“My right hand.” The words scrape out of my throat, raw and rough. “What happened to my fucking hand?”
Luka sets the cup on a rusted filing cabinet and crosses the room to help me up, his grip under my arms doing all the work because my left hand can barely hold the gun and my right hand won’t do anything at all, just hangs at my side like meat attached to my shoulder.
The shoulder that took a bullet.
“Where’s Anya?”
“Checking the perimeter with Chernov.” Luka settles me back onto the metal desk. “She hasn’t slept. Hasn’t eaten. Hasn’t left your side except for the last twenty minutes when I made her take a break before she collapsed.”
My wife. Running perimeter checks.
“How long was I out?”
“Six hours.” Luka’s jaw tightens. “We need to move soon. Vadim’s scouts have been spotted fifty kilometers south.”
The door opens, and Anya walks through it carrying a medical kit in one hand and a pistol in the other, a tactical vest strapped over clothes stiff with my dried blood, her hair pulled back so tight it must hurt, and her face still smeared with rust-colored traces she hasn’t had time to wash off. She moves like a soldier now, alert and dangerous, scanning the room before her eyes land on me, and something in her expression shifts—relief, exhaustion, hunger, all of it flickering across her features before she locks it down.
Mine. Even exhausted, even blood-streaked, even wearing borrowed gear that hangs wrong on her frame. Mine, and anyone who tries to take her from me, will learn that a wolf doesn’t need hands to kill.
“You’re awake.” She crosses to me in three quick strides, sets down the kit and the gun on the desk beside my hip. Her hands are on my face before I can respond, tilting my head to check my pupils, pressing her fingers to the pulse point under my jaw. “Pain level, one to ten.”
“Six.” I catch her wrist with my left hand—the grip weak, trembling, but at least I can feel her skin warm against my palm. “Anya. My right hand.”
She goes still for just a moment, and then her attention shifts from my face to my right arm. She lifts my right hand in both of hers and examines it, pressing each fingertip while her eyes stay fixed on my face to gauge my response.
I don’t feel any of it.
She moves to the knuckles, the palm, the wrist, working her way up toward the shoulder where I can see fresh bandages wrapped tight beneath the edge of my shirt, and somewhere around my bicep the sensation starts to return—dull, distant, like feeling through layers of wool.
“Make a fist.”
I tell my hand to close, and nothing happens. The fingers just lie there in her palm, limp and useless.
Anya’s expression doesn’t shift, doesn’t soften, doesn’t give me anything to hold onto. That absence of comfort somehow makes it worse because it tells me she already knows howbad this is. She sets my right hand down gently on my thigh and picks up my left, running the same examination, and this time I can feel her fingers pressing into mine, even though the sensation is muted and strange.
“Fist.”
My left hand closes. Slowly, shakily, the grip is pathetic compared to what it used to be, but the fingers curl into my palm and hold.
“The shoulder wound.” Anya releases my hand. “The bullet tracked through the brachial plexus before exiting. Your right arm has lost motor function from the elbow down.”
I stare at my hand lying dead on my thigh.
“The left?” My voice comes out rough, and I hate the desperation in it, hate that I’m lying here broken while my enemies close in.
“Frostbite.” Anya takes my left hand in hers again, and her thumb strokes across my knuckles, the touch gentle in a way that contradicts the flatness of her tone. “The cold cut off blood flow long enough to cause damage, but the nerves are intact. Sensation and strength should return with time and therapy. Weeks, maybe months, but it should return.”
Should. Notwill.Should.
“The violin.” The word cracks in my throat. “I can’t—”
“No.” Anya meets my eyes and doesn’t pretend there’s any version of this where I sit in the war room at three in the morning and let Tchaikovsky pour out of my mother’s Stradivarius. “You won’t play violin again. The nerve damage is permanent, Roman. You’ll never hold a bow, and by the time your left hand recovers…” She stops, letting the silence finish the sentence.The music is gone.
I wait for her to soften it. To tell me maybe, to tell me there are surgeons, there are treatments, there’s still hope.
She gives me nothing but the truth, hard and cold and unforgiving.
“You don’t need the violin anymore.” She folds my weak left hand in both of hers, and her grip is warm and certain, even though her face stays carefully blank. “It was your escape. The place you went when the guilt got too heavy to carry. You don’t need escape anymore, Roman.”
