My phone is still in my pocket, miraculously intact. I ease it out carefully, trying not to pull the bandages. Three missed calls from my brother Iosif. Two from my cousin, Vitali. One from the Pakhan himself.
Fuck.
I thumb open the messages.
Iosif:Where the fuck are you?
Iosif:Answer your phone.
Iosif:If you're dead, I'm going to kill you.
I allow myself a small smile despite the pain. Typical Iosif. All concern wrapped in threats.
Avros:Heard about the ambush. You good?
Pakhan:Report.
I should call them. Let them know I'm alive. But the moment I do, they'll want my location. They'll send men. They'll pull me back into the world I stumbled out of last night when those bullets tore through me.
Surprise floods me when I realize I don’t want to go back. Not yet.
I need time to heal. Time to think.
Time to figure out what the fuck I'm going to do about the Pakhan's order.
One year. Produce an heir.
The words echo in my head, have been echoing for weeks now. My brothers and cousins already scrambling, making plans, calling mistresses and models and socialites. Treating it like a game, like breeding is just another task to check off a long list of duties.
Idiots.
I've never wanted that. Marriage, children, the domestic trap that turns men soft. I'm a soldier. I do the work no one else wants to do. I bleed for the Bratva because that's what I'm good at.
I don't need complications.
But lying here on this stranger's couch, wrapped in bandages she applied with capable hands, I realize something has shifted.
I could have died last night. It probably won’t be long before I can’t outrun the things I used to chase.
Three men in an alley, guns drawn before I even registered the threat. Turf war bullshit, wrong place at the wrong time. I took two of them down before the bullets hit. The third ran.
I stumbled six blocks before I saw the lights of the bakery. Didn't even know what kind of place it was. Just knew it was lit, and I was bleeding, and my options were down to one.
Knock on that door or risk dying in the street.
I knocked.
And she opened it.
There was no slam of the door or screaming. She saw the blood and immediately shifted into something else. In control and efficient. Alone, she managed to get me inside, up the stairs, onto this couch. Then she treated my wounds like she'd been waiting for exactly this kind of emergency.
You’re a nurse,I'd said.
Was.
There's a story there. Pain in the way she said it. Something broke her away from that life, and now she's here, running a failing bakery in a rough neighborhood, living alone above the shop.
Struggling.
