ROMAN - Khimki Factory, 0314
Iwake up to footsteps.
Not Anya’s—I know the sound of her by now. These footsteps are heavier, getting closer to wherever I’m lying on what feels like cold metal beneath my back.
My right hand moves toward the gun that should be under my pillow.
My fingers don’t respond.
I try again, brain screaming the command at muscles that refuse to listen. Nothing happens, not even a twitch, the entire hand lying dead at my side like it belongs to someone else’s body. The footsteps are getting closer, and I can’t grip the fucking weapon because my hand won’t obey me.
My left hand shoots across my chest instead, clumsy and weak but at least the fingers close—barely, shakily, but they close—around the grip of the Makarov tucked against my ribs.
I’m rolling off the table before the footsteps reach the door, and my shoulder lights up with agony that whites out my vision for two full seconds.
The footsteps stop.
I look up from the floor where I’ve landed in a heap, propped against the desk leg with the gun wavering in my left hand. Luka is standing in the doorway holding a cup of something that steams in the cold factory air, his face carefully blank in a way that tells me he saw everything.
“Pakhan.” He keeps his voice neutral, but I can hear the concern underneath it. “You’re awake.”
“My right hand.” The words scrape out of my throat, raw and rough. “What happened to my fucking hand?”
Luka sets the cup on a rusted filing cabinet and crosses the room to help me up, his grip under my arms doing all the work because my left hand can barely hold the gun and my right hand won’t do anything at all, just hangs at my side like meat attached to my shoulder.
The shoulder that took a bullet.
“Where’s Anya?”
“Checking the perimeter with Chernov.” Luka settles me back onto the metal desk. “She hasn’t slept. Hasn’t eaten. Hasn’t left your side except for the last twenty minutes when I made her take a break before she collapsed.”
My wife. Running perimeter checks.
“How long was I out?”
“Six hours.” Luka’s jaw tightens. “We need to move soon. Vadim’s scouts have been spotted fifty kilometers south.”
The door opens, and Anya walks through it carrying a medical kit in one hand and a pistol in the other, a tactical vest strapped over clothes stiff with my dried blood, her hair pulled back so tight it must hurt, and her face still smeared with rust-colored traces she hasn’t had time to wash off.
She moves like a soldier now, alert and dangerous, scanning the room before her eyes land on me, and something in her expression shifts—relief, exhaustion, hunger, all of it flickering across her features before she locks it down.
Mine. Even exhausted, even blood-streaked, even wearing borrowed gear that hangs wrong on her frame. Mine, and anyone who tries to take her from me, will learn that a wolf doesn’t need hands to kill.
“You’re awake.” She crosses to me in three quick strides, sets down the kit and the gun on the desk beside my hip. Her hands are on my face before I can respond, tilting my head to check my pupils, pressing her fingers to the pulse point under my jaw. “Pain level, one to ten.”
“Six.” I catch her wrist with my left hand—the grip weak, trembling, but at least I can feel her skin warm against my palm. “Anya. My right hand.”
She goes still for just a moment, and then her attention shifts from my face to my right arm. She lifts my right hand in both of hers and examines it, pressing each fingertip while her eyes stay fixed on my face to gauge my response.
I don’t feel any of it.
She moves to the knuckles, the palm, the wrist, working her way up toward the shoulder where I can see fresh bandages wrapped tight beneath the edge of my shirt, and somewhere around my bicep the sensation starts to return—dull, distant, like feeling through layers of wool.
“Make a fist.”
I tell my hand to close, and nothing happens. The fingers just lie there in her palm, limp and useless.
Anya’s expression doesn’t shift, doesn’t soften, doesn’t give me anything to hold onto.
That absence of comfort somehow makes it worse because it tells me she already knows how bad this is.
She sets my right hand down gently on my thigh and picks up my left, running the same examination, and this time I can feel her fingers pressing into mine, even though the sensation is muted and strange.
“Fist.”
My left hand closes. Slowly, shakily, the grip is pathetic compared to what it used to be, but the fingers curl into my palm and hold.
“The shoulder wound.” Anya releases my hand. “The bullet tracked through the brachial plexus before exiting. Your right arm has lost motor function from the elbow down.”
I stare at my hand lying dead on my thigh.
“The left?” My voice comes out rough, and I hate the desperation in it, hate that I’m lying here broken while my enemies close in.
