Page 60 of Sexting His Assistant

The room changes. The air thins.

The pain in my shoulder, which I’ve been ignoring with reasonable success, throbs until the entire left side of my body becomes one hard, pulsing ache. Doctor Mirov says something to me, but I don’t hear it properly. My eyes stay on the doorway long after Nina disappears through it with her brother’s hand wrapped around her wrist.

There is blood on the floor.

Blood on my skin.

Blood on the torn remains of my shirt.

And still, what I notice most is that she’s gone.

Pathetic. Unacceptable.

I close my eyes for half a second and immediately regret it, because behind my eyelids she’s there too: pale in the medical room lights, hair loose around her face, my blood dried across her hands like accusation.

“Mr. Kazan,” Mirov says.

I open my eyes. “Finish.”

His expression does not change, but I know what he’s thinking. He has treated me long enough to understand that my patience worsens in direct proportion to how much pain I’m pretending not to feel.

“The bullet passed cleanly enough to remove,” he says. “But there’s muscle damage. You will not use the arm for at least two weeks.”

“No.”

He pauses.

I look at him.

He sighs. “One week, if you are determined to be foolish.”

“Better.”

“It’s not better. It’s medically irresponsible.”

“Then write that down.”

He mutters something under his breath and continues stitching.

It hurts more now that Nina’s not watching.

That’s the humiliating truth of it. While she stood in the room, wide-eyed and shaking but refusing to leave, I could sit upright beneath the lights and give her control because she needed to see it. Because if I had so much as flinched, she would have broken. Because her fear had filled the room more dangerously than the blood did, and I could not bear to add to it.

Now she’s gone, and the pretense costs more.

The anesthetic dulls the surface, but deeper than that, the wound burns with each pull of the needle. My jaw tightens. My fingers curl around the edge of the mattress. Once, when Mirov cleans too close to torn tissue, my breath leaves through my nose in a sound too sharp to be dignified.

He pretends not to hear it.

A sensible man.

My mother stands near the cabinet with both hands folded in front of her, her face composed in the way I’ve seen too many times. It’s the expression she wore when my father was brought home bleeding. It’s the expression she wore when men came to the house at midnight and spoke in low voices. It’s the expression she wore the first time she understood that I would not escape this life, because by then I’d already chosen to rule it.

“You frightened her,” she says.

I look at her. “The shooting frightened her.”

“You frightened her too.”