Page 81 of The Pakhan's Captive
The heavy oak door to the master suite creaks open.
I instantly squeeze my eyes shut, slowing my breathing into the rhythmic, shallow cadence of sleep. I roll onto my side, facing away from the door, pulling the duvet up to my ears. My heart is a frantic bird hitting the cage of my ribs.
I hear his footsteps. They aren’t the usual, measured strikes of a predator. They’re heavy. Slightly uneven. There’s a dragging quality to the sound that makes the hair on my arms stand up. He stops by the foot of the bed.
A long, low groan ripples through the silence—a sound of genuine, unvarnished pain that he would never let me hear if he thought I was awake.
I stay frozen. Don’t move. Let him go to sleep. Don’t let the wall down.
I feel the mattress dip. He’s standing right beside my side of the bed. A shadow falls over me, blocking the faint moonlight from the window. Then, a hand—large, calloused, and trembling slightly—reaches out. His fingers graze the top of my head, a touch so light it’s almost a prayer. He pets my hair, smoothing the strands back from my forehead with a tenderness that feels like a betrayal of everything I know about him.
He groans again, a sharp, hitched intake of breath, and pulls his hand away. He tries to stand, but I hear his knee buckle slightly against the frame.
And then, I smell it.
It’s not sandalwood. It’s the sharp, metallic tang of iron. It’s the smell of the dungeon. It’s the smell of the floor of my father’s study.
Blood.
Before I can stop myself, before the “Republic” can issue a cease-and-desist, I am sitting up. I twist around, my eyes wide and frantic in the dark.
“Razvan?”
He freezes, half-hunched over, his hand gripping the bedpost so hard the wood creaks. He looks at me, his face pale and slick with sweat in the moonlight. His dress shirt is unbuttoned halfway, hanging off one shoulder.
“Go back to sleep, Lena,” he rasps. His voice is a wreck, a hollowed-out version of his usual baritone.
“You’re bleeding,” I say, my voice rising with a panic I can’t suppress. I scramble across the bed, ignoring the way my silk nightgown rides up my thighs. “Why is there blood on you? What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m fine.”
“Don’t lie to me!” I snap, reaching out to grab his arm.
He winces, a hiss of pain escaping his teeth, and that’s when I see it. The white silk of his shirt is soaked through on his left side, a dark, spreading bloom of crimson that looks black in the dim light.
It’s the wound from the shootout. The “graze” he told me was nothing. The injury he’s been minimizing for days while he flew me across the country and managed a Bratva war. He’s been walking around with a hole in his side, pretending he’s invincible, and now it’s finally demanded its tithe.
“Sit down,” I command.
He looks at me, a flicker of his old, arrogant self dancing in his eyes despite the agony. “Since when do you give me orders,zayka?”
“Since you’re bleeding out on my expensive rug! Sit. Down. Now.”
To my utter shock, he obeys. He sinks onto the edge of the mattress with a heavy thud, his head dropping forward. The shift in our dynamic is so sudden it’s dizzying. For months, he has been the mountain, the immovable force. Now, he’s a man. Just a man. And he’s hurting.
I bolt for the bathroom, returning seconds later with a first aid kit and a bowl of warm water. My hands are shaking so hard the medical tape rattles in the box.
“Take the shirt off,” I say, kneeling between his legs on the floor.
He fumbles with the buttons, his fingers clumsy and unresponsive. I growl in frustration and push his hands away, my own fingers flying over the silk. I peel the fabric back, and I have to bite my lip to keep from crying out.
The wound is ugly. It wasn’t a graze. The bullet had taken a chunk of flesh from his side, and the stitches—likely done in haste by a field medic—had torn completely open. The area is angry, swollen, and weeping fresh blood.
“You idiot,” I whisper, the anger and the fear mixing into a volatile cocktail in my chest. “You absolute, arrogant idiot. You’ve been walking around like this? For three days?”
“I had things…to attend to,” he grunts. He leans back on his elbows, watching me through hooded eyes. “The Petrovs, they needed to understand the cost of the St. Petersburg incident.”
“I don’t care about the Petrovs! You could have gotten an infection. You could have fainted while holding Theo!”
