Page 5 of Merciless Bratva Soldier

“Almost.”

He says something to Nikolai in Russian. Nikolai answers him, low and short, and Yevgeny’s eyebrows slide upward. Neither of them tells me Nikolai is going to be fine, and I’m grateful for that.

“Go and wash,” Yevgeny says. “My driver is bringing the car to your step.”

The staff bathroom is barely a closet. I scrub from the wrists to the elbows twice, the way I was taught, and the water in the sink runs pink and then clear. My hands start shaking now, when there is nothing left for them to do. I hold them under the hot water until they stop.

When I come out, Nikolai is on his feet, a thick white dressing bound around his middle under the open coat, Yevgeny on one side of him, and a younger man with a shaved head on the other. His lips are gray, but he is standing.

At the door he stops and looks at me over his shoulder, and my breath hitches in my chest. “Do you have someplace else to be?” he asks, and I shake my head. “Lock the door. Set your alarm. Don’t open it again tonight.”

In any other circumstances, I’d tell him that I’ll be fine. Instead, I find myself saying, “I won’t.”

“Lock it behind us, Vera.”

The door closes.

I stand in the staff room with my clean hands at my sides.

Then I lock it and check it twice. I punch the code into the keypad and press the button Rosa labeled STAY in black marker, which arms the doors and leaves the rooms alone. The stairs to my apartment climb from the corner of the staff room behind their own locked door, and I’ve never appreciated it more.

I mop the floor with bleach until the water in the bucket runs clear. The ruined towels go into a sealed bag by the door for the morning, because I promised I wouldn’t open it again tonight.

My phone shows two messages from Tessa.

Home yet?

V?? You never answered.

I type: I’m fine. Going to bed, and hit send before I can think about it.

I reach for the notebook; it isn’t on the table where Yevgeny’s bag sat.

It’s on the shelf by the lockers, closed, set square on top of the clean aprons, no blood on it anywhere.

I open the front cover. My grandmother’s handwriting slants across the first page, the way it did on every birthday card I ever had from her.

For my Vera, so you never have to guess.

2

NIKOLAI

“The scan is clean.” Yevgeny’s voice reaches me before he has fully entered the room, which is how I know he has been waiting to say it.

The room is white and quiet and has no window. A monitor counts my heartbeats in green. There is a line in the back of my right hand and a weight around my middle that is dressing and tape and something heavier underneath, where the pain lives. The clinic has a brass plate outside that says DIAGNOSTIC and nothing else, a scanner in the basement, and two rooms like this one for men who cannot give their real names downstairs.

And I’ve thought about nothing else but Vera since I got here. Damp dark eyelashes framing warm brown eyes. Full lips that never seem to fully close, the most inviting mouth I’ve ever seen in my life. Her sugar and honey scent. The swell of her breasts and hips beneath the faded apron, and her obliviousness to the effect she was having on me.

“Tell me the rest.” I drag my attention back to the present.

He pulls the stool to the bed and sits. He looks older than he did the last time I saw him.

“The blade went into the muscle of the side wall and opened an artery. It didn’t reach the kidney or the bowel. I read it twice, then I woke the radiologist and had him read it a third time, because I didn’t like how you arrived.” He takes off his glasses and cleans them on his shirt. “The vessel is tied. The wound is closed in layers. You lost enough blood that I stopped making jokes about it.”

“You don’t make jokes.”

“You see how serious it was.”