Page 91 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

The IV line snakes and pulls taut against his arm, and the monitor above the bed starts beeping in a frantic cadence of alarm. Yuri, two nurses, and Maksim are all crowded around him in a claustrophobic knot, trying to hold him down.

Every head in the room turns toward me at once, and the sharp edges withdraw from Lev’s whole body. His shoulders deflate, as though he can finally breathe again for the first time.

I cock my head and hold up the thermos in my hand. “I went to get water,” I deadpan. “That is all. Are we really doing this over five minutes?”

He only stares at me, pale and bleary, the gauze at his chest already seeping a faint pink. His silver hair is disheveled and flat, stripped of all its usual authority.

“Get back in that bed,” I call out.

He doesn’t move an inch, and his silence is a weapon sharper than any blade.

“Get back in the bed, or I will call the doctor and have him strap you down to it,” I snap.

He finally, grudgingly, sits back against the pillows.

The brisk nurses recheck the needle in his arm and the dressing on his wound, warning him under their breath about tearing the intricate stitches open again. His gaze never once leaves my face, following me across the small room as though I might blur and dissolve the moment he blinks. It should unsettle me. I should feel like a cornered animal again. Instead, something in my chest loosens a notch, and my heart lurches, because I have spent weeks believing he could look at me and feel nothing at all.

His eyes drag over me slowly, and his hot, direct look feels like a hand closing warm around the back of my neck. I pour water into the cup and keep my eyes purposefully away from his.

After the nurses file out of the sterile room, Yuri retreats to the far corner, unobtrusive, and Maksim stays leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. His mouth is a hard, flat line of contempt.

I hand Lev the water and notice how pale his tapered fingers are, drained white from all the blood he lost. “Drink this, darling, and stop interrogating me with your eyes,” I say.

“I’m not interrogating you,” he says, searching my face. “I’m making sure you are still here.”

The words slide right under my skin and lodge there, like a bell being rung gently from within.

I sit down in the chair beside the bed. “Drink,” I say again, a quiet mantra, and he obeys me without a word.

The whole scene is kind of unbelievable. This is a Bratva man half the city holds its breath around, and he is drinking water because I told him to.

“There are things I should have told you sooner,” he muses.

“Yes, there are,” I admit, too fast.

Maksim’s eyebrow twitches with something he is trying hard not to let become a smile. Lev, for once, wears guilt on his face instead of anything wrathful.

“I knew Yelena for a very long time,” Lev says. “Since we were children. I felt I owed her something in return for all of it.”

The name still lands on me like a bruise being pressed. That name is poison on my tongue.

His eyes drop to my hands, to the little crescent marks my own nails left in my palm during the surgery, and his hand flexes and stops where it was drifting across the sheet toward me. He holds it still.

“I didn’t know what kind of person she had become,” he says, ducking his chin down. “I told myself she was still the girl who once came down to a cold, grimy basement for me. I wanted her to be. I should have looked harder, and I didn’t, because it was easier not to.”

“You made me feel stupid,” I bite out. “For weeks.”

He doesn’t look away, and my eyes search his.

“You treated me like a girl you could buy quiet with a dress and a few promises, like some cheap consolation prize,” I say.

“You are right,” he says, with no excuse layered under it. “I’m sorry,” he says, and I can hear that he means it. “Not for losing control of a situation. For hurting you. I knew you were adrift and scared, and I took the easiest way through it anyway.”

I look at the gauze taped over his wound while Maksim listens in silence from the wall. He plainly hates hearing every damn word of this, and he holds his tongue anyway, because even he knows Lev earned the right to finish.

Yuri clears his throat. “The Lebedev family is gone,” he says. “Gone all the way down. Every loose end tied off. Everyone was seized, and the ones who would not cooperate are simply not anywhere anymore.”

My stomach twists at what gone all the way down means in the world these men move through, and it feels achingly, obscenely wrong. I don’t let myself follow the thought to the bottom of it. Yelena is dead on a warehouse floor, and her whole family has been erased like a line struck out of one of Lev’s ledgers, and I helped none of it happen and could have stopped none of it. That is the godless world my child is being born into, a world that will come knocking one day, and I’m still deciding how much of it I can live beside.