knew I hadn't.
The bullet from his arm clinked into the metal dish as Mikhail extracted it.
"He's going to make it," Mikhail said, meeting my eyes across Artem's body. "He's too stubborn not to."
I nodded, tears streaming freely now.
Let them flow.
I wasn't running anymore…not from Artem.
Not from these feelings.
Not from this life that had chosen me as much as I had chosen it.
Mikhail was still working, but I knew with absolute certainty that Artem wouldn't let a few bullets stop him from coming back to me.
And I was never going to run from him again.