Page 40 of The Bratva’s Monster
“The kitchen and… You took care of it?”
He nods with a smile. “Yes, ma’am. You know, that cut on your lip looks a little angry.” He points to his own lip, to the spot where the cut is on mine. “I can have a look at it if you'd like.”
Instinctively, I touch my lip and I’m reminded of the shot I took from one of the intruders last night.
“Misha,” he says to one of the other men, “Fetch my bag, please. It’s on the front seat of the truck.”
Misha, a young man with jet black hair and dark eyes, nods, then leaves out the door. Marius waves at me to come down.
“I don’t think we’ve ever officially met,” he says as I come down the stairs. “Fortunately, up until now, there’s never really been a reason for that. My clients are usually Bratva. I rarely meet their wives. It’s not like I’m ever invited to any of their reindeer games unless someone’s bleeding to death or needs something cleaned up.”
“I’m-I’m not Rikki’s wife. I’m—”
“Oh, I know. This is Gedeon’s home. I’m familiar. Sorry for your loss, by the way.”
Misha returns with a black doctor’s bag in hand. He gives it to Marius.
“You’re a doctor, too?” I ask him.
“I’m whatever’s required.” He glances around the room, then points to the window seat under the living room’s front window. “Come. The light is better over here.”
He escorts me over, and I have to pause to look around. There is no sign that anyone at all was here. The carpet is free of any blood. The wall where Rikki punched one of them into hamburger is stain free, though there is still a dent in the wall where Rikki threw him. As we sit on the window seat facing one another, he sets the bag down between us and opens it.
“Sorry about that dent in the wall,” he says without looking up from his bag. He takes out a bottle with clear liquid in it and some cotton balls. “I’ll have to come back to fix it. I didn’t come with the proper tools. Rikki neglected to mention it.”
He touches my chin to lift it a little to the light and get a good look at my lip. Now that he’s paying attention to it, it feels like it’s throbbing a little.
“Hmm,” he says, “You took quite a hit, there. I’ve seen worse, though. You’re lucky Rikki showed up when he did.”
Lucky. I guess that’s a word that could be used to describe his presence last night. He wets a cotton ball. “Now hold still.”
He dabs my lip, and the familiar sting of the disinfectant makes me wince.
“It’s a little swollen,” he says, “but put some ice on it and you should be fine. You won’t even need stitches, which is more than I can say for Rikki.”
I wait until he’s done cleaning the wound before I ask, “He got hurt last night?”
“Bullet skipped off his right shoulder,” he said. “Nothing he can’t handle.”
The one shot that the first guy got off… “So, he’s all right?”
“He was when I left him this morning,” he said. “Couple more stitches to add to his collection, I guess.”
He’s packing up his bag and suddenly, I want to ask him questions. About Rikki. About Gedeon. About anything that I never knew. Then I wonder if he’s heard any of the rumors about Gedeon. Is he only helping because Rikki asked him to? Maybe he thinks I’m a traitor as well.
“What have you heard about my husband?”
He pauses for a second, then, “Well, I know he died like a man. Or at least like men die when they’re Bratva.”
“Is that all you know?” He looks up at me, and I realize his different colored eyes aren’t really different colored at all. One of them is clouded over in a shade of milky blue-white. He’s blind in one of his eyes.
“What do you really want to ask me, Mrs. Pavlova?”
I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. I don’t know how to blatantly ask whether he thought that Gedeon was the rat or not. I force a smile and say, “I was just wondering how well you knew him.”
He returns my smile, but it bends down a little at the corners, echoing some sadness. “I knew him very well. Well enough for me to know that he loved you very much. Talked about you all the time. How he wanted to do right by you.”
My heart sinks into my stomach. “Really? He talked about doing right by me?”