“Frostbite.” Anya takes my left hand in hers again, and her thumb strokes across my knuckles, the touch gentle in a way that contradicts the flatness of her tone.
“The cold cut off blood flow long enough to cause damage, but the nerves are intact. Sensation and strength should return with time and therapy. Weeks, maybe months, but it should return.”
Should. Not will. Should.
“The violin.” The word cracks in my throat. “I can’t—”
“No.” Anya meets my eyes and doesn’t pretend there’s any version of this where I sit in the war room at three in the morning and let Tchaikovsky pour out of my mother’s Stradivarius.
“You won’t play violin again. The nerve damage is permanent, Roman.
You’ll never hold a bow, and by the time your left hand recovers…
” She stops, letting the silence finish the sentence. The music is gone.
I wait for her to soften it. To tell me maybe, to tell me there are surgeons, there are treatments, there’s still hope.
She gives me nothing but the truth, hard and cold and unforgiving.
“You don’t need the violin anymore.” She folds my weak left hand in both of hers, and her grip is warm and certain, even though her face stays carefully blank. “It was your escape. The place you went when the guilt got too heavy to carry. You don’t need escape anymore, Roman.”
“What do I need?”
“An empire.” She brings my knuckles to her mouth and presses her lips against the wolf tattoo. “That requires different hands. Hands that pull triggers. Hands that sign death warrants. Hands that hold your Tsaritsa when she’s covered in your enemies’ blood.”
“Tsaritsa.” I curl my working fingers around hers, the grip pathetic but present. “That’s a dangerous title to claim. It makes you a target for everyone who wants the throne.”
“Good.” Her mouth curves into something cold that makes me hard despite everything. “Let them come learn that the chemist knows forty-three ways to stop a heart. Twenty of them look like natural causes, and the other twenty-three make excellent examples.”
I pull her closer—awkward, graceless, my left hand barely able to grip her vest—and she comes, settling into the space between my knees, her palms flat on my chest, and her face inches from mine.
“Mishka?”
“Safe,” she breathes out. “Kolya has him. He’s dark.”
“Forever.” I catch her jaw with my left hand, thumb stroking her cheekbone because I need to touch her, need to feel her warmth against my damaged skin. “Your brother lives, or I die making it true. That’s a blood oath, Anya. Non-negotiable.”
She leans into my palm for just a moment, lets me feel the weight of her exhaustion, and then she straightens, and the Tsaritsa is back in her eyes.
“The men are restless.” She pulls away to collect the medical kit, checking supplies. “Thirty-three of them stayed, but having me give orders while you were unconscious didn’t sit well with some of the old guard. Chernov’s been managing them, but there’s been talk.”
“What kind of talk?”
“The kind that questions whether a man who needed a woman to save him can still lead.” Her voice stays flat, but I can see the anger underneath it, the fury she’s been swallowing while she kept me alive. “The kind that suggests maybe your Tsaritsa should know her place.”
Something dark and hot floods through my chest, and my left hand clenches, the weak muscles protesting.
“Show me.”
* * *
Chernov gathers them on the main floor of the factory, sodium lights buzzing overhead and casting shadows that make everyone look half-dead.
I’m standing only because Anya’s hand is pressed against the small of my back, where no one can see it, her fingers a steady pressure against my spine that keeps my legs from buckling.
Thirty-three men in a loose circle. Armed. Watching.
Some of them look at me with respect, with loyalty. Others are looking differently, their eyes flicking to my right hand hanging useless at my side and my left hand shaking slightly despite my best efforts to control it.
The largest of them steps forward before I can speak.
Yevgeni. Old guard. He’s been with the Volkovskaya since before I was born and thinks that gives him the right to question.
“Pakhan. We’re glad to see you recovered.”
“Are you.”
He doesn’t flinch, but his eyes drop to my hands again, weighing whether the wounded wolf is still dangerous enough to fear.
“The men have questions.” He moves closer. “About capability. About leadership. About whether a Pakhan who needed a woman to drag him from the river and cut him open on a table can still—”
I move before he finishes the sentence.
My right hand is dead weight, but my left can still grab, can still pull, can still yank him off balance, and I use my forehead instead of my fists, driving it into his nose, cartilage crunching, and blood spraying hot across my face in a burst of copper-scented satisfaction.