Page 3 of Merciless Bratva Soldier

The overhead light catches his silvery scar where it breaks the left eyebrow and runs toward his cheekbone, pale against his skin. My chest tightens. I ache to run my thumb along it, not to learn how it feels, but to trace the map of his face.

Jesus, Vera. He’s bleeding under my hand, and I want to touch his face. I’m sure he’d thank me for that while his life source spills out onto the staff room floor.

With my free hand, I find his pulse. Fast and thready, skin cool and damp.

I did two years at nursing school and eighteen months of nights in the ER. I know what to do.

“You need an ambulance.”

I already know the answer before he says, “No.”

“You need an emergency room, not a stranger with bar towels.”

“They’ll call the police.”

I glance at the blood spreading through the towel. “Then you can explain it to them while somebody fixes this.”

“The one coming… he’s a doctor.”

“A real one?” Guys who get stabbed in the night and refuse an ambulance don’t generally hang out with surgeons and anesthesiologists.

“A real one.” His eyes turn a shade lighter as if he’s amused by the question. “He doesn’t write things down.”

I press harder. “What’s your name?”

He studies me for a moment. “Nikolai.”

“Nikolai, you’re going to keep talking to me. If you stop, I’ll call nine-one-one, and you can be angry with me from a hospital bed.”

This time his smile lands, and heat floods my face. “That’s fair.”

He doesn’t ask my name, and I don’t offer it.

The pad warms under my palm. Then it’s wet, and the wet is spreading toward my fingers. I don’t lift it to look. Lifting is the one thing you never do. I put my second hand over the first and lean until my shoulders shake, and fear comes up my spine so fast and so cold that for a second I can’t hear the refrigerators.

“You’re strong for someone so small,” he says.

“I lift fifty-pound flour sacks. Keep talking.”

“I’ve ruined your floor.”

“It’s tile. It’s seen worse.” This is a lie, and I see the moment when it registers on his face, but he doesn’t pull me up on it.

“I’ll pay for the towels.”

“You’ll pay for them by not dying in my break room.” And I mean it more than I realize until the words hang above our heads.

A tremor starts in his shoulders, small to begin with, then it isn’t.

“My coat is on the hook above your head,” I say. “Can you reach it?”

He lifts his right arm without a word and brings it down. I keep one hand on the wound and pull the coat over his chest with the other, tucking it under his arm. It barely covers half of him.

“Is there water?”

The tea is right there, an arm’s length away. Everything in me wants to hand it to him because it’s what I do. Somebody looks tired, and I put something warm in front of them before they ask. My stomach clenches.

“No. Nothing to drink,” I say softly. “Not while you’re bleeding like this.”