Vasily
Vasily
Tapping on my cheek has me grumbling, “Not yet, zvyozdochka ,” and reaching for Ana, but what my hand hits is a man’s leg. I pry one extremely gunky eye open to see my brother standing next to me. “Oh, fuck off and die,” I groan, expecting a lecture from him as I roll away from him. I know I’m in trouble, I get it. But I’m twenty-six years old, not a child. I don’t need him chewing me out about my choices any more than I need him apparently telling the goddamn cartel to call him if I show up looking for heroin.
“You gotta get up, Vasya. This is important.”
I hear the urgency in his voice. The fact that he calls me Vasya has me tweaking slightly. Something is wrong.
I’m not ready for an emergency. I’m feeling about ready to die right now. Whatever the crisis is, I don’t need to be involved for at least another hour.
“Let me sleep.”
“Vasya, listen to me.”
“Noooo,” I groan, not caring that I sound every bit as petulant as Ana.
She’s probably worried about me. Fuck, she was confronting me about the exact fucking thing I ended up doing. She was probably trying to be nice about it. And I lost my cool immediately because once a junkie, always a junkie.
The bed dips under Artyom’s weight as he sits down next to me and sighs heavily. “What happened last night, we’ll talk about that later. But we need to go to the hospital. Now.”
Ah, shit. That’s rehab talk. I’m in my old bedroom at his house. That single glance out of one eye was enough to confirm that, as well as the fact that it’s daytime. So they’re not going to try to pump my stomach this time, at least. No Narcan. I’m pretty sure I was roofied last night. I don’t need to be dragged out of bed for rehab. “We’ll go when I wake up,” I grumble.
“Listen to me, Vasya,” he says, and God, I loathe the sympathetic tone in his voice every bit as much as I hate the way he’s currently squeezing my arm. This is the shit he does when he knows I’m about to get pissed about what he’s going to tell me to do. This is the tone he used last Friday, when he was scheduling me to rape an innocent virgin — not that it matters that she was a virgin — the next day.
My chest hurts at the expansion of my lungs filling on my next breath as I think he’s about to tell me that he’s got a room booked for me at Placid Meadow and has already sent Ana home. It would be for the best, but I wince at the thought.
“It’s Analiese,” he says. “She was taken to the hospital.”
I’m already on my feet before he can start explaining what happened.
The moment I see Dima standing there in the waiting room, I rush forward, shrugging Artyom off as I slam into the asshole.
He could have killed her.
Ana could be dead right now.
There’s a nagging voice reminding me that he couldn’t have known she was allergic to kiwi when he bought that fruit salad on the way home and ate all the kiwi with the thought they wouldn’t do well overnight. The nagging voice also tells me that he saved her life, that she’d been on the phone with Camilla when he heard her fall and had kept his head about him as he called Igor to find an epi-pen and performed mouth-to-mouth until Igor arrived.
There’s a nagging voice also telling me we’re in a goddamn hospital waiting room and I’m creating a scene, but it’s Artyom’s nagging voice, and he can fuck off.
It’s the soft, angelic, weeping voice of Ana begging me to stop that has my attention shifting.
I tilt up to see her all compressed into her tiniest ball in one of my hoodies. “Why are you here?” I bellow.
Her big brown eyes go damp as she says, “I’m waiting to see a doctor,” in a weak, warbly voice.
I’m about to explode, to go just fucking ape shit on everyone in the hospital for making her wait when she could have died , but Artyom gets my attention with a squeeze of the back of my neck and says, “I’ll take care of it right now.”
Ana’s puffy little bottom lip trembles. “You scared me.”
I crawl off of Dima to walk on my knees over to her. Standing up doesn’t seem important right now. “I shouldn’t have left last night.”
“No, now. Dima, are you okay?”
Dima lets out a rough cough, but at my glare, he nods and gets himself up on his feet. “Yep, just gonna, ahh, take a leak,” he says, grunting as he staggers not to the bathroom but to the desk where Artyom is currently chewing out a nurse. Two security guards are also approaching both him and me, but they’re intercepted by Alex and Kostya.
“He saved me,” Ana says as I sit down next to her and pull her into my lap reflexively. As soon as I was up and moving, Artyom told me she was fine, but no one goes to the emergency room if they’re fine. I’ve gotten shot three times in one night and still didn’t have to go to the ER. “You shouldn’t have attacked him like that.”
I respond with a thoughtful hum but nothing more. I don’t want to talk right now. My heart’s been beating hard enough I thought it was going to explode the entire twelve-minute drive to the hospital. Now that I’m holding her, I just want to take some deep breaths and get myself back to human again.
She’s not getting sent back to her brother’s today. That shit is off the table.
“Does he really live with you?” she asks.
I’m thrown off enough by the question that I chuckle. “Yeah. Whose bedroom did you think that was?”
“I thought it was a guest room! I stole his pillow,” she mutters, mortified.
“You humped that pillow,” I remind her, keeping my voice low so no one else hears it.
It doesn’t keep her from turning bright red, though. “You’ll get him a new one, right?”
“Hell no! He can buy his own pillows.” But it feels good to joke. She’s okay. She needs to see a doctor, right now, but she’s okay.
She huffs but then drops her head down to my shoulder. I feel her exhaustion in her weight. I’m also pretty sure I smell vodka in her hair. She twirls the laces on the hood of the jacket Artyom threw to me on our way out of the house and says, “So don’t freak out when I say this, but I just almost died, and—”
“I’m going to fucking kill Dima,” I snarl.
“That’s not even what I was worried about you freaking out about!” she laughs incredulously. “What I was going to say is tomorrow’s Sunday, so I really feel like I need to go to church after all this.”
“Okay, yeah. But we’ll have to go to my church.”
She peels herself off of me so she can look me in the eye, searching for the joke there.
“What, you think I don’t have a church?”
“Mrs. Baranov?” a nurse calls from up front. “Mrs. Analiese Baranov?”
Ana gives me a peevish look. “Did you tell someone I’m your wife?”
I kiss her petite, upturned nose. “No, I’m sure Artyom told her you’re his sister-in-law. Probably along with either a knife or a death threat.”