Page 21 of Lethal Bratva Daddy
"Don't tell me, then. I'll write down paper cut." I had the kid's jacket off before he could get shy about it. A bullet had kissed the meat of his upper arm and carried on, a clean furrow, shallow and ugly and bleeding with real enthusiasm. Survivable. Painful. Exactly the sort of thing that goes septic and kills you a week later out of spite if no one cleans it properly. "Galina. Hot water, clean towels, and the strongest thing in this house that isn't wine. And a sewing kit, if there's no real one."
They brought me a trauma kit, because of course they had one. A house like that bleeds professionally. I cleaned the wound while the kid swore in two languages and white-knuckled the edge of the counter, and I talked to him the whole time, low and steady and a little bored, because bored is the most reassuring thing a nurse owns. Bored says nobody in this room is going to die tonight.
"You're not screaming at me," the kid said, watching my hands work. "The last one screamed. The doctor."
"I'm not a doctor. Doctors faint. Nurses finish. What's your name?"
"Stas."
"Okay, Stas. Here's the deal. You're going to have a scar that girls invent whole stories about, and in exchange you're going to let me clean it every single day for a week, or it goes green and falls off and then you've got no stories at all. Deal?"
"...Yes, ma'am."
Then I closed the furrow on the marble island, small neat sutures, the kind I can do in my sleep and frequently have.
I stitched a bullet graze closed on his kitchen island and earned more respect in ten minutes than in ten years of saving lives for free.
When I tied off the last stitch and looked up, the room had rearranged itself around me. The three large men were watching me now the way you watch a person who has turned out tobe useful in your own private language. Galina had given up pretending to wipe a counter and was openly studying me, and she gave me one slow nod that I understood to be a kind of knighthood. And in the doorway, where I had not seen him appear, stood Kolya.
He was looking at me as if I had done something impossible. Not the saving. He had watched me save a life before. His eyes were on my hands, steady and red to the wrist, and on the kid breathing easy against the cabinets, and at the way his own men had arranged themselves around me without anyone telling them to, and there was something on his face I had not been given permission to see. Reluctant. Astonished. A man watching a door swing open in a wall he had bricked up with his own hands.
The kitchen emptied the way rooms do once a crisis is over, everyone abruptly very busy somewhere else, and then it was only the two of us in all that marble at an hour with no proper name, me scrubbing another person's blood off my hands at a sink worth more than my car, him leaning against the counter and not bothering to pretend he was doing anything but watching me.
"You should be asleep," he said.
"So should you. We're both terrible at it. It might be the one thing we have in common."
"It is not the only thing."
He poured two glasses of something amber and slid one down the marble, and I caught it, and for a while we just stood in the dark kitchen and drank and performed nothing for anyone, because there was finally no one left to perform for. He told me a little. Not much. A brother who shared none of his blood and all of the rest of him. A man called the Pakhan he would die for, and nearly had. The outline of a life I could not picture anyonechoosing, and could suddenly see why a person born into it might never get the chance to.
"Why me?" I asked, when the quiet had gone on long enough to risk it. "Out of everyone you owe. Why am I the one you can't seem to put down?"
He was silent a long moment.
"Because you ran toward me," he said. "No one runs toward me. They have not in a very long time."
"That's a terrible reason. Running toward you has nearly gotten me killed twice."
"It is the only reason I have. The rest I do not have words for, and I have noticed you do not trust a man's words anyway. Only his hands." He glanced at mine, still pink from the sink. "Yours told me the truth tonight before your mouth caught up. You were not afraid of the blood. You were afraid of standing in my kitchen and starting to feel like you belonged in it."
He was right, which I hated, so I drank instead of saying so.
For a while neither of us spoke, and the quiet was not the bad kind. Somewhere in the house a clock I couldn't see kept careful time for people who were not using it. I thought about the photograph of myself asleep, and the man who had crouched on a fire escape to take it, and how the only place in this entire city I had slept without one eye open was a bunker full of armed strangers. It was not a sentence I had ever expected my life to produce.
"I feel safe here," I said. "That's the part that scares me. I'm not supposed to feel safe in a place like this, with a man like you."
"No," he agreed, quietly. "You are not."
The air in the kitchen did the thing it kept doing around him, going thick and certain, and I set my glass down and so did he, and the distance between us closed without either of us admitting to moving. I could see it on him plainly, the wanting, as clear as the scars I now knew he carried under the good shirt.He wanted. He was also not going to do a single thing about it, and I watched him make that decision in real time.
He didn't deny the wanting. He denied himself. Somehow that was worse.
"Kolya." I do not know what I meant to say after his name. I never found out.
"You are twenty-four," he said. Quietly. Like the words cost him something to lift.
And there it was, the number he had been hiding behind for days, set down on the marble between us like a third glass.
