Page 57 of Sexting His Assistant

I stop at the threshold. A medical room. Fully equipped.

White cabinets. Stainless trays. Bright overhead lights. Monitors. Cabinets with glass fronts. A narrow bed already prepared. A man in blue gloves stands beside it, sleeves rolled to the elbow, face calm in the way doctors are calm only when things are very bad.

“Mr. Kazan,” the doctor says.

“Doctor Mirov,” Luka replies, as if he has arrived for a routine checkup and not with a bullet lodged in his shoulder.

The doctor’s eyes move over the wound. “Sit.”

Luka sits.

That alone tells me the pain is worse than he is admitting.

Yelena touches my arm gently. “Come, darling. Let them work.”

But I cannot move. “I’m staying,” I say. My voice sounds small, but I mean it.

Luka’s head turns. Our eyes meet.

For a moment, I expect him to order me out. I almost want him to. It would be easier to be angry than to stand here and watch.

But he doesn’t.

He only looks at me for one long second, then turns back to the doctor.

Doctor Mirov cuts through Luka’s coat first, then his shirt.

The fabric parts under the scissors, black cloth peeling away from blood-slick skin. I look at the wound because that feels safer than looking at the rest of him, which is stupid, because the wound is horrific.

There’s blood everywhere.

Across his shoulder, down his upper arm, smeared over his chest where the shirt clung wetly to him. The bullet hit high, near the outer part of his shoulder, and the skin around it is torn and ugly. I press my hand over my mouth.

Luka barely flinches.

He sits upright on the edge of the bed, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere on the wall beyond the doctor. His control is obscene. Inhuman. The doctor cleans the wound, and Luka’s only reaction is a slight tightening of his fingers around the edge of the mattress.

My gaze betrays me and drops lower.

His torso is not what I expected, though I don’t know why I expected anything else from him. He is lean but powerfully built, broad through the chest and shoulders, his stomach hard beneath streaks of blood, muscle shifting under his skin every time he breathes. There are scars too. More than one. Thin pale lines across his ribs. A rougher mark near his side. A small round scar low on his abdomen that looks old and cruel.

A map of violence I’ve never been allowed to read.

I look away quickly, ashamed of noticing his body while he is bleeding. Then I look back because I’m terrified he will disappear if I don’t keep him in sight.

The doctor injects something near the wound. Luka’s expression does not change.

“Local anesthetic,” Doctor Mirov says, mostly to me, I think.

I nod as if I understand anything beyond the fact that Luka’s blood is drying on my hands.

Yelena appears beside me with a damp cloth. “Here,” she says gently.

I look down. My hands are a mess.

Red between my fingers. Red under my nails. Luka’s blood on my palms, on my wrist, a smear near my thumb where I must have touched my face without realizing.

I take the cloth. “Thank you,” I whisper.