Page 90 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

The itchy rope burns on my wrists and the ache in my back throb for attention, and I ignore all of it. There’s no room in me for anything but Lev behind that door, and a longing so sharp it hurts.

After three hours on the dot the operating room doors finally open, and the grizzled doctor pulls his mask down off his face.

“Family of the patient?” he asks, eyes scanning me as if looking for a lie.

Before my flustered brain can even decide whether I have the right to answer, Yuri pushes me forward by the shoulder. “She is on his form,” Yuri says, his tone clipped. “The Pakhan changed his emergency contact to her the week she started.”

“That is me,” I say, and my cheeks go pink. “I’m his emergency contact.”

“The bullet is out, and it missed everything vital,” the doctor says. “He was fortunate.”

My legs give out under me, and Maksim catches my elbow before I go down.

“He lost a great deal of blood, and his pressure ran low on the table,” the doctor goes on. “He needs twenty-four hours of close monitoring before I will call him out of the woods.”

“Can I see him?” I ask, and I rub at my temples.

“Through the ICU glass only,” he says. “No bedside visits tonight. He needs to be left completely undisturbed.”

“When will he wake up?” I ask, my breathing picking up.

“That depends on his body and how the anesthesia clears,” the doctor says. “It could be a few hours. It could be considerably longer than that.”

I follow the gurney as far as they let me, and before the ICU doors close, I press my fingertips to his where they lie slack on the sheet, a need, not a greeting. He is alive, and right now that single fact is enough to stand on.

Yuri hands me a bag of clean clothes, and I change out of my blood-soaked shirt in a cramped hospital bathroom and pull on a pair of stretchy leggings and a soft sweater. A nurse brings a warm towel for the dried trickles of blood across my palms.

I stare down at my own hands, and I see Lev falling all over again. Because it is you. Because I love you. The words burn behind my eyes until they blur. It is not just desire between us, and it never was.

“Did you think you might die,” I ask the empty air, “taking that bullet for me?” I’m not entirely sure who I’m asking.

“No,” Yuri says from the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. “Because he didn’t have the time to think it.”

He doesn’t elaborate, but I understand him anyway. Lev didn’t stand there and calculate whether I was worth a bullet. He simply put his body between the gun and mine before the thought could even form.

“Is he always like this?” I ask.

“No,” Yuri says, too fast, and my throat blocks around whatever I meant to say next.

Through the ICU glass I can see Lev stripped of every piece of the brooding, commanding presence he wears like armor. Tubes run into his arm, and monitors ring the bed with their soft, steady light.

Maksim lets a nurse clean the scrape on his own arm, and then he slides down the corridor wall and falls asleep sitting up, and I’m envious of him. Yuri, his favored guard, stays on his feet the whole night, stepping away only to take low calls in the stairwell and keep the others in the loop.

I count the waves crawling across the monitor, one after another. Every spike is a small proof that his heart is still beating, and I hold onto each one and wait for the next.

By the next morning the doctor comes out and tells me Lev is past the critical stage at last. The words reach me through a strange, floating daze.

“We can move him to a regular room this morning,” he says.

I brace one hand against the wall as the fear I have held taut all night finally goes slack in my chest.

29

DELANEY

“Where did she go?” Lev demands, his voice hoarse, smoke and silk, but somehow still carrying the flat force of an order.

The panicky nurse is insisting he cannot get out of bed, and he has already thrown back the covers with one of his bare feet planted on the floor when I walk through the door.