“Hey.” I take her hand, pulling her attention away from the sight and cup her cheek. “You don’t need to go in. Stay in the car if you want, or here,” I dig the keys out of my pocket. “Go to my apartment. You can stay there while they check me out.”
Aurora’s eyes drop to the keys and back to me a few times before she shakes her head. “No, I’m staying.”
“Lych—”
“Do you have anyone else who loves you?” Her question takes me aback for a moment.
“No,” I tell her.
“Then I’m staying.”
“Aurora, you don’t ha—”
“No, Sava. I’m staying with you. Where you go, I go, right? That’s how you said it?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“Everyone who goes through those doors needs to have someone who loves them there. And I love you, so I’m staying. Why are you smiling right now?” She narrows those blonde brows at me, looking like a little grumpy angel.
“I like hearing you say it, that you love me.”
A cute blush colors in her cheeks as she tucks her hair behind her ear.
“Yeah? Well, you better get moving then, before I change my mind.”
I burst out laughing, forgetting the pain in my head. “Oh, it’s so cute you think you ever had a choice in the matter.”
Aurora rolls her eyes, but the cute blush only deepens and a smile appears on her face.
“I like it,” I tell her. “I like seeing you smiling a whole lot better than in tears.”
“Then let’s go make sure you’re all healthy.” She opens the door.
“Close it, Lychik. We’re not going in the hospital.”
“For the love of…Severin! You most likely have a concussion! If not something worse! You need scans or X-rays or whatever else they do there.” She grows more and more frantic by a second, and I catch her face with my hands, kissing those soft lips. “Severin—”
Before Aurora can say anything else, I dial a number I don’t want to for the second time this week. But my ego can take a hike.
“Sava? You got more bodies for me to send to the other side?” My childhood friend-turned my father’s henchman, Denis, asks.
I called him the night Aurora was assaulted and told him to take care of those motherfuckers. No matter how illegal, Denis can get anything done. From putting bullets into someone my father needed gone, to kidnapping, torturing, or simply running ridiculous errands.
“I need a doctor with a portable X-ray and MRI at my apartment in the next twenty minutes.”
I don’t normally flaunt the power of my last name—actually, I avoid it—but not tonight. I’ll use every last bit of that wretched last name to my advantage.
Denis is silent for a second before clearing his throat. “I saw that tonight. Are you all right?”
Our lost friendship is yet another thing I resent my father for, but I neither want nor care to go down that memory lane.
“We’ll know if you get the doctor to my place.”
“He’ll be there in fifteen.”
I end the call to find Aurora watching me, her lips parted. “Ready to go, Lychik?”
She blinks a few times.
