Page 4 of Merciless Bratva Soldier

He looks at the cup and then at me. “Are you always this strict?”

“I’m careful.” I allow myself my first smile since I discovered him outside the back door.

His gaze moves to the table. To the open notebook, the blue ink, the pages soft and brown at the corners, and the words across the top of the page in my grandmother’s careful capitals. HONEY CAKE.

“What are you writing?”

“They’re my grandmother’s recipes. I’m putting them in the case one at a time.”

“For Rosa?”

He read the name on the door. Of course he did.

“For now,” I say. “Someday, Galina’s name is going on the window.”

I don’t know why I tell him this. I haven’t even told Rosa. I haven’t said it out loud to anyone but Tessa, my best friend, and that was only once, at two in the morning after a bottle of wine.

My phone buzzes on the floor beside my knee.

“Your phone,” he says.

“It can wait.”

His answers are getting shorter. His eyes close for longer each time he blinks, and his pulse under my fingers has stopped being a count and turned into a flutter.

“Nikolai?”

His eyes open. “I’m here.”

My pulse accelerates. “Stay here.”

“You’re frightened.” His eyes slide to mine and hold, but his expression is impossible to read.

“Yes… Keep talking anyway.”

He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “Tell me about the honey cake.”

So I do. Buckwheat honey, because the light kind tastes like nothing. Sour cream in the filling to add flavor. Eleven thin layers, rolled out warm and baked one at a time, then left overnight so they soften into each other. I talk until my voice stops shaking. He listens the entire time with his eyes on my face, as though every word is information he intends to keep.

A knock comes at the alley door. Two, then three.

“Yevgeny,” Nikolai says.

“It’s open!” I call out.

A gray-bearded man in his fifties comes in, rain on his glasses and a heavy bag in one hand. He takes in the room, the floor, Nikolai, me, and sets the bag down on the table beside my notebook without hurrying.

I don’t wait to be asked.

“Single stab wound, left flank, below the ribs. Pressure held since eleven fifty-two. It’s still coming through. Pulse around one-twenty and weak. Skin cool and clammy. He’s shivering. He’s been oriented the whole time. Nothing by mouth.”

Yevgeny kneels and puts his gloved hand flat on top of mine.

“On three.”

I count in my head and let him take over. I strip my gloves off inside out and drop them in the bin by the lockers. There’s blood on my wrists above the cuffs, where the gloves didn’t reach.

Yevgeny peers at me over his glasses. “You’re a nurse?”